Happiness Quote by Gary Larson

Larson’s gag lands by staging mental health as barnyard vaudeville, then refusing to let it stay cute. “The Bluebird of Happiness” is already a prefab cultural symbol: light, lyrical, faintly corny. By calling it “long absent,” the caption sketches a whole backstory of Ned’s emotional drought in five words, the kind of quiet, unphotogenic sadness cartoons rarely linger on. Then comes the pivot: not a phoenix, not a raven, but the “Chicken of Depression.” It’s funny because it’s wrong in exactly the right way.

A chicken isn’t majestic; it’s jittery, domesticated, vaguely ridiculous. Depression, in other words, isn’t romantic tragedy. It’s the humiliating, everyday animal that shows up in your kitchen and won’t leave. The substitution also mocks the self-help industry’s habit of branding feelings with mascot-level simplicity. If happiness gets a bluebird, depression gets... poultry. That demotion is the punchline and the critique.

There’s subtext in the name “Ned,” too: an everyman label that makes the scene feel less like an exceptional breakdown and more like a routine visitation. Larson’s broader context is The Far Side’s signature move: using deadpan anthropomorphism to smuggle uncomfortable truths past your defenses. You laugh first, then notice the bleakness hiding in the rhyme scheme. The joke isn’t that depression is silly; it’s that it arrives with the same inevitability as a cartoon symbol, and with none of the dignity we’re taught to expect from our pain.