Far Side Feature Image, characters waving in foreground, while one makes a funny face in background
Summary SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAY SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Iconic newspaper cartoon The Far Side didn't feature an ongoing narrative, or characters that carried over from strip to strip – but one name popped up with enough frequency that he can be called the "secret recurring character" of the comic's run: Al. Though not always appearing in the flesh, Al's presence was felt in some of Far Side creator Gary Larson's most memorable drawings.
2:01 Related "I Worked At Night": Gary Larson Had the Perfect Explanation For Far Side's Dark Worldview In the Preface to The Complete Far Side: Volume One, Gary Larson provided a fascinating insight into when and where he wrote his wildest comics.
This panel represents the more straightforrward vein of Gary Larson's humor in The Far Side. Though the comic is frequently cited as having punclines that weren't immediately evident, with their humor often needed to be puzzled out by the reader, this was far from always the case. Al and his many businesses were often used in Far Side's more easily decipherable installments – though not always.
Characters often met tragic fates in The Far Side, and here, Al is at the heart of one of Gary Larson's bleakest jokes. Back on the high seas, "Al's Glass Bottom Tours" suffers a catastrophe, as the boat's hull is pierced, causing it to flip over and sink to the bottom of the ocean. This is one of the best examples of Gary Larson's use of the name "Al" as a catch-all entrepreneurial shorthand. It is used as a way of giving this Far Side strip an extra bit of personality – character, so to speak, even if Al himself didn't appear as a character. The joke certainly would have worked had the sign just said "Hardware Store" – but calling it "Al's" is an extra step that dials in the specificity of the joke, making it funnier.
In what is perhaps the funniest "Al" installment of The Far Side, a man examines the crumpled note tied to a brick that just smashed through his window. The note reads: Gary Larson's humor was regularly absurd, but the maniacal quality of the punchline here stands out as one of his most laugh-out-loud jokes. Again, the humor here is designed to leave the reader asking "What-the?", as just the first of many questions.
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