Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. Jerry's here too. She has had to step away for a second, but she'll be back, we imagined, and when she gets here, it'll really be stuff you should Know.
That's right. I'm excited about this one because this is sort of filed under our tribute series the Things We.
Love Tribute to your Taste.
I don't know how you feel because we didn't even talk about this, but the cartoon from the Funny Pages and the books and more, The Far Side by Gary Larson. Yeah, it spanned from like fifth or sixth grade to me through the end of college, which is just kind of crystallizes to me the perfect time to be awakened to something like Gary Larson's sense of humor.
Yeah, for sure. He definitely The Far Side, I should say, definitely helps shape my sense of humor, just from being exposed to that and finding it funny. You have to kind of find it funny to begin with, but once you do, it definitely can especially during formative your help shape your humor. And if you go back and look at them now, they're still great, but there's something that's just it just had something before that. It's not like
it lost it now, but it's just diluted now. And I was looking around and trying to figure out what the deal is, and the best explanation I could come up with is that it had such an impact on culture that it actually normalized and spread that sort of humor so far and wide that it became less I guess, humorous in and of itself, because it made it well normal to be funny in that way that people weren't.
Really nobody was doing anything like Gary Larson was when The Far Side came out, but it was so popular he made it a thing.
Yeah. The only thing you need to add about that statement is to me, because I still think it's amazing, and I have had the best time of the past couple of days just reading these over and over.
Oh good, Yes, No, I like them too. But yeah, there's just something I guess it's I don't know what it is. I think I already said it.
Yeah, but we're talking about one of the best cartoons ever. The difference between a cartoon and a comic generally, I mean, they're kind of interchangeable in a way, but a comic is generally a strip of several panels that tell a story and have a bit of an arc. A cartoon is a single panel thing that tells all you need to know in one picture, sometimes with words, sometimes without words.
It's kind of like comparing a book to a poem, Like a good poem is really really hard to write compared to pros because it has to be more efficient and economical, and so a one panel cartoon has to have the same impact, or in the case of Farsight, a far far greater impact than a strip, because you have to figure out how to get things across, like the movement of time or what's like cause and effect
in just one single image. So when you take that into account too, it just makes it even more impressive.
What he did, I think, Yeah, for sure, it's a cartoon that ran for fifteen years. It's been gone for about thirty years, but it is still one of the most Like just his style is so instantly recognizable as Gary Larson. He's not a guy that used you know, characters, that wasn't like family circus where you know, you knew
these people. But he had certain a certain way of drawing and he had certain sort of stock characters he would bring in, like the beehive lady with the cat eye glasses and the little freckle faced glasses kid with the crew cut. Lots of animals, So he would kind of bring in these, you know, kind of characters in and out. But they were never like named characters with any kind of story.
No, And sometimes they would have names, but it was totally inconsequential. It would be somebody addressing them and just using a right like you wouldn't point to that person be like, oh, there's Barry or something like that. Like they were just interchangeable archetypes that he created.
Yeah, and as we'll see, you know, toward the end, a great intersection of comedy and art and science because Gary Larson was a bit of a science nerd. He was born in nineteen fifty and raised in Tacoma, Washington, and got his sense of humor apparently from his family. He said, my older brother and his parents, whose dad was a car salesman, his mother was a secretary, and they just had a really wacky sense of humor. But he's he hasn't done a ton of interviews over the years,
but in the interviews he's given. He said, I just that was just my family sense of humor, and I didn't hear things like wacky and left of center until much later.
Right yeah, like people would describe as family like that. It's not like the family was like, look at how wacky we are, right yeah. Yeah. So one of those big influences, in addition to like his just his mom and his dad, was his older brother. I think he called out, but I saw that one of the things his older brother did was introduce him to like a
love of nature. They would go around the beaches of Puget Sound and collect live animals when they could, and then bring them home and put them in cages or terrariums or aquariums, And later on he was like, I don't think you're supposed to do that. I don't think you should keep animals captive. But growing up as a kid, he had a real interest in animals and developed a real love of biology. But his brother had a dual
influence on him. I saw a quote where he said his brother introduced him to like the beauty of a jellyfish, and then also used that same jellyfish to smack me in the face with which I think it's a that's a good big brother right there.
Yeah, he sounded like kind of the classic tormenting big brother, but in a loving way, is what I gathered at least. Yeah, But yeah, he's always he's been in animals. He's very much into nature and animal the treatment of animals in conservation. Now since his retirement, he's gotten really into that. But he went to school at Washington State in nineteen seventy
two Cougars and was initially a biology student. But he realized he didn't want to go to school for more than four years and he wasn't sure what he could do with a biology degree, so he switched to communications. But apparently always regretted that switch and feels like he should have stayed a biology major.
