In recent months, I’ve been examining the best-ever quotes from various newspaper comic strips, and in that time I’ve determined that every comic strip requires its own approach. For Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, I went with something heartfelt and inspirational because those comics and characters really have inspired people. For Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, I investigated something more philosophical, as the best of those comics make the audience contemplate human nature and the world around them. But for Gary Larson’s The Far Side, well, the task is monumentally different.

Larson didn’t do deep. He didn’t do inspirational. Many of his cartoons required you to think, but not because they were thoughtful in the lofty sense. They required thought because Larson’s work was brilliant, and you sometimes had to figure out what the punchline was. For example, this comic strip where an artist is painting a woman as a half-fly creature. You likely see the woman or the painting first, and you wonder why the artist is painting her that way. Only after inspecting the comic more closely do you see the dead fly on his glasses. Larson’s work often requires the reader to investigate........

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