Featured Image: The Far Side, a detective points at a suspicious looking elephant in a room full of humans
Summary SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAY SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Over the course of its fifteen years in syndication, Gary Larson's newspaper comic The Far Side featured its fair share of shady characters, who often appeared dressed in trench coats. The trench coat was a signature visual gag, one that Far Side readers quickly came to recognize as one of the strip's best recurring elements.
10 The Key To The Far Side's Humor Was Often Its Simplicity First Published: August 12, 1982 The most familiar trench coat wearing figure in The Far Side is Gary Larson's representation of a suspicious looking man, frequently identified as a member of an organized crime syndicate.
Upon a bit of closer scrutiny, the joke extends from the idea that a trench coat-wearing man looming on a street corner might make passersby uneasy. This man has somehow managed to commodify this, bottling those feelings and seeking to sell them, rather than give them away for free.
Though he is depicted leering out the corners of his eyes, his unease doesn't stem from fear that a gorilla might show up and question what the man is doing on its turf; rather, this is the nature of Larson's familiar trench coat man, who is always on the look out for trouble – likely because he's already knee-deep in it. This is crucial to Gary Larson's joke here, though that does make its punchline easier to miss than the author might have hoped.
"The heart! Hand over the heart!" the mugger barks, before adding: "And you with the brains! Let's have 'em!" Strangely, he doesn't ask for the gold medallion around the Lion's neck – and just as notable is the fact that the Lion, supposedly no longer cowardly after the end of the film, has his paws in the air just like his cohorts, instead of taking brave action to thwart the robbery.
3 At Least These Far Side Mobsters Tried To Be Intimidating First Published: October 1, 1984 While unquestionably qualifying as shady, Far Side's mafiosos often came across as more goofy than dangerous. That is the case here, but at least in this instance, there is a somewhat coherent effort to intimidate and extort – it just happens to be carried out in quixotic fashion.
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