Everybody agrees that penguins are funny. They walk funny. They sound funny. They all look like they’re wearing tiny little tuxedos. They’re birds, but they can’t fly — that’s very funny. They live in utterly ridiculous places, and they fall down all the time.
I mean, come on.
It almost seems as though nature designed penguins purely for our amusement, which is why these clownish creatures have been comedy staples forever, including in The Far Side.
While penguins weren’t a top-tier Gary Larson fixation like cows and dinosaurs were, they were a semi-recurring source of comedy in his daily comic strip, which ran from 1980 until 1995. And, because penguins are such funny little guys, here are the 10 best penguin-oriented Far Side comics.
10
July 22, 1981
Penguins are such ridiculous creatures that if your town was being terrorized by a giant one, it’d be more embarrassing than anything else. Even with other funny animals, I don’t think this is the case. Monkeys are funny, but King Kong is one of the greatest monsters ever. Goats are funny, but I’m pretty sure a giant goat head-butting buildings would be horrifying. A giant penguin, though? There’s just no way to take that threat seriously, especially since these creatures presumably have a complete inability to stomp.
Hamsters!
Okay, hamsters are funny, and I’m pretty sure they’d be funny as giants, but still not funnier than penguins.
9
July 15, 1981
This is just a great example of a simple, silly gag which is kind of the opposite of the previous one. The idea of penguins as an animal you can get an infestation of is really ridiculous.
8
July 10, 1982
I just love this idea that these two penguins are waiting for just the right person to come by while they’re isolated on an ice float.
7
September 27, 1983
Sometimes Gary Larson would find a particular thing about a subject that he just fixated on, and he’d essentially come back to the same funny idea over and over again, like a great running joke. For example, he loved to depict scientists as childish idiots — the contrast there was ripe for comedy. Larson had also decided that the worst musical instruments ever were banjos and accordions, so he leveled insult after insult at those instruments and the ones who play them.
For penguins, the running gag was that they all look identical.
This is a great example of that, where a penguin is saying, “Say … you’re not Bob! … You look like him, but you’re certainly not him!”
The idea that even penguins can’t tell penguins apart is especially good.
6
August 9, 1982
This is another “all penguins look the same” gag, with the joke being that the singing penguin is desperate not to be like the rest.
5
August 26, 1986
Another “penguins all look the same” gag, with a murder-mystery twist.
4
February 1, 1987
This is the best example of the “all penguins look the same” joke, as it’s one of those panels where Larson made you work for the punchline. It’s an especially nice use of his wide Sunday panels because it provides all the more penguins you have to inspect until you figure out what the joke is.
3
March 12, 1984
This kind of seems like a variation of the penguins looking alike thing, but the punchline here is more about ridiculously bad disguises and penguins being little dummies — which, I’ll admit, I don’t know if penguins are stupid or not, but they feel like they are.
2
October 23, 1985
This is just a fantastic joke. It’s the kind of unique perspective to an age-old subject that Larson specialized in.
1
June 8, 1994
Finally, this is Larson’s best-ever penguin comic, bar none. Capitalizing on a penguin’s clumsy habit of falling over, it depicts a lone penguin on a sheet of ice having slipped on a random banana peel. It’s a remarkably simple comic, yet each element builds upon the other. Banana peels are slippery, ice is slippery, and penguins can barely stand upright. It’s a comedic perfect storm that is then further enhanced by the thought, “How did the banana peel get there?”