Though it may have run its last cartoon more than two decades ago, Gary Larson’s The Far Side has long been an indelible part of the fabric of pop culture, in many ways managing to foretell many trends in the contemporary zeitgeist long before their time. The platform for hundreds of legendary cartoons that graced the pages of newspapers around the world, it is one particularly surreal comic that presciently rises above the rest in its setting of the surreal meme tropes, and, predictably, it involves cows.
The Far Side was a single-panel cartoon that debuted in 1980, distributed by Chronicle Features (and later Universal Press Syndicate). An endearingly clever cartoonist, Larson would often devise shocking sight gags, often involving surreal, non sequitur humor that frequently contained the quality of inducing a gradual dawning upon the reader to appreciate. A lover of silly animal-style humor, many of Larson’s cartoons involved animal-based gags, such as the animal which would prove to be the most iconic symbol of his creation: the common cow.
It is this bovine preoccupation that served as an early precursor to the greater millennial-created surrealist meme-style humor, most notably in an infamous comic known as “Cow Tools.” The 1982 comic depicts an impassive bovine standing (upon two legs) next to a table upon which lay several of these supposed tools as the cow looks on. The joke of the comic, simply captioned “Cow Tools,” is that looking upon the workman cow with his absurd, unrecognizable and likely non-functional tools is meant to serve as a window into the stoic, if unintelligent, mind of the cow itself.
The Unknown Tools of the Future
Unfortunately, the comic did not go over well at the time. After his distributor was inundated with fan-mail seeking guidance within 24 hours of publishing, Larson released a statement in which he admitted the joke may have been “beyond what is comprehensible to the average ‘Far Side’ reader.” He explained in the statement that attempting to find reason in the joke based on a supposed rational purpose for a cow having tools, or the usefulness of the supposed tools themselves, was futile in trying to understand the joke, which many wrote seemed uncharacteristically impenetrable.
Cultural progress, if it can indeed be called that, has shown that Larson’s irreverent approach was simply ahead of its time, reliant upon a certain meta-cognitive quirk in his own sense of absurdity that hadn’t quite developed in the culture as a whole. The humor of “Cow Tools” draws upon the impregnable obtuseness of the cow and the unknowable relationship it has with its tools. The trick is understanding the implicit comparison being made between the cow, whose tools serve no known purpose, and a human, who relies upon his tools and his knowledge of them to work.
The result is that the joke in this Far Side comic draws upon a similar vein of humor to that of the modern meme, which often draws upon these kinds of absurdist comparisons in their humor which is predicated upon “reasonable” everyday mindsets in order to more strongly project their surrealism. What’s more, this makes sense ultimately, because Gary Larson’s The Far Side was always tracing that cutting edge of humor even back before the internet made it vogue. And its influence continues today.
Source: The Spokesman Review