The Far Side has always poked fun at the seemingly mundane by putting an absurdist lens on a variety of topics and subjects. The Far Side has no lead character like Garfield or Calvin and Hobbes, which means creator Gary Larson has the freedom to write/draw gags about anything and anyone – including scientists.
Sometimes The Far Side makes jokes about dinosaurs and aliens, sometimes babies and farmers, and even literal trees. Clearly, no one is safe from Gary Larson’s ability to turn literally anything into a hilarious and utterly absurd joke. And one of the funniest subjects Larson often uses in The Far Side is scientists. However, rather than portraying them as pillars of human intelligence representing the collective desire to understand the world around them, The Far Side’s scientists are usually pretty stupid. Here are 10 of the funniest examples of dumb Far Side scientists!
10 Not Even Scientists Can Resist the Call of the Ice Cream Truck in The Far Side
As four scientists are right in the middle of conducting research in their laboratory, they all notice an ice cream truck driving by the window. The scientists immediately drop what they’re doing and run to catch the ice cream truck before it passes, as if they’re a bunch of little kids on summer vacation. While readers don’t know exactly what these scientists were working on, they do know that – whatever it was – it was far less important than ice cream.
The sight of labcoat-wearing scientists excitedly scrambling out of the room in the hopes of maybe getting some ice cream from a passing ice cream truck after hearing the call of its jingle is so hilariously juvenile that one cannot help but laugh at the utter stupidity of the situation.
9 One Prankster Might Be the Dumbest Scientist in The Far Side
As one scientist is working hard on building a missile, another one sneaks up behind him with an inflated paper bag, and is getting ready to pop the bag right in the first scientist’s ear. While The Far Side doesn’t show the grim outcome of this utterly idiotic practical joke, it’s implied that that pop will startle the first scientist so much that he’ll hammer the wrong point on the missile, causing it to explode right there in the lab, killing both scientists.
The Far Side has no shortage of dumb scientists, but this one prankster might be the dumbest of them all. Startling a colleague who’s in the middle of building a missile, resulting in his and one’s own death? That’s pretty stupid, though the implied tragedy is matched by the utter hilarity.
8 A Groundbreaking Invention Turns Out to Be Pretty Useless in The Far Side
This Far Side comic shows a scientist that has invented a groundbreaking device, as it allows him to communicate with dogs. Talking to dogs (or at least understanding what they’re saying) is something people have seemingly always wanted to do. And now, this scientist has done it. Unfortunately, the invention turns out to be pretty useless in this case, as instead of the sound of barking, the scientist just hears every dog in his vicinity saying, “Hey!“.
It doesn’t take a genius inventor to understand that dogs are trying to get someone’s attention when they’re barking, and substituting their bark for the word “hey” doesn’t really tell anyone what they don’t already know. It’s hilarious to consider that this scientist spent countless hours and untold amounts of grant money to create this ‘groundbreaking’ invention, only to learn that it’s essentially useless, making him feel like a complete idiot.
7 The Far Side Calls Out Scientific Hypocrisy at Its Funniest
As Igor is helping his mad scientist master, Dr. Frankenstein, bring the iconic Frankenstein’s Monster to life, Igor pulls out a Wolfman puppet, and plays with it right in front of the undead monster’s face. Apparently, this was too weird even for Dr. Frankenstein, who scolds Igor for being unnervingly bizarre. Of course, this is hypocrisy at its finest, as someone like Frankenstein – who’s literally trying to reanimate the amalgamated form of multiple corpses – has no room to judge Igor for doing anything ‘weird’.
The fact that Frankenstein can’t see his own hypocrisy, or accept that someone willing to help him create a literal monster from stitched-together body parts is going to be a little weird, is pretty stupid – and utterly hilarious.
6 A Far Side Scientist Gets More than He Bargained For During a Truly Weird Experiment
A team of scientists is in their lab, conducting an experiment that’s decidedly strange: testing whether animals “kiss”. One of the scientists finds success with an armadillo, as they’re able to kiss the animal without any trouble at all. Upon reading the chalkboard, it seems the scientists also tried to kiss a squid, but after being unable to find the lips, they deemed that animal ‘unkissable’. Then, readers’ collective attention is drawn to the back of the room, as a scientist tries to kiss a cow, but receives only a damsel-like smack across the face for his advances.
