I know there are people who completely don't get The Far Side, and I admit, I understand that, but for me, Gary Larson's Far Side had a direct connection to my funny bone.
There are people out there who have a Seinfeld scene for nearly every occasion. I a not one of those, I found it kind of funny, but I wasn't crazy about it.
That is how I am with Gary Larson's work with The Far Side. I have some that pop into my brain in certain situations. (I know Gary Larson put out a very heartfelt and polite letter some years ago asking people not to post his cartoons, but I hope he will understand that in this case, I am discussing his style and what makes it so special to me)
Every so often I find myself addressing some computer related problem, and am ready to click some button and making an irrevocable change, when this cartoon pops into my head:
To me, this cartoon is legendary. It perfectly encapsulates the mindset of someone who absolutely doesn't get it and is going to be very surprised, even though reality is right in front of his face.
It makes me grin sometimes, and always makes me stop and ponder if I am the pilot wondering what a mountain goat could possibly be doing in a cloud bank.
Because I have been there, and just making me think of that is enough to make me take that extra look.
But.
His cartoons don't hit everyone, and occasionally, I miss the point too. This is one that I completely never got, for decades I never figured it out.
I do believe I was nearly embarrassed to admit I couldn't get it. Could my sense of humor be so dense that an obviously funny thing to everyone else went right over my head?
It was eventually revealed to me that the thing that was funny about it was the boy Holstein holding his hoof behind his sister Holstein's head making the horns that kids love to do.
All those years, I though his hoof was a bow on the head of the girl in the Holstein family!
This one is another cartoon I reference often, in the same light as the Mountain Goat in the cloud cartoon, and for similar reasons:
This one has a special place in my heart of humor. It manages to approach the scatalogical, getting hit in the gonads by a baseball, and the goofy male aspect of being totally oblivious.
This final example relates more to what we see in this editorial piece referenced in this thread. This one is interesting, because Gary Larson himself didn't see the backlash on this one coming, if I recall correctly: 
So, when this cartoon hit the newspapers some years back, there was some woman who wrote a letter to her local paper in an effort to get his cartoon permanently pulled, because how disgusting, terrible, and coarse it was to have a dog having sex with a car that it had finally caught! He was caught completely off guard, as he didn't even imagine someone would interpret it that way!
So, to return to the subject, humor obviously isn't the same for everyone, but there is quality humor and lousy attempts at humor, and these cartoons mentioned, Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, etc. are quality cartoons.
And the fact that the author of the opinion piece thinks these cartoons are anything but quality, make you think he is one of the Puritans who had the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
