Entertainment
‘The Far Side’s Last Comic Turned Its Entire 15-Year Run Into One Final Joke
When Gary Larson ended his legendary newspaper strip, The Far Side, on Jan. 1, 1995, he could have gone sentimental, thanked readers, gathered his favorite characters for a final goodbye, or simply drawn one last absurdist gag and walked away. Instead, Larson did something much more Far Side, and made the entire 15-year run a joke about a joke.
By then, The Far Side had become one of the most recognizable newspaper comics in America. It had appeared in nearly 2,000 newspapers, been translated into more than 17 languages, and produced thousands of cartoons built around talking animals, bewildered humans, cavemen, aliens, scientists, monsters, and situations that rarely made any logical sense. So, naturally, Larson’s grand finale suggested that none of it had actually happened.
‘The Far Side’s Final Comic Was a Bizarre ‘Wizard of Oz’ Parody
The strip’s finale was unusual before the punchline even arrived. The Far Side was overwhelmingly a single-panel comic, but Larson broke that format for his last installment, giving readers a two-panel farewell. The first panel is staged like the climax of The Wizard of Oz. Larson himself stands on a platform beside a parody of Glinda the Good Witch, while a crowd of Far Side regulars gathers around them. There are cows, cavemen, nerdy children, the Devil, animals, and familiar human archetypes that had populated Larson’s cartoons for years.
Glinda then gives Larson a variation on the advice Dorothy receives in The Wizard of Oz: Close his eyes, say “There’s no place like home” and, instead of clicking his heels, quack three times. He took one of the most recognizable moments in American pop culture and replaced its crucial action with a dopey duck joke. Ducks were recurring fixtures in The Far Side, so the gag works on two levels: It’s a parody of Oz, and it’s a final reminder that Larson’s bizarre animal humor has been running the show all along.
The Wizard of Oz connection also gives the strip a visual trick. The first panel is presented in color, while the second switches to black and white, echoing the movie’s famous transition between the colorful world of Oz and Dorothy’s Kansas home.
The Final ‘Far Side’ Strip Reveals Where All Those Weird Characters Came From
The second panel takes Larson out of his surreal fantasy and drops him into bed at home, surrounded by family and friends, except the joke isn’t that his strange adventure was imaginary. Larson uses the dream to make a joke about where The Far Side came from in the first place. The people around his bed resemble the characters from his cartoons; his relatives correspond to the women, cows, cavemen, and nerdy children he has supposedly been dreaming about.
What initially looks like a conventional “it was all a dream” reveal is actually Larson pretending that the entire comic strip was an extended hallucination inspired by the ordinary people and things around him.
Larson never wanted The Far Side to operate like a conventional character-driven comic. He resisted the idea of establishing a fixed cast of recurring characters, believing it would limit what he could do. His characters existed to serve the joke rather than to create an ongoing narrative. The finale essentially turns that philosophy into one last stunt.
The ‘Far Side’s ‘It Was All a Dream’ Ending Is the Joke
The best part of the finale is that Larson isn’t really revealing anything. Dream endings usually exist to recontextualize what came before. Television famously used the device to make viewers question what was real, undo events, or connect seemingly unrelated pieces of a story, but The Far Side had no sprawling continuity to resolve. Larson takes a storytelling device meant to deliver an enormous revelation and applies it to a comic strip that never needed one. The punchline is effectively knowing that all those ridiculous things were imaginary — it is a fourth-wall break, but a particularly Far Side version of one.
After 15 years and 4,337 cartoons, Larson didn’t pretend he had been building toward some grand conclusion. Still, he announced his retirement in October 1994, citing fatigue and concern that continuing too long could cause the strip’s quality to decline. The final comic looks like a farewell to the strange world Larson created, but the punchline is that there was never really a world there at all.
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