Gary Larson - Offensive? (1 Viewer)

[Jon_Are]

Couple of my favorites:

A fireman who just rescued a cat from a tree is handing the kitty over to the "owner", who is a dog wearing a housecoat and a goofy human mask. Caption: "Now calm down there, ma'am...Your cat's gonna be fine...just fine." What makes this a "Larson" is that you can see the dog under the disguise can hardly contain his excitement; he's jumping up and down and his tail, poking out of the robe, is wagging furiously.

The scene is a newborn nursery showing several wide-eyed babies. There are two middle-aged "Larson" ladies who are nurses, one who is shooing a huge crocodile out of the nursery with a broom. The caption: "Get, you rascal! Get!...Heaven knows how he keeps getting in here, Betty, but you better count 'em."

What nobody has mentioned yet is Larson's skill with the pencil. The chubby nerdy boys, the ladies with their cat-eye glasses, beehive hairdos, pearl necklaces and hands on their hips, etc. The jokes are funny, but it's the visuals - combined with the jokes - that set Larson apart.

Jon

 

[Thomas Newton]

Jesse the cow is standing in the meadow, grilling hamburgers. Other cows: "You're sick, Jesse! Sick, sick, sick!"

 

[Yee-Ming]

I'd guess not. The shifting sea-ice makes the "ground" unstable, and they need something stable and immovable to hatch their eggs. It's not like they could pick up the egg and move it to safer 'ground' when necessary. Conversely, I was wondering if polar bears, who are now threatened by the diminishing Arctic ice cap, could thrive in Antarctica, but again because they seem to hunt seals in the water for sustenance, they need the vagaries of ice floes and easy access to the sea to hunt -- on Antarctica they'd be limited to the coast, and even then I don't think the sea ice down south works the same as it does up north. All speculation on my part, I'm not a scientist.

 

[Ravi K]

What about the one with the cow driving the meat delivery truck? Gary Larson sure thought about cow cannibalism (cownnibalism) a lot...

 

[Yee-Ming]

Considering the theory that BSE may have been caused by cows eating feed consisting of animal carcasses, that may now be seen as somewhat prophetic.

 

[Ron Price]

CARTOONIST AND POET

Reading about the work of cartoonist Gary Larson and how he works I could not help compare and contrast his modus operandi and my own with respect to writing prose and poetry. Larson draws inspiration from similar sources to my own: interests, experiences and memories. He is sensitive about his readers and whether they understand his work. And so is this the case with me and my literary opus. I have one eye on my readers most of the time, but another on the world and all that is therein. Sometimes I shut one eye and open the other; at other times I open both eyes one, I like to think, to “the hallowed beauty of the Beloved.”

Both Larson and I like our work to speak for itself but, after years in classrooms explaining things to students, I am not bothered if I have to discuss my work. This, though, I rarely have to do. I’m not popular enough to have to so engage my mental powers. Larson is never comfortable analysing his cartoons. We are both painstaking about making our work unambiguous. One interesting sub-set of his work is cartoons about cartoons and, for me, poems about poetry. Ideas for his work and mine can and do come from anywhere. Being a cartoonist is a solitary life as it is being a poet, but there are fewer really successful cartoonists. Few poets and few cartoonists get rich.-Ron Price with thanks to Jackie Morrissey in The Complete Far Side: Volume One: 1980-1986, by Gary Larson, Andrews McMeel Publishing, Kansas City, 2004, pp. viii-xiii.

Yes, things that just drift into
your head, Gary, little musings
when one is alone with one’s
thoughts and I, too, jot them
down. But, unlike you, Gary,
I get lots of ideas from others,
indeed, a veritable cornucopia
of sources. But we both had our
door openers, eh Gary? Mine was
Roger White, the unofficial laureate
poet of the international Baha’i
community in the 1980s and ‘90s.

But I must most deeply thank the
internet, a world-wide-web that
got my work out-there or my words
would have remained gathering dust
in my files forever. And, finally,
like Larson’s Humour Police, his
readers, and my Poetry Police, my
readers, who hover around and let
me know in no uncertain terms that
I have crossed some invisible line
into total obscurity or obsolescence
and that I am just wasting my time.

