36 Years Later, The Far Side’s Biggest Mistake Remains The Funniest Moment In Comic Strip History

Published Sep 3, 2026, 5:59 PM EDT Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020. Even though Gary Larson’s The Far Side provided readers with some of the funniest comic strips ever written, the funniest moment in the history of the iconic strip happened entirely by accident. Around the same time that The Simpsons was revolutionizing cartoon comedy on TV, paving the way for later primetime animated sitcoms like South Park, Family Guy, American Dad, and Bob’s Burgers, Gary Larson’s offbeat masterpiece The Far Side was providing newspaper readers with some of the weirdest comic strips in the medium’s history. Although The Far Side remains incredibly popular and influential, the comic strip could not be less like most of its competitors. Unlike Calvin & Hobbes or Peanuts, The Far Side isn’t a warm-hearted paean to the innocence of childhood that features a recurring cast of instantly recognizable characters. Instead, in stark contrast with the rest of the comics keeping it company on the funny pages, The Far Side consisted of one-panel comics with morbid, bizarre punchlines and no recurring cast members. Incredibly enough, The Far Side still managed to spawn two TV specials, 1994’s Gary Larson’s Tales From The Far Side and its 1997 sequel, Tales From The Far Side II, that brought Larson’s vision to the screen with surreal visual gags and no dialogue. However, as fun as these short films were, The Far Side is mostly remembered nowadays via Larson’s daily strip which ran from 1975 until 1995. Ironically, one of the comic’s funniest moments came when The Far Side’s caption was mixed up with its more family-friendly newspaper neighbor, Dennis the Menace. The Far Side’s Dennis the Menace Caption Switch Was The Funniest Mix-Up In Comic Strip History Hank Ketchikan’s Dennis the Menace began on March 12, 1951, which, in a staggering coincidence, is also the same day that the completely unrelated British comic strip also named Dennis the Menace debuted across the Atlantic. Ketcham’s iconic strip follows the sweet but chaotic Dennis, and is among the most light-hearted and family-friendly comic strips ever. Lacking the existentialism of Calvin & Hobbes or Peanuts, Ketcham’s strip is straightforwardly sweet and upbeat. That’s why it was so jarring when, as recollected by Larson himself in the tenth anniversary collection The Prehistory of the Far Side, a local newspaper named The Dayton Daily News accidentally swapped the captions from The Far Side and Dennis the Menace not once, but twice. The first instance involved The Far Side strip depicting a family of hungry snakes at a dinner table, nonsensically accompanied by the misplaced Dennis the Menace caption “Lucky I learned to make peanut butter samwiches or we woulda starved to death by now.” The same day’s Dennis the Menace strip became markedly darker after the swap, as a picture of Dennis and his friend cheerfully eating a sandwich while his mother looked on with a frown was accompanied by The Far Side’s caption “Oh, brother!...Not hamsters again!” While The Far Side’s new caption simply seemed bizarre, the implication that Dennis and his friend were chowing down on hamster sandwiches for the umpteenth time was hilariously macabre. Gary Larson Himself Thought This Mistake Made The Strip Funnier However, Larson himself noted that both cartoons were “immensely improved” by the second mix-up, which occurred in the same paper. Here, a caveman attends a prehistoric fortune-teller, and the caption beneath their meeting inexplicably says “If I get as big as Dad, won’t my skin be too TIGHT?” The same day's Dennis the Menace strip truly benefits from this caption switch, as the title character talks to his parents at the dinner table with the caption “I see your little, petrified skull… Labeled and resting on a shelf somewhere.” The image of Dennis peering into his mother’s smiling face and telling her that her skull will one day adorn a shelf is hysterically grim and bizarre, and it’s the sort of mix-up that accidentally made a forgettable daily comic strip into an unintended masterpiece of dark humor. While The Far Side had plenty of great gags of its own, this memorable moment in comic strip history was one of its funniest accidents. Writer Gary Larson Colorist Gary Larson