Caption:
“Somethin’s up, Jed. … That’s Ben Potter’s horse, all right, but ain’t that Henry Morgan’s chicken ridin’ him?”
Alt text:
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this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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The Far Side
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Hello fellow Far Side fans!
About this community and how I post the comic strip… Many moons ago, I would ask my Dad to save the newspaper for me everyday so I could read my favorite comic strips and one of those was The Far Side. These days of course you find just about anything online including www.thefarside.com where they post several comics a day and I repost them here. Just to note, the date you see in my posts is not the initial release date, but the date they were posted on the website.
The Far Side is a single-panel comic created by Gary Larson and syndicated by Chronicle Features and then Universal Press Syndicate, which ran from December 31, 1979, to January 1, 1995 (when Larson retired as a cartoonist). Its surrealistic humor is often based on uncomfortable social situations, improbable events, an anthropomorphic view of the world, logical fallacies, impending bizarre disasters, (often twisted) references to proverbs, or the search for meaning in life… Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Far_Side
Hope you enjoy and feel free to contribute to the community with art, cool stuff about the author, tattoos, toys and anything else, as long it’s The Far Side!
Ps. Sub to all my comic strip communities:
Bello Bear !BelloBear@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/bellobearofficial
Bloom County !bloomcounty@lemm.ee https://lemm.ee/c/bloomcounty
Calvin and Hobbes !calvinandhobbes@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/calvinandhobbes
Cyanide and Happiness !cyanideandhappiness https://lemm.ee/c/cyanideandhappiness
Garfield !garfield@lemmy.world https://lemmy.world/c/garfield
The Far Side !thefarside@sh.itjust.works https://lemmy.world/c/thefarside@sh.itjust.works
Fine print: All comics I post are freely available online. In no way am I claiming ownership, copyright or anything else. This is a not for profit community, we just want to enjoy our comics, thank you.
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It's riffing on Westerns. You might see dialogue like that, talking about one cowboy riding another's horse, leading some characters to surmise that something's wrong. In Far Side fashion though, instead of a cowboy, it's a chicken.
What might have gone wrong in that situation in a western? Do the characters assume the cowboys had killed each other or something?
It’s a Western movie trope based in the socio-economic and cultural fabric of the time.
A horse in frontier times would have been a highly priced possession for the owner, usually the most valuable of all in fact, aside from reflecting connection, trust and personal attachment between the two. Given the unforgiving environment, the loss, sudden absence or injury of one’s horse could be the difference between survival and swift and certain death.
Enter crime. Riding another’s horse would have been highly unusual and indicative of either a dire emergency necessitating such or, most likely, foul play.
The chicken being the hero or cause of calamity for the owner is inherently hilarious.