Yeah, he said, it's one of the most idiotic things I ever did. Yeah, we should all be pretty grateful though, that he did switch, because it's not clear that he would have still made the far Side. One of the reasons he did make far Sites because he had a lot of time on his hands. So after he graduated with a communications degree, he got jobs like playing banjo
or working in a music store. I think, very coolly, he became a Humane Society investigator, and that's what he was doing when he created a strip called Nature's Way, which if you look at the original Nature's Way cartoons, it's just early Farside without with a different name.
Essentially, Yeah, it was the far Side. The San Francisco Chronicle changed the name, which you know that they've asked him about that, because I remember Charles Schultz was very particular about naming it Peanuts and keeping it that, and Gary Larson did not mind the name change, but he sold. He got a few days off from work apparently and realized, like, boy, I don't like my job, so I'm gonna try something else. And he didn't have any formal art training at all.
And I love his his his style, but none of that was like from art class or anything like that, right, And in nineteen seventy six, sold six cartoons to Pacific Search, a regional science magazine, for ninety bucks, sold another handful to another local magazine for you know, three to five bucks each, and then eventually got in nineteen seventy nine, got a weekly gig at the Seattle Times for Nature's Way at fifteen dollars.
A week, right, which is I think eighty five bucks something like that.
Now, yeah, so not money to live on, but he did have.
A place in the local paper. I mean, Seattle Times is big time, right, yeah, I think that same year in nineteen seventy nine, he said, I think I can do bigger, I can do better, and he took a trip to San Francisco and he took his portfolio with him, just one copy of his portfolio. He managed to get it to the right people at the San Francisco Chronicle and they said, hey, we really love your stuff. Apparently the same day they got in touch with him and said, hey,
come in here, we want to talk to you. And they said, not only do we want to run Nature's Way, which we're going to change to the far side, we have a syndication company so we can get you in thirty different papers across the country automatically. This is like
beyond life change. And Laura Clauston helped us with this, and she went on to really kind of, I think, point out just how nuts it was that this happened to him, not just because he had no experience, no art training, that he'd only made, you know, a handful of cartoons. To this point, but just the way that comics pages are and how stodgy and rooted in non change they tend to be. That that really it's just crazy that he got this chance. It just all fell together for him like this.
Yeah, absolutely it was. And it's still an industry where it's hard to get in, you know that the comics section is only so big. It's like it's real estate, you know, and there's just not room and the classics just don't go away seemingly. There's an artist, a cartoonist
named Georgia Dunn who does breaking cat news. She and this is you know, sort of a point about women in the industry, but she said there are more dead men than live women in the funny pages, but also just sort of illustrates how how hard it is to
break in to the funny pages. So the fact that he got his chance with such a weird cartoon, like the person that would take it out to the different newspapers to syndicate it and try and you know, sell it to him has some pretty great stories on like the re actions he got because Farside is one of the things that you kind of get or you don't. Earlier said, you know, you have to to really grow to love, you know, love it, but some people never do. Some people hate the Far Side still.
Yeah. One of the comments that the salesman got when he was out beating the pavement was this is not a Buffalo product. Yeah.
I could just see that scene, like the whatever the Buffalo newspaper is the guy, it's just like, this is not a Buffalo product, like, very sternly, please leave, sir. And apparently he said the initial response has been quite funny and uneditor like, and he was basically like the they were so diverse and unpredictable, like he even from people he knew really well, from editors, he really knew.
He's like, I never knew if they were going to offer me, like to stay and have a cup of coffee, or did like say get out of my office.
Yeah, because people would have a visceral response to it. Either they thought it was great, they didn't like it. The idea that the Far Side was ever divisive is just hilarious to me. But it just really kind of goes to show how much Gary Larson changed the culture with the Far Side, that it was just totally far out off the wall offensive to some people. And now because he kind of laid the groundwork and launched that kind of humor and made it far and wide in
the United States especially. It's just it's that much funnier now when you look back and think, like people were offended by the Far Side.
Yeah, there's another good quote here from one of the editors. I don't know what this is, but it's not for us.
But other people say, like, what a mind this man has. Yeah, he's brilliant.
Yeah. Yeah, again, it's just one of those things. It's very divisive cartoon. Should we take a break, Yeah, all right, we'll be right back with more on the brilliant Gary Larson.
Stoftly jawsh so.
So one other thing happened to Gary Larson that week that he went down to the Chronicle. He got news from the Seattle Times that they were dropping him. Yeah, and he went on to blame the placement in the paper. Apparently they put it next to a kid's crossword puzz that's not the place for the Far Side. Of course you're gonna get complaints, right, But he also said that had the Seattle Times fired him a week before, he never would have gone to San Francisco or to the Chronicle.
