•In the 1980s and 1990s, nothing in the newspaper’s comic strip section was quite as dark as The Far Side. While Peanuts peaked at Lucy van Pelt yanking the football away from Charlie Brown, and Garfield’s darkest gag involved kicking Odie off a table, Gary Larson’s strip made jokes about hangings and murder, with death was a regular punchline.
Larson also liked to make light of whatever came after death. He occasionally joked about Heaven, but he seemed to find Hell far more amusing, setting many strips in the underworld and making Satan a recurring figure. While few Far Side characters appeared more than once, the Devil himself showed up repeatedly.
Here are six Far Side comic strips featuring the Devil, who, according to Gary Larson, doesn’t seem to be that nice of a guy.
“We Deliver Anywhere”
In this strip from June 11, 1988, a pizza gets delivered to Hell and Satan is clearly unhappy about it. “First of all, this is going straight back — and I’ll just have a little chat with whoever placed the order,” says Satan. The best detail in the strip is the slogan on the pizza box: “Jerry’s Pizza: We Deliver Anywhere,” and Jerry clearly lives up to her word.
Pizza is one of the greatest pleasures on Earth, which means it’s disqualified from being served in Hell — even though there’s a perfect-looking pizza oven literally everywhere you look.
The very literal Gary Larson
A recurring source of humor in Larson’s strip was to take a common phrase or idiom and interpret it as literally as possible. In one comic from 1992, he picked apart “ride off into the sunset” by depicting a burnt-up cowboy who had literally ridden into the sun. In another from 1985, he played on the phrase “dressed to kill” by showing two sharks in fancy evening attire.
In this strip from 1982, Larson dissected “To Hell and back” by turning Hell into a mere tourist destination. A man shows off slides from his vacation, including a picture of his wife standing with the Devil — especially funny given how happy the Devil is while the wife looks bored.
Splitsville
Hell showed up in several Far Side comics, but it wasn’t always the same Hell. Several strips depicted very specific, different forms of Hell, each designed to torture a particular resident of the underworld. This strip from 1990 has the caption “Bowler’s Hell,” showing a bowler who made an impossible-to-hit split, with the Devil saying: “Whoa! Another split?… What a bummer!”
Gary Larson on banjos
If a bowler’s version of Hell is endless splits, a classical conductor’s would have to be an orchestra filled only with banjos. Larson seemingly found banjobs obnoxious, as a number of his strips feature them in less-than-flattering light. In another, more Earthly Far Side comic, a different conductor is horrified by the sound of a banjo in his orchestra, shouting “Stop! Stop! What’s that sound? What’s that sound?”
Still, for Larson’s musical tastes, banjos rank higher than accordions, which received even harsher treatment.
See?
This Far Side comic contrasts Heaven and Hell. In Heaven, you receive a harp when you die; in Hell, the instrument given to all new inhabitants is an accordion.
All dogs don’t go to Heaven?
In yet another specific version of Hell, dogs sentenced to eternal damnation are forced to work as their arch-nemesis: mailmen. The strip comes from 1986 — a few years before All Dogs Go to Heaven, the animated film directed by Don Bluth that was released in 1989.
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