In The Far Side, Hell isn’t always a grand landscape of fire and brimstone. Sometimes it’s a botched pizza delivery, an impossible bowling split or an instrument you can’t stand. Gary Larson’s Devil appears in these everyday indignities, making damnation feel oddly familiar.
Table of Contents
1. “We Deliver Anywhere”
In a comic dated June 11, 1988, a pizza arrives in Hell, and Satan isn’t happy. “First of all, this is going straight back – and I’ll just have a little chat with whoever placed the order,” he says.
The box bears the slogan “Jerry’s Pizza: We Deliver Anywhere,” and Jerry has clearly kept her word. The Devil’s complaint makes a certain kind of comic sense: pizza is one of life’s great pleasures, so it hardly belongs in Hell, even though a perfect-looking pizza oven seems to be everywhere there.
2. The very literal Gary Larson
Larson often took familiar phrases and pushed their literal meanings until they became jokes. In a 1992 comic, a cowboy who literally rides into the sun ends up burned to a crisp. A 1985 strip turns “dressed to kill” into two sharks in fancy evening clothes.
This 1982 comic applies the same trick to “To Hell and back,” turning Hell into a tourist destination. A man shows vacation slides, including a picture of his wife beside the Devil. Satan looks delighted; the wife, by contrast, looks bored.
3. Splitsville
Hell doesn’t look the same in every Far Side comic. Several strips imagine different versions, each tailored to torment a particular resident. In this 1990 comic, captioned “Bowler’s Hell,” a bowler faces an impossible-to-hit split as the Devil reacts: “Whoa! Another split?… What a bummer!” Endless splits would be a particularly cruel punishment for anyone who bowls.
4. Gary Larson on banjos
If endless splits are a bowler’s personal Hell, a classical conductor’s might be an orchestra made up entirely of banjos. Larson repeatedly portrayed the instrument unflatteringly, as if he found its sound obnoxious.
In another, more earthly Far Side comic, a conductor is horrified by a banjo in his orchestra and shouts, “Stop! Stop! What’s that sound? What’s that sound?” Still, Larson seems to have ranked banjos above accordions, which got even harsher treatment.
5. See?
This comic puts Heaven and Hell side by side: the dead receive harps in Heaven, while new arrivals in Hell get accordions. Larson’s repeated jokes at the expense of banjos and accordions leave one question hanging: did players of either instrument ever take offense?
6. All dogs don’t go to Heaven?
In this version of Hell, dogs sentenced to eternal damnation are forced to work as mailmen, their arch-nemeses. The comic might seem to parody Don Bluth’s animated film All Dogs Go to Heaven, which the author describes as a beautiful film. But the dates don’t line up: the comic is from 1986, while the film is from 1989.
The author isn’t looking for a theological argument, but sides with Bluth on the afterlife: dogs go to Heaven, and Larson is totally wrong about any dog going to Hell.