It would have just completely deflated his any self confidence he had. So the timing of it was just amazing when you put it all together. One other thing too, Apparently one of the Chronicle syndication heads tried to talk him into turning it into a comic strip with recurring characters. No, and he was like, I think I'm just gonna hold with this. So if you put all the components together, the fact that we even have the far side is significant. It also makes it seem like we're probably the only
version of the universe that has the far side. All the other multiverses didn't get it because nothing fell into place quite.
Right multiverse h M.
All right.
So, because it was so divisive, it wasn't like wildfire out of the gate. It was in thirty papers initially, I think three years later it was up to eighty. And you might be thinking, like, hey, eighty newspapers is pretty great, but for syndication's that's small beans. It really just sort of took a very natural path to growing
in three years and went from thirty to eighty. Then a couple of years later it was up to two hundred and really kind of launched after that, and at its peak was in nineteen hundred newspapers, which made Gary Larson a very very rich guy because he started putting
out books and calendars. In eighty three, eighty four, and eighty five, he had books on the New York Times bestseller list, and eventually I believe all but one of his twenty three books was on the New York Times bestseller list and sold the combined forty one million copies and almost eighty million calendars.
Yeah, those books were like when you had that book in your hands at the time. Oh yeah, the greatest thing in the world.
Yeah, and those books were coming out. I was like twelve and thirteen, so it was just Christmas morning at the Brian House was I would just grab that thing and basically run to my room.
Nice.
And it was also in seventeen different languages, which I just I know, it's not even a terribly American thing, but I'm just trying to imagine the far sides, weird sensibilities going over in a foreign language country. I don't know, it just sort of surprised me.
Yeah, you'd think way way more languages, right.
No, I'm just surprised it went over at all in other countries.
So yeah, I gotcha. Yeah, I know, I could see there being seventeen different languages that could find it humorous.
Oh you could, all right, yeah, because there's like two or.
Three million languages, you know.
Yeah.
So he was also very unsurprisingly an award winning artists and cartoonists from the beginning of his peak. I think around nineteen eighty five he won the first award for Best Newspaper Panel all the way up till the end in nineteen ninety four winning for our Outstanding Cartoonists of the Year. And like you said, he was like the calendars, the books, like he was making mad Bank, as he
puts it every time he's interviewed about it. But he really kind of drew the line a lot of merchandising, like they wanted to do everything, and he was like, one of my rules is you can't take these things out of context. Like you're never going to see a T shirt with just a picture of the beehive Lady, beehive hard Lady with Cadie glasses, Like that's out of context. Doesn't make sense. I don't want to do that. No dolls,
nothing like that. But just as much as like kind of protecting what he created, he also didn't want to seem like he was making any kind of cash grab to the fans of the Far Side. He was a very sensitive person who was really probably from what I can tell, overly aware of what people thought of him or how they took his work.
Yeah, I mean, you could have a T shirt or a mug or something, but it was just like a cartoon, right, like a Far Side panel, which was pretty brilliant because I mean that's where the humor is. And also since they weren't characters, I think that kind of helped that decision along, right, Although I got to say, like a, if I had the doll of the little crew cut kid, I wouldn't mind that, I'm sure, as he might be ripping them off and doing something like that. So I'm not sure.
I'll bet you're right, actually, and I know somebody's got a Christmas coming up.
He was also very sensitive to offending people. Even though he did that all the time, It's not something he ever set out to do. You know. He very famously always would feature God as a character. And it wasn't even you know, like, oh let me make God some like sort of wimpy weirdo like. It was this like sort of big, all powerful god with long flowing hair, and but religious people didn't like that. I guess, still
sort of some sort of craven image. Cat people definitely didn't like them, because there was a lot of a lot of dogs preying on cats in various ways. But he just didn't want to ruffle feathers, he said, I just ended up doing it.
Yeah, he was just being humorous. And one of the great, great, great things about the Far Side is it's not making a comment on anything. Yeah, it's just dropping in on an absurd moment in life, somewhere in the universe or somewhere on Earth, which is why those characters are all interchangeable. They're not specific someone. It could be anyone who's having an absurd moment, right. And the best description I saw came from Carrie Soper, who's the biographer of not just
Gary Larson, but The Far Side. He said that the point of Farside is that we're all just fools flailing against the universe, and that the Far Side is just basically a camera dropping in on those moments where it's most pronounced.
