Gary Larson Had to Publish An Explanation for This ‘Far Side’ Comic That We Still Don’t Understand

For all the brilliant scientific humor Gary Larson delivered during his 15 years writing and drawing The Far Side, sometimes, the punchline really isn’t any less stupid than “cow tools.”

Larson regularly published The Far Side in newspapers across the country from December 31, 1979 to January 1, 1995, so, given that the beloved comic strip’s entire original syndication occurred well before the invention of Wikipedia in 2001, you’d have to think that there were more than a few Far Side strips that went over the heads of fans who didn’t have as deep an understanding of evolutionary biology as Far Side’s creator. As such, when a particularly esoteric strip hit the funny pages, those head-scratching readers would call in to Chronicle Features or whichever other newspaper published Far Side at the time and demand an explanation.

In 1982, one Far Side panel was so preposterously incoherent and inaccessible that Far Side fans overwhelmed both Chronicle Features and Larson himself with follow-up questions, prompting Larson to publish an incredibly unusual press release explaining the joke — as little as there was to explain.

Larson, whose life’s work was largely centered around the animal kingdom and its interesting inhabitants, famously had a fixation on our bovine brethren and their unique lot in life. “I’ve always thought the word cow was funny, and cows are sort of tragic figures. Cows blur the line between tragedy and humor,” Larson once pondered when asked about his cow obsession.

That philosophical rumination (moomination?) on the common dairy cow is, somehow, more coherent and clear than the above comic strip, published in October 1982. Assuming that there was some hidden meaning that only the scientifically educated could glean from the strip, as was usually the case with confusing Far Side comics, fans flooded Chronicle Features with questions about “Cow Tools” upon the panel’s release — one general manager at the newspaper would later say of the reaction to Larson’s strip, “The phone never stopped ringing for two days.”

As Larson himself became overwhelmed with fan mail hoping to find some secret message in “Cow Tools,” he resolved to clear the air with a press release later that month, writing, “The cartoon was intended to be an exercise in silliness. While I have never met a cow who could make tools, I felt sure that if I did, they (the tools) would lack something in sophistication and resemble the sorry specimens shown in this cartoon. I regret that my fondness for cows, combined with an overactive imagination, may have carried me beyond what is comprehensible to the average Far Side reader.”

Today, “Cow Tools” is a meme among the still-active and online Far Side fan community, as is the explosive and confused reaction to the non-joke of the panel. As for the proper interpretation of “Cow Tools,” the question of, “But what does it mean?” is positively moo(t).