In the 1980s and 1990s, newspaper comic strips reached their peak as The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes became just as popular, if not more so, than classics such as Peanuts. What Gary Larson created with The Far Side was quite different. Rather than trying to tell a short story with the same characters in a few panels, he used just one panel for both the setup and punchline to a clever joke.
Larson had several recurring themes he returned to, whether it be goofball scientists or talking animals. Then there’s what he did with dinosaurs, using creatures long extinct for surrealist satire about modern society. There are so many great examples of this, but these five Far Side comics in particular are so hilariously over-the-top.
5
‘Smoking Kills Dinosaurs’ (1987)
Most kids grow up fascinated by dinosaurs (and continue on to enjoy thrilling dinosaur movies as adults). They seem unreal, and it’s unfathomable that such creatures could exist on the same planet we now inhabit. With the immense size of some species, how could animals so intimidating, who ruled the Earth through so many eras, disappear? It’s eerie to know that an asteroid swiftly destroyed life as it was. It’s part of the reason why our fascination with dinosaurs hasn’t died with them.
In today’s era, smoking is what is killing so many humans. By the 1980s, when Larson drew this comic, everyone knew the dangers of cigarette smoking, which now kills millions across the globe annually. It’s our own little slow-burn meteor of sorts. That’s dark. Showing the absurdity, however, of dinosaurs sneaking off for a cigarette break is silly and lessens the impact while simultaneously driving the point home.
4
‘Caveman Bubblegum’ (1980)
Although popular in over-the-top movies and cartoons, dinosaurs and cavemen didn’t exist at the same time. The asteroid that wiped out the dinos crashed into Earth around 180 million years ago. Neanderthals, the first humans, didn’t evolve until 40,000 years ago. That’s just a wee bit of a time gap. But if dinosaurs and humans shared the same world at the same time, we wouldn’t rule. People would easily be prey for creatures that towered over us.
Larson’s comic shows how we’d be easy picking for dinosaurs. Poor Neanderthals wouldn’t have a chance. We’d be nothing more than a fun, unserious hobby, with T-Rexes playing with their food and treating us like a game. If humans existed in their era, we would have been extinct long before an asteroid.
3
‘The Thagomizer’ (1982)
Dinosaurs have such strange names. Get past the popular ones, like the Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velociraptor, and it quickly becomes a confusing list of species. There’s Alosaurus, Brachiosaurus, and all kinds of saurus you’ve never heard of and would likely have a hard time pronouncing. Then there’s the Stegosaurus.
The Stegosaurus is a popular dinosaur because of its fascinating shape. Although an herbivore, it’s not one to mess with due to the plates that run down its back and the sharp spikes at the end of its tail. If a predator got hit with one of those spikes, they would be in trouble. But just what the heck do you call it? In this comic, which makes fun of the strange names given to all things dinosaurs, a Neanderthal calls it a Thagomizer, with Thag Simmons presumably meeting his end by one. What’s amazing is that, while this isn’t the official name (there isn’t one), paleontologists now call the Stegosaurus’ tail spikes a thagomizer out of respect for the iconic Far Side comic.
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s
🔬House
🩺Scrubs
01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
County General Hospital, Chicago
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Sacred Heart Hospital, California
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
2
‘Taunting Mammals at the Worst Time’ (1980)
Many times, Gary Larson’s Far Side comics didn’t even need words to say so much. Take this one, for example, which shows a trio of dinosaurs encountering a small, weird-looking, furry mammal. As two of them point and laugh, a third is distracted, watching these odd, little white balls of solid water fall to the ground.
After the asteroid hit Earth all those millions of years ago, not all dinosaurs immediately died. The destruction it caused lasted for millions more years, changing the Earth’s temperature and ushering in the ice age. As dinosaurs froze to death, those small, funny-looking mammals, covered in fur, found a way to survive. Soon enough, with dinosaurs out of the picture, they would thrive and evolve. That’s no laughing matter if you’re a confused T-Rex.
1
‘Meaties’ (1981)
If you’re of a certain age, your childhood mornings revolved around the cereal box. Walking into the kitchen clad in pajamas, showing off our favorite cartoons, we’d get out our favorite sugary cereal and eat at the table while reading the back of the box and shaking out the toy included at the bottom. What a way to begin the day!
In Larson’s Far Side comic, it’s the same type of life for dinosaurs, who live in houses, eat at the table, and get scolded by their mothers. Just like our mothers did, this guy’s mom wants him to put his toy down and focus on eating his breakfast. It’s what he’s eating that drives the joke home with some dark subject matter. Forget Wheaties — this dinosaur is eating Meaties, presumably made up of chunks of Neanderthals and other animals. And instead of some cheap, plastic toy, the dino kid is getting an entire dead child to play with. What fun! It’s absurd, disgusting, and, as always with Gary Larson’s The Far Side, oh so funny.