The cow was capable of kissing the scientist, but did not consent to it, which is an unexpected variable in the scientists’ experiments. But, beyond the non-consenting cow, this whole thing is really weird and incredibly stupid – though it is admittedly hilarious.
5 Early Human Scientists Still Had No Reason to Be THIS Dumb
This Far Side comic takes readers back to the early days of human existence, when Neanderthals roamed the Earth, and shows the earliest version of a microscope being used by a caveman scientist. The scientist is using the primitive piece of lab equipment to look at a mammoth, and upon doing so, the scientist confirms that the animal he’s looking at is, indeed, a mammoth.
While a little bit of leeway can be given due to the fact that this scientist was a Neanderthal, that’s still no excuse for him to be this stupid. Obviously the animal he was looking at through the microscope (which had no right to be called that, by the way) was a mammoth, that much could clearly be seen without the piece of equipment. Caveman or not, this Far Side scientist is inexcusably pretty dumb.
4 A Far Side Scientist Tries to Conquer Fear in the Dumbest Way Possible
A scientist has placed himself in a coffin-sized box that’s dangling from the side of a tall building. Inside the box with him are a bunch of snakes, and he’s in complete darkness. It’s revealed that the scientist is doing this to overcome three fears at once: fear of heights, fear of snakes, and fear of the dark. Hilariously, the scientist is shown inside the box screaming for his life, indicating that the experiment is a failure, and he’s still very much afraid of all those things.
From being trapped in a dangling box with a bunch of snakes, to the fact that the scientist is trapped in a dangling box so high up to begin with, this experiment is needlessly dangerous on so many levels. Plus, the fact that it didn’t even work proves how dumb the experiment was, and how dumb this scientist is by extension.
3 The Far Side Confirms Why There are No Dog Scientists
This Far Side comic introduces readers to a room filled with anthropomorphic dogs, and each one of them is a scientist working on the same problem: how a doorknob works. The scientist dogs call this conundrum “The Doorknob Principle”, and every one of them is working diligently to solve it. Well, except one dog, who noticeably got distracted by a random cat playing outside the window.
Learning how a doorknob works is far from a scientific breakthrough, even if it would mean that dogs would no longer have a reason to scratch incessantly behind a shut door. If even the smartest dogs in the world can’t figure out how a doorknob works, then it’s clear dogs should not be scientists, which is something The Far Side hilariously points out in this comic.
2 These Far Side Scientists Hilariously Misunderstand One Common Saying
An incredibly common saying is “laughter is the best medicine”, but these scientists don’t understand that the sick person needs to be the one laughing for it to be true. However, they’re determined to understand the precise parameters of this assertion to see if, in fact, laughter is the best medicine. During the experiment, every one of the scientists standing around a bedridden sick person just starts laughing at him, all while the person in bed just stares off in disbelief.
It’s funny enough to consider that a team of scientists would take a saying like “laughter is the best medicine” literally enough to test it, but what makes this comic hilarious is that they’re testing it completely wrong. They’ve misinterpreted the saying by taking it literally, and their tests prove a complete lack of understanding, which is just so stupid in the funniest way.
1 The Far Side Reveals Even Rocket Scientists Can Be Dumb
When any random task is simple enough to understand, it isn’t uncommon for someone to say, “it isn’t rocket science”, as they can understand why someone would have trouble understanding rocket science, but not whatever the task in question may be. Basically, that saying is just a round-about way to call someone dumb. However, The Far Side reveals that even rocket scientists themselves can be pretty stupid.
After these rocket scientists build a poorly-constructed rocket, one of the scientists says, “We’re not exactly rocket scientists“. But, the thing is, all of them are rocket scientists, they’re just really dumb rocket scientists apparently, which is a hilariously ironic gag that plays on a commonly said insult. And that’s why this is one of the 10 funniest Far Side comics about dumb scientists.
The Far Side
The Far Side is a humorous comic series developed by Gary Larson. The series has been in production since 1979 and features a wide array of comic collections, calendars, art, and other miscellaneous items.
