7 Far Side Comics With Perfect Pop Culture References

Published Oct 20, 2026, 2:42 PM EDT Ambrose Tardive is an editor on ScreenRant's Comics team. Over the past two years, he has developed into the internet's foremost authority on The Far Side. Outside of his work for ScreenRant, Ambrose works as an Adjunct English Instructor. What are The Far Side's pop culture comparables? Gary Larson's cartoon didn't share much DNA with other strips like Peanuts, or Garfield, or even Calvin & Hobbes. Instead, The Far Side is a lot more like what The Simpsons would become, toward the latter half of Larson's career. It also shares similarities with Saturday Night Live. How? Through The Far Side's referential humor. In fact, The Far Side was a constant stream of pop culture references. Some more obvious than others, some more subtle. All of them coming from Larson's idiosyncratic POV. Below is a collection of some underrated, but unequivocally perfect Far Side references to TV and movies, songs, and classic pop culture figures. Most of these Far Side pop culture-inspired punchlines should still be recognizable to a wide set of readers, but just in case, we'll dig into what Gary Larson was lampooning and what made these cartoons such 10/10 bits. 7 "Nightmare On Oak Street" Let's start with a seasonally appropriate Far Side cartoon. There's so much to love about this extra-strength Sunday panel. It is a blend of absurdist imagery and topical pop culture humor. It is either brilliant or ridiculous Larsonian wordplay, depending on readers' tastes. It is a perfect example of how making something literal often makes it laugh-out-loud funny. This panel was published in April 1988, four months ahead of the release of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. The slasher franchise was in the zeitgeist, and ripe for riffing on. Larson swaps out elm trees for oaks, and then makes the characters literal oak trees. What would their nightmare be, then? Obviously, a lumberjack busting in with a chainsaw. The Nightmare reference sets the foundation of the joke, and then Larson's oddball flourishes make it a masterpiece. 6 "As A Young Colt, Mr. Ed..." Mr. Ed, the talking horse, was a favorite of Gary Larson's. The Far Side creator was a product of the 1950s, making him one of the first generation of kids to grow up with television. Mr. Ed was on from 1961 to 1966, meaning Larson went from adolescent to teenager as it aired, and the show stuck with him. So much so that he made multiple Mr. Ed jokes during his career. This is one perfect example. The panel depicts a "young colt" sitting alone in a chair in a school hallway, next to the door to his classroom. He has an "Eddie" nametag pinned to his chest. Why is he being punished? "For speaking out of turn." It is a brilliant play on his nature, as a horse that speaks like a human. Especially for people who are familiar with the show, because in Mr. Ed, the horse would only talk to one person. But in Gary Larson's "prequel," he's clearly learning to keep his opinions to himself the hard way. 5 "Catch Willie" Free Willy came out in theaters in the summer of 1993. The movie's premise almost sounds like a Gary Larson fever dream in its own right: a tough orphan helps break a killer whale out of a SeaWorld-esque amusement park before its owner can murder the orca in an insurance scam. It was a huge box office hit, and continued to do huge numbers when it was released on home video during the holiday season in December '93. We don't know exactly when, or even if Larson actually saw the movie. But the title Free Willy was unavoidable at the time, and in the spring of 1994 Larson spoofed it with this Far Side panel, in which a man walks up to the ticket booth at a movie theater, underneath a marquee that reads: "Catch Willy." The punchline is really driven home by the subtitle: "And Make Him Do Tricks." It is the kind of Far Side joke that gets readers giggling in spite of themselves, possibly. It is literally subversive, in that it is flipping the popular movie's title, and it is just edgy enough without going overboard. 4 "Left His Brain In San Francisco" Gary Larson was a musician, and references to songs and musicians were integral to the rhythm of The Far Side. In this case, it is also one of The Far Side's many jokes about Dr. Frankenstein. This is another super-sized Sunday cartoon, in which passengers disembark from a plane. One of them, a man in a white lab coat, abruptly stops and starts frantically going through his bag. "Dr. Frankenstein realized he had left his brain in San Francisco," the caption explains. It is a twist on Tony Bennett's classic song "I Left My Heart in San Francisco." But while Bennett sang falling in love with the city, with his heart metaphorically staying behind, there's no metaphor here. The brain is literal, and it is the most vital organ in Dr. Frankenstein's operation, meaning forgetting to pack it was the ultimate fumble on his part. 3 "A Pleasant Little Place" Here's another Far Side horror movie reference. Specifically, one of several Psycho jokes Gary Larson made over the years. In several instances, he riffed on the infamous shower scene, but even funnier were his spoofs of the movie's spooky setting, the Bates Motel. Or, as it is converted into here, the "Bait Motel." Which makes all the difference for the family full of worms who drive up looking for a place to stay on this dark and stormy night, as a fractal bolt of lightning splits the night sky overhead. "This looks like a pleasant little place," the worm wife says, which is funny in its own right because Larson nails the look of the Motel, and the Bates/Bait house, from the Hitchcock film, and it looks thoroughly terrifying. The real kicker of the joke, though, is the silhouette of Mrs. Bates/Bait up in the window of the house. Holding a fishing pole. It is this small but genius touch that makes this a perfect Far Side cartoon. 2 "I Found My Drill" "Norm? This is Mitch," a man in a phone booth, inexplicably placed at the top of a hill, "you were right." What was Norm right about? Mitch "found [his] drill," which readers can see lying on the grass nearby. Also nearby is the sign that tells us this isn't just any ordinary hill. It is "Bluebery Hill." You know, the one Fats Domino, and Louis Armstrong, and Glenn Miller, and Elvis Presley have all sung about. (Just to name check a few of the music legends who have done renditions of "Blueberry Hill," a song first recorded in 1940.) Except they all found a "thrill" on Blueberry Hill. That's intangible. Ephemeral. You know what isn't? A power drill. This switch makes the reference ridiculous, in the manner of the funniest Far Side comics. 1 "A Second Lucy Is Discovered" This panel is in the conversation for The Far Side's greatest pop culture reference. It is a playful shoutout to The Far Side's #1 rival for "greatest newspaper comic" ever, Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts. It is also a joke about one of Gary Larson's favorite subjects: archeology and the study of prehistoric humanity. Finding "a second Lucy" while on a dig is described as "rocking the anthropological world." Just like finding evidence that human civilization sprang from multiple origin points, finding out that Lucy from Peanuts might predate her 1950 origin, perhaps by thousands of years, is a "shocking" and undeniably brilliant punchline. Writer Gary Larson Colorist Gary Larson