I guess, yeah, that's brilliant. Actually, that kind of says it best. We should probably illustrate a couple of verbally illustrate a couple of cartoons, just if you haven't seen the Far Side so you kind of know we're going for here. You should definitely look these up because these
are some classics. But one that really kind of crystallizes what he does is Early Experiments and Transportation, and that is a panel and at the bottom that's all it says, Early Experiments and Transportation, and it features these cave dudes, these three cave guys holding an early kind of stone wheel with another cave guy strapped to the top of it, just sort of sitting there with his legs out with Obviously, the idea is it's going to be pushed down the
hill and they haven't thought it through, and this guy is going to be rolled over, you know, with this wheel crushing him. And that's sort of the brilliance of the Far Side. It's just a single panel. He doesn't have the next one showing the wheel rolling and the guy going oh my bones, like you have to. It's up to the viewer and the reader to put all this together in your head and imagine what comes next. And that was sort of the brilliance of it was
he tapped into your imagination. The other thing I think was very larcen Esque is it could have just been that these guys on the hill, but then about halfway down the hill he adds a guy, a cave guy looking up with a little stone tablet to record the results. And it was those extra little bits in the frame for me that just took farside over the top.
Yeah, for sure. Another good one is the Midvale School for the Gifted, probably my favorite all time, the best known. Yeah, it's just amazing. There's no quote, there's no anything, there's no cut line or caption or anything like that. It's just that little glasses, crew cut kid with freckles pushing on a door to get into the Midvale School of the Gifted where he ostensibly goes to school, and it clearly on the door pull.
Yeah. Yeah, And if I may comment on this one, the brilliance of that one to me like you could do that. You could have a kid's hand on the door pushing that says pull. But it's the way that he's leaning in his whole body, right, and you get just when you see it. I remember when I was a kid seeing that, thinking it looks like that kid has been standing there for an hour right with his hand against that door, expecting it to open, right, And how he conveys that with just the way he drew
that kid leaning in, I don't know. That's the magic of the Far Side, agreed.
Man. I'm glad you're interpreting these for us, because you're doing a fantastic job.
No. Great.
Uh. There's another one that was pretty famous too, but not necessarily everyone's seen, but you might have heard of the one called cow Tools that came out in nineteen eighty two. Yeah, and apparently this is the panel that taught Gary Larson that there's a lot of people out there reading the Far Side because cow Tools came out and it just baffled people to the point where they were starting to get agitated because they didn't understand the cartoon.
It was a pop culture phenomenon, people trying to figure out what this cartoon meant, and the problem was everybody was looking way too deeply into it and you had to take it at face value. And it got so I don't want to say out of hand, but just such a just so widespread that the syndicate asked him to write a letter explaining it that got published in the papers that also published The Far Side.
Yeah, it's definitely the most divisive panel he did, and I don't think i've ever seen that he regrets it or anything. I think what he didn't like was that people I don't know if he didn't like it, but people just didn't get it. And it's even one that I looked at for the first time when I was a kid, and I didn't fully get. But I don't
think there was a lot of subtext. He came out and he said, I've never met a cow who could make tools, so I felt sure that if I did that, the tools would lack something in sophistication and resemble the sorry specimens that I showed in the cartoon, And I think people thought it was something more than that, right, and to him it was just that as just these dumb root of entry tools that a cow would make.
Yeah, that's all it showed. It was a cow standing maybe a little proudly behind a table with their tools spread out. There's a barn in the background. He's on a farm, and one of the tools you can identify as a saw, but the other like three You're like, I have no idea what that does, and that's it. That's all it is. It's like the cow made terrible tools, but he's still proud that he made some tools. And these are cow tools. That's it. That's all there is
to it. And if you take it on its face, it's hilarious.
But yeah, if you start.
Trying to figure out what this tool means or what he's saying with this, it just completely loses it.
Yeah. I mean there were definitely cartoons I didn't get when I was a kid. I remember looking at some of them not fully getting it and thinking like, oh, this must be like something you might get as an adult, but you know, maybe not, because in the Simpsons and Cheers there were definitely pop culture references where people like Woody and Cheers wouldn't get a far side or or Homer wouldn't get a far side. So it became a thing to not understand the panels.
Right, I wanted to talk about one more. There's that Carrie Soaper author was asked what panel would you pick out as the quintessential far side wow, and he said, the one lupis slip of phobia, which is.
Remember it.
Like the caption says lupus slip a phobia fear of being chased in your kitchen by timber wolves while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor, And that's exactly what's going on. There's this kid who's being chased around the table by two timber wolves and he's wearing socks, and his floor is nice and shiny, and he's kind of hanging on to the table like he's about to fall over, so like his his. The other funny thing about it, too, is like