How do you rank a comic that never had a recurring hero, never did life lessons and drew its people to look deliberately grotesque? Polygon writer Brian VanHooker tried with a list published on October 11, 2026, picking Gary Larson’s 10 greatest Far Side panels. His rule is simple. Each one has to make you laugh.
VanHooker’s argument starts with what makes a strip great. Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes sometimes went deep. Prince Valiant won on detailed artwork. Garfield lives or dies on a relatable gag. The Far Side did none of the first two. VanHooker says Larson was trying to write the funniest joke he could every day, which is why the strip had no recurring characters. So he ranks the panels on how clever and effective the joke is, not on how famous they became. That rules out an easy pick: the Stegosaurus cartoon that gave a dinosaur’s tail spikes a real name.
The countdown, in brief:
- 10. Find Peter is a Peter Pan gag that only works once you spot the right cubicle. It shows Larson trusting readers to dig for the punchline.
- 9. A deconstructionist masterpiece is about “sketchy” characters, drawn especially crudely on purpose.
- 8. The bowling pin mystery shows cops puzzling over a man killed with a bowling pin while hundreds of pins surround them.
- 7. A clever twist finds a situation where Pinocchio suddenly wouldn’t want to be a real boy.
- 6. More deconstruction mocks newspaper hidden-picture puzzles with badly hidden appliances in a forest. The caption claims there are 127 of them, which there obviously aren’t.
- 5. Find the punchline leads your eye from a giant fly woman to the painter’s model and finally to the artist’s glasses.
- 4. Reconstruct the punchline only lands once you realize there was a window washer outside before the woman opened the window.
- 3. Snakes shows God making snakes the way a kid rolls Play-Doh.
- 2. Love triangle is funny because, like the bowling pin cops, its characters aren’t very clever.
- 1. Smoking dinosaurs shows dinosaurs puffing on cigarettes, which implies that’s why they went extinct.
VanHooker’s top pick packs a lot of Larson into one rectangle. It has his love of dinosaurs and his fondness for dark, morbid humor. A lowbrow image turns out to hide a smart idea. The picture of smoking dinosaurs is silly. The extinction joke behind it is the clever part.
Two kinds of humor keep showing up in the list. One is the “scavenger hunt” panel, where the joke hides in a detail you have to find. The other is the panel that pokes fun at comics themselves, from deliberately sketchy line work to fake activity puzzles.
The panel the list leaves out has its own legend. The 1982 Stegosaurus cartoon had a caveman lecturer call the tail spikes the “thagomizer” after “the late Thag Simmons.” Paleontologist Kenneth Carpenter picked up the word at the 1993 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting. The Far Side first ran on January 1, 1980, and ended on January 1, 1995. At one point it was syndicated to more than 1,900 newspapers. The official site thefarside.com went live on December 17, 2019, and a “New Stuff” section with new Larson cartoons followed on July 8, 2020.