Ron Price
14 December2007

PS. I also want to thank: (a) my son for loaning me the biggest, fattest book I’ve ever held in my hands or on my lap, The Far Side, Volume 1, and for continuing to make me laugh as he has done since he was just a little chap; and (b) my wife whose honesty, persistence and her multitude of other qualities have made her my indefatigable collaborator.

 

[andrew markworthy]

Reputedly Mr Larson's personal favourite is of a cow and a bull in a living room. The cow is holiding a martini glass and is saying to the bull,'Wendell, I'm not content'. Along with 'Cat Fud' and 'Midvale School for the Gifted' already mentioned, my personal favourite as well.

As for being offended - nope, never offended me. Traditional cartoons from the 70s and earlier that habitually depicted women as ditzy airheads offend me. Perversely enough, these are probably just the ones that those most offended by Larson want to see in the papers.

 

[Francois Caron]

My favourite is the unpublished one depicting the aftermath of a snake having eaten a baby. The only problem is that the baby was still in its wooden playpen! Now the snake is trapped!

 

[Jeff_CusBlues]

I've seen the 'Midvale School for the Gifted' cartoon stuck up many times in offices and coffee mess areas. Most times, it has the Midvale crossed out and the rival school's name penciled above. Here in Indiana, the names Indiana or Purdue dominate.

 

[andrew markworthy]

Or the favourite of Psychology 101 lectures. Two amoeba, one saying to the other 'stimulus - response, stimulus - response, that's all you ever think about'.

 

[Joe S]

OK, I'm going from memory and it's been years since I saw it, but my favorite Far Side has two cows checking into a motel, the desk clerk says something to the effect of "I'm sorry, the barn is full, you'll have to stay in the house."

 

[Jeff_CusBlues]

I like the one with two hawks sitting on a limb; both have on sunglasses. The caption reads, "Birds of prey know they're cool."

 

[Paul Padilla]

As speculated earlier, the Jane Goodall Institute does sell the Larson T-shirt.

The Jane Goodall Institute

Prominent people's people do overreact. The whole Tinky Winky incident was reputed to be such a case...if you can believe that.

I've only ever been offended that I couldn't get one here and there.

Being a couple of dog lovers, here is mine and my wife's favorite.

Image removed at requested of Mr. Larson

Another favorite I can't locate is the elephant, looking at the bottom of it's foot and finding a flattened pygmy and saying, "I thought I heard a squeak." IIRC from the Complete Farside, it's original form was over the top and featured a baby and the caption, "I thought I smelled something."

 

[Parker Clack]

Gentlemen:

This is to let you know that you will no longer be allowed to post any cartoons by Mr. Larson on this site. He has requested that such images be removed and they have been.

Thank you for you understanding.

Parker

 

[Paul McElligott]

Some of my favorites:

"Bummer of birthmark, Hal." - Deer with a bullseye on his chest.

"They turned it into a wastebasket?!" - Outraged, three-legged elephant in a phonebooth.

"I just gotta be me!" - which the newspaper ruined by actually making the little singing penguin stand out from the crowd.

"He was in season, ma'am, and you didn't have to open the door." - Police detective to a female deer whose husband has just been gunned down by a hunter.

"Creationism explained" - which cannot be properly conveyed so I will post a link to someone who is disobeying Mr. Larson Your Government Working to Protect You It's about two-thirds of the way down the page.

 

[Johnny Angell]

Where's his sense of humor?

 

[Dave Mack]

Wow, what does he do? Stay home all day surfing the net looking for images of his work?
What a dumb move asking these to be removed. Nobody's making $ off of them and if anything it might have spurred some sales of some of his books! I was even thinking of checking amazon to see how much the complete set was selling for now. After the "image removed" orders, kinda left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth...

 

[Johnny Angell]

I'm not going to let that happen to me. I'll bet it wasn't Larson himself, but his publisher that submitted the request. I also think that you can't be selective in protecting your copyrighted material. If it were allowed here, another person might be able to claim he could use Larson's cartoons to make money.

 

[BrianW]

Dave, to be fair, it is his stuff, and I wouldn't regard the appearance of his cartoons here protected fair use of his copyrighted material. And, as Johnny astutely pointed out, he (or more likely, his publisher) is in something of a bind in that the law requires "upkeep" of one's copyright through non-selective and timely protection. In other words, once his publisher became aware of the cartoons' existence here, they really had no choice under the law but to ask that they be taken down.

 

[Sam Posten]

Cat Fud ----->