Published Sep 13, 2026, 8:02 PM EDT
Shawn Van Horn is a Senior Author for Collider. He’s watched way too many slasher movies over the decades, which makes him an aficionado on all things Halloween and Friday the 13th. Don’t ask him to choose between Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees because he can’t do it. He grew up in the 90s, when Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, and TGIF were his life, and still watches them religiously to this day. Larry David is his spirit animal. His love for entertainment spreads to the written word as well. He has written two novels and is neck deep in the querying trenches. He is also a short story maker upper and poet with a dozen publishing credits to his name. He lives in small town Ohio, where he likes to watch professional wrestling and movies.
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In the 1980s and 1990s, newspaper comic strips reached their peak as The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes became just as popular, if not more so, than classics such as Peanuts. What Gary Larson created with The Far Side was quite different. Rather than trying to tell a short story with the same characters in a few panels, he used just one panel for both the setup and punchline to a clever joke.
Larson had several recurring themes he returned to, whether it be goofball scientists or talking animals. Then there’s what he did with dinosaurs, using creatures long extinct for surrealist satire about modern society. **There are so many great examples of this, but these five Far Side comics in particular are so hilariously over-the-top.
Most kids grow up fascinated by dinosaurs (and continue on to enjoy thrilling dinosaur movies as adults). They seem unreal, and it’s unfathomable that such creatures could exist on the same planet we now inhabit. With the immense size of some species, how could animals so intimidating, who ruled the Earth through so many eras, disappear? It’s eerie to know that an asteroid swiftly destroyed life as it was. It’s part of the reason why our fascination with dinosaurs hasn’t died with them.
In today’s era, smoking is what is killing so many humans. By the 1980s, when Larson drew this comic, everyone knew the dangers of cigarette smoking, which now kills millions across the globe annually. It’s our own little slow-burn meteor of sorts. That’s dark. Showing the absurdity, however, of dinosaurs sneaking off for a cigarette break is silly and lessens the impact while simultaneously driving the point home.
Although popular in over-the-top movies and cartoons, dinosaurs and cavemen didn’t exist at the same time. The asteroid that wiped out the dinos crashed into Earth around 180 million years ago. Neanderthals, the first humans, didn’t evolve until 40,000 years ago. That’s just a wee bit of a time gap. But if dinosaurs and humans shared the same world at the same time, we wouldn’t rule. People would easily be prey for creatures that towered over us.
Larson’s comic shows how we’d be easy picking for dinosaurs. Poor Neanderthals wouldn’t have a chance. We’d be nothing more than a fun, unserious hobby, with T-Rexes playing with their food and treating us like a game. If humans existed in their era, we would have been extinct long before an asteroid.
Dinosaurs have such strange names. Get past the popular ones, like the Tyrannosaurus Rex and Velociraptor, and it quickly becomes a confusing list of species. There’s Alosaurus, Brachiosaurus, and all kinds of saurus you’ve never heard of and would likely have a hard time pronouncing. Then there’s the Stegosaurus.
The Stegosaurus is a popular dinosaur because of its fascinating shape. Although an herbivore, it’s not one to mess with due to the plates that run down its back and the sharp spikes at the end of its tail. If a predator got hit with one of those spikes, they would be in trouble. But just what the heck do you call it? In this comic, which makes fun of the strange names given to all things dinosaurs, a Neanderthal calls it a Thagomizer, with Thag Simmons presumably meeting his end by one. What’s amazing is that, while this isn’t the official name (there isn’t one), paleontologists now call the Stegosaurus’ tail spikes a thagomizer out of respect for the iconic Far Side comic.
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
Many times, Gary Larson’s Far Side comics didn’t even need words to say so much. Take this one, for example, which shows a trio of dinosaurs encountering a small, weird-looking, furry mammal. As two of them point and laugh, a third is distracted, watching these odd, little white balls of solid water fall to the ground.
After the asteroid hit Earth all those millions of years ago, not all dinosaurs immediately died. The destruction it caused lasted for millions more years, changing the Earth’s temperature and ushering in the ice age. As dinosaurs froze to death, those small, funny-looking mammals, covered in fur, found a way to survive. Soon enough, with dinosaurs out of the picture, they would thrive and evolve. That’s no laughing matter if you’re a confused T-Rex.
If you’re of a certain age, your childhood mornings revolved around the cereal box. Walking into the kitchen clad in pajamas, showing off our favorite cartoons, we’d get out our favorite sugary cereal and eat at the table while reading the back of the box and shaking out the toy included at the bottom. What a way to begin the day!
In Larson’s Far Side comic, it’s the same type of life for dinosaurs, who live in houses, eat at the table, and get scolded by their mothers. Just like our mothers did, this guy’s mom wants him to put his toy down and focus on eating his breakfast. It’s what he’s eating that drives the joke home with some dark subject matter. Forget Wheaties — this dinosaur is eating Meaties, presumably made up of chunks of Neanderthals and other animals. And instead of some cheap, plastic toy, the dino kid is getting an entire dead child to play with. What fun! It’s absurd, disgusting, and, as always with Gary Larson’s The Far Side, oh so funny.