Entertainment
35 Years Later, ‘The Far Side’ Predicted One of Our Biggest Trends
When a work of art is described as “ahead of its time,” it’s usually a compliment. That’s not always the case when people talk about “Cow Tools,” a 1982 installment of The Far Side by Gary Larson. The single-panel comic is abstract at best, with no discernible punchline in the traditional sense. However, decades later, the comic is credited with predicting the rise of internet meme humor — or perhaps even influencing it. Tracking the public response to this work over 34 years provides a unique view of our evolving sense of humor, and it may re-orient discussions about how our monolithic online culture has developed.
For those unfamiliar, “Cow Tools” (seen below) is a simple black-and-white drawing of a cow standing on its hind legs in the foreground. There’s a barn visible a short distance away, and a workbench in front of the cow. On it are four objects, including one that looks like a hand saw, one forked stick with an odd shape, and two things that are even harder to define. If you feel like you’re missing the joke, you’re not alone. The vehement reaction to this strip and its later re-popularization online both illustrate our appetite for absurd humor and our inevitable desire to define it and compartmentalize it.
The Far Side was published in syndication from 1980 to 1995, meaning “Cow Tools” appeared in thousands of newspapers around the U.S. when it was first released on October 28, 1982. The response has now been carefully documented by meme historians — Larson, the newspapers, and the syndication publisher Chronicle Features were all reportedly inundated with phone calls and letters in the days and weeks after “Cow Tools” dropped. The phone at Chronicle Features rang practically all day for two days straight, and the letters that came in had genuine frustration behind them, even if many were self-aware about the absurdity of it all.
The response was so great that Larson eventually responded publicly with a press release, writing: “The cartoon was intended to be an exercise in silliness. While I have never met a cow who could make tools, I felt sure that if I did, they (the tools) would lack something in sophistication and resemble the sorry specimens shown in this cartoon.”
After that, “Cow Tools” remained somewhat infamous among comic strip aficionados for years, with many remembering the frustration of feeling like they were missing out on a joke and the dissatisfaction they felt at Larson’s explanation. It wasn’t until the rise of social media that a wider audience began looking at “Cow Tools” with fresh eyes. In the context of all the self-referential meme humor that circulates online, “Cow Tools” didn’t seem so hard to understand anymore. Perhaps its original viewers were just expecting too much from it.
In recent years, “Cow Tools” has actually become a helpful bridge for building cross-generational understanding. Gen X and Baby Boomer parents may be a little put off or suspicious of the sense of humor their children are developing online — and with good reason in some cases. However, “Cow Tools” is a reminder that sometimes things are “not that deep,” they’re just absurd for absurdity’s sake. Nowadays, “Cow Tools” is regarded by some as an accidental meta-commentary on inside jokes and memetic humor. It has also been described as “the original s—post.”
‘The Far Side’ Readers Haven’t Changed As Much As They Think
While “Cow Tools” was arguably ahead of its time, it may prove that the internet hasn’t changed us as much as we think. The outsized response to the cartoon is often recounted as a joke — letters complained of debates among friends and family trying to understand the humor, even citing the education levels of various people trying to interpret it. We look back on the desperation of those complaints and laugh, imagining that those people wouldn’t last a minute in the onslaught of a modern social media feed.
The truth that younger modern readers don’t want to address is that they probably had nearly the same reaction when they first saw “Cow Tools.” The mere fact that so many explanations and analyses of the work exist online proves that fact — creators answer the questions that are already being asked on Google, and the resurgence of “Cow Tools” online sparked a massive demand for explanations that would have fried the Chronicle Features phone line in 1982. Modern readers don’t inherently understand “Cow Tools” better or faster than their counterparts from three decades ago, they simply have the means of getting answers. They are able to find context for the comic immediately, which is all the original readers really wanted.
Larson himself seemed to regard “Cow Tools” as a partial failure due to the response. In his 1982 press release, he wrote: “I regret that my fondness for cows, combined with an overactive imagination, may have carried me beyond what is comprehensible to the average Far Side reader.” The fact that the comic was so frustrating for people, and the fact that they didn’t simply fall back on the simplest explanation they could think of, meant it had failed to convey the simple amusement Larson wanted.
That said, “Cow Tools” is now an invaluable object lesson in understanding how internet humor has evolved and what its limitations are. Many believe that memetic humor is getting more absurd and esoteric, but that’s only true from the outside of any given niche. The people laughing hardest at an online joke understand every nuance of it, and one source of the humor is imagining how much it would confuse an uninitiated viewer. The acceleration comes from the mechanism of the internet itself, where people can research for the proper context as soon as they want.
Larson revived The Far Side as a web comic in 2020, publishing new strips on his official website. Older panels like “Cow Tools” are available now in various collected editions.
- Release Date
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October 26, 1994
- Directors
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Marv Newland
- Writers
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gary larson
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