Customer Reviews

The Chickens Are Restless

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Many of Gary Larsen's most outrageous Far-Side characters make their cameo appearances here. Strange, irreverent, bizarre, Larsen's humor rarely fails to make me laugh or chuckle. Only occasionally does it leave me mystified.

My favorites from among this collection of Larsen's cartoons are what I call the Roadkill Tour, the Chicken at the Bottom of the Pecking Order, Monday Night in the Woods, Dodge City, Honah-Lee, Early Plumbers, Side of Ham, and the Music Teacher. But, hey, with Gary Larsen it's hard to know where to draw the line between the hysterical and the merely funny.

My Grandpa has this book and every time I visit his house, I read it. If I get finished with it and his other Far Side book, I read them all over again! This book is awesome!

"The Chickens Are Restless" is another great and twisted Far Side volume, now available at a bargain price. For years the best thing in the morning paper was Gary Larson's brilliant, enigmatic, and impossible to replicate strip, and I still miss it when I read the news. This is a strong collection, exploring all the weird little crevasses of Larson's mind. When I was in college I was a biology major, and the Far Side helped me find humor in even the most trivial, and frankly unenjoyable, parts of my educational process. There's plenty of science and animal behavior humor here ("Be a virus, see the world.") but there are other even more esoteric (and occasionally culturally dated) cartoons here: one of my favorites is on p. 7, and is captioned "To the horror of the lifeboat's other members, Madonna loses her balance and falls on her face." This will make complete sense to you if you had to endure Madonna's music (and more to the point, her outfits, when she was much younger.) As an airline pilot, the other panel on the same page is probably my favorite in the book, as Ted instigates a disaster from his window seat.

This is a great and inexpensive collection, and I highly recommend it to Far Side fans or to anyone who wants a great laugh at a great price.

Mutinous canines, alien-spotting rednecks, dung beetles, and all the assorted occupants of the spaced-out mind of Gary Larson are here in this fun-filled compilation.

Larson is one "acquired taste" that I am glad to have developed.

This 1993 compilation collects about 361 Far Side illustrations. I found this collection to be a bit less riotous than some others of Larson's collections, and in many cases I had to think more to understand the joke.

For example, there is an illustration showing workers in a chicken processing factory. It took me a moment to realize that there was a basket on the wall with a "GIZZARDS" bucket below the basket. There is another illustration of the famous "Larry of the Lemurs," who was significantly less famous than his African counterpart, Tarzan.

I also thought there were a number of illustrations that were very funny. Adam calls Eve to ask her out on a date and the first thing she thinks is that she doesn't have a thing to wear. Another good one is the lady walking through the sinister woods with a vacuum cleaner and the caution that nature abhors a vacuum.

A few illustrations failed to tickle my funny bone. The image showing a dog hallucinating about cat mirages went no where with me. Another one about shortening Dodge Ball City to Dodge City after the arrival of the Earp brothers fell flat for me as well.

Gary Larson always offers an "outside the box" view of the world. Often his images offer a new twist on a cliché, either reinterpreting the cliché with an image, such as two robots sitting side-by-side, noting that each knew how to push the other's buttons. Sometimes Larson changes one word to achieve a new variation on an old phrase, such as when Jeannie Jeannie Eatszuchinni testifies against her brother, Mr. Pumpkineater. Regardless of how well each image or caption works, you can be assured that this book will stretch your mental muscles, and perhaps you will be able to look at the world in different and more humorous way.

As an owner of "Night of the Crash-Test Dummies" and "Cows of our Planet", I decided to add more to my collection. Why? Reading The Far Side will leave you wanting more and more and more. Almost like a drug, except THIS drug is hilarious. The mind of Gary Larson never fails to deliver plenty of laughs. "The Chickens Are Restless" is no exception, with its wacky humor and comical front cover. 95 full-pages of laughs galore, this book is perfect almost anywhere: before bed, in the office, on the toilet (just to name a few). The illustrations are intriguing from start-to-finish. I highly recommend it, along with others in The Far Side series.

i really liked this collection of the far side. i do realise that this is one of the later collections, and i am not here to critisize. i do want to point out, though, that these are a [little] repetative. besides that i loved these comics, and the one about madona on the life raft remains one of my all-time favorites. i would suggest this to anyone who wants a good laugh, or just wants to complete their collection. this is a wonderful peice of work, and you will try to figure some of them out still. i love every one of these.

I have always been a big fan of Gary Larson. This is just another great book of the many he has created. My boyfriend and I spend an dinner not talking to each other except to say how funny this book was.

The spectrum of mental craziness goes from the heavily medicated in a padded room to the person that does nothing worse than pick their nose in public. For all of those actions on the less serious end of the crazy scale, Gary Larson is there to chronicle them and make them even nuttier. His cartoons are bizarre, just when you think that nothing could possibly be new regarding a cliché, Larson manages to find the path to something different.
One of my favorites in this collection is on page 78 where a family in a vehicle has pulled up to point B and there is a sign with the text "Point A" in the distance. The farmer standing there with a rake in his hand is saying, "Well, lemme think. ... You've stumped me son. Most folks only wanna know how to go the other way."
However, my favorite is a consequence of my years as a calculus teacher. It is on page 87 and shows a man in a white coat writing mathematical formulas and diagrams on a chalkboard. The caption is "Abducted by an alien circus company, Professor Doyle is forced to write calculus equations in center ring." Every calculus teacher at times feels like she is a spectacle in a bizarre circus and the students at times feel lost in an abstract space.
There is great humor in this book, Larson is once again at the top, or bottom if you prefer, of his game.

I just had a series of good laughs and am glad I found this Gary Larsen classic waiting for me under the tree this morning. The collection covers a number of familiar Larsen themes. Chickens, of course. And cows, road kill, the Old West, cave men, aliens and hell. The man has range.

Captions from some of my favorites are listed below. You are left to imagine the Larsonian twist in each cartoon.

- Slow Cheetahs Anonymous
- The Living Hell of Maurice, Jacques Cousteau's cat
- Scene from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Ed
- The ever-popular Donner Party snow dome
- Moses parting his hair
- Octopus obedience school
- Failed marketing ploys

The classics never age and this book is as funny today as it was in 1993. It is recommended for a run of good laughs and to pass around at the office.