6 Perfect Far Side Comics Set In The Bathroom

Published Sep 12, 2026, 9:30 AM EDT

Ambrose Tardive is an editor on ScreenRant's Comics team. Over the past two years, he has developed into the internet's foremost authority on The Far Side. Outside of his work for ScreenRant, Ambrose works as an Adjunct English Instructor.

Gary Larson had a proprietary sense of humor, which manifested as The Far Side. Sinatra-style, he did everything his way. That included toilet humor, or the closest The Far Side ever really came to it. Of all The Far Side's recurring locations, the bathroom might just be the most underrated.

The Far Side is associated with recurring characters, like cows, chickens, and bears (low-key The Far Side's funniest animals), but it also featured a rotating series of reliable locations Larson could return to on short notice. It might surprise readers, but bathrooms weren't a staple of the rotation. When Larson did go to the lavatory for a punchline, though, the cartoons that resulted were always memorable.

Curated below are a series of undeniably perfect Far Side comics, each set in the bathroom. Together, they highlight what a 10/10 Far Side setting both private and public bathrooms were, and leave us wondering why Larson didn't exploit this more during his career.

"Some Help Scrubbing The Far Side Of Your Back"

First Published: April 30, 1980

It is the quintessential Far Side joke: an ordinary moment is invaded by something bizarre and inexplicable. In this year one Far Side panel, a woman is taking a bath when her scrubbing brush is grabbed by an octopus' tentacle. Which promptly does her a solid by scrubbing the hard-to-reach small of her back.

Not that this makes the sudden appearance of a giant mollusk in her tub any less alarming. The bather clutches her knees to her chest and stares off with a wide-eyed, fearful expression, hoping against hope that the octopus just wants to be helpful.

It's a perfect wordless Far Side comic, which gives readers everything they need to get the joke sans caption, while still leaving them with oh, so many questions.

"Hate To Think What Might Be Down There"

First Published: June 17, 1987

"Drain's clogged,' one character says, standing in the tub, talking to his wife who is standing at the sink nearby. "Man, I'd hate to think what might be down there," he muses. If this Far Side couple were human, this wouldn't be much of a joke at all, would it? But these characters are giant, anthropomorphized flies.

In this case, The Far Side serves up a visual punchline, which the caption seasons with a dash of absurd irony. What is really memorable about this Far Side, though, are the small details of how Gary Larson humanizes the flies.

The husband fly's body language, his hairy appendages on his equivalent of hips. The scowl on the wife fly's face as she turns to look at him, probably wondering why she didn't marry an insect that was better at keeping things working around the house.

​​​​​​​"Cat Showers"

First Published: October 14, 1987

This is a classic Far Side "What the?" cartoon. The kind that people burst out laughing at if absurd humor is exactly their sort of thing, while most other readers are left going, "Huh? What the?" Captioned simply, "Cat showers," it shows a giant tongue sticking out of a blue-tile bathroom wall, where a shower faucet would normally be, as a Garfield-esque orange tabby rubs up against it.

The beauty of this Far Side panel is that it is simultaneously obvious and ridiculous. It takes something natural, the idea that cats clean themselves by licking themselves, and makes it outrageously unnatural, in the funniest possible way. It is a joke almost anyone could make, but virtually nobody besides Gary Larson would make.

It stands as one of The Far Side's most memorably surreal images, but the real star of the show here is the concept itself. The terse caption makes that clear. Larson knew exactly what he was doing with Far Side panels like this one, which don't have to be uproariously funny to be successful. They just have to stick out from the rest.

"Something Fishy About The Bathroom Decor"

First Published: December 10, 1987

This is one of Gary Larson's best cartoons. Certainly, it's one of his most visually engaging. Again, Larson lets the illustration speak for itself with this Far Side, and here it manages to simultaneously shout and whisper. It is "loud" panel, visually, with clashing floor and wallpaper patterns that make the fish taking a bubble bath the least surprising thing about the comic.

At the same time, the punchline is subtle. The wallpaper features humans, the same way a human might decorate their bathroom with fish wallpaper. It is a hilariously strange inversion, but it takes a minute to click for many readers.

That's not a bad thing. That's an essential part of The Far Side reading experience. Art in general, and newspaper cartooning specifically, is all about catching and not releasing the viewer's attention. In that regard, Gary Larson nailed it with this one.

"The Gentle Sound Of Rushing Water & Rustling Of Magazines"

First Published: April 8, 1991

Now, we get to what might be the most underutilized location of Gary Larson's career: the public restroom. (More on that shortly.) Here, the perennial Far Side feud between deer and hunters spills out of the forest and into human territory, as a deer takes refuge from the hunter on its tail by hiding in a public bathroom stall.

"His rifle poised, Gus burst through the door, stopped, and listened," Larson narrates in the caption, which has a short story tone to it. "Nothing but the gentle sound of running water and the rustling of magazines could be heard," the caption continues, hysterically substituting the soundscape of a lavatory for the sounds of the woods. It is a great, fully-rounded Far Side scene, the kind Larson produced more and more of late in his career, and it culminates in a delightfully silly punchline.

That is, Gus falters. He loses the deer's trail. Which is wild, because the deer's hooves are clearly visible in the fifth stall from the door. This is what sends the joke over the top and makes it one of the funniest Far Sides of 1991.

"It Was An Innocent Mistake"

First Published: December 30, 1993

Gary Larson returns to the public bathroom setting for one more unforgettable Far Side cartoon. This one starring a mummy, and a guy whose first mistake was taking the bathroom stall right next to the one the mummy is in. The guy's big, huge mistake, though, comes when he mistakes a loose strand of the mummy's bandages for toilet paper.

"It was an innocent mistake," the caption notes, before adding that the guy, "Maurice," got "the full brunt of the mummy's wrath" for his faux pas. What that amounted to, exactly, we'll never know, but the humor here doesn't come from Maurice's fate, just his bad luck and carelessness.

Once more, the idea of this Far Side joke, the premise, is the funniest part. What makes it perfect is that Gary Larson was able to deliver a Far Side cartoon that lived up to the premise.

​​​​​​​Final Thoughts:

As edgy as The Far Side could be for its time, toilet humor wasn't really a part of Gary Larson's bag of tricks. Larson seldom, if ever, made scatological jokes, or used going to the bathroom as a punchline, and surprisingly, he didn't set as many Far Side panels in the bathroom as he could've.

The cartoons collected here are the all-stars of The Far Side's bathroom jokes, and also the majority of them. It stands as perhaps Larson's most underused setting, and that's doubly true for the public restroom. As we've seen, there was great comedic potential in the location, but The Far Side only occasionally went there.

Why do you think Gary Larson didn't set more Far Side jokes in bathrooms, public or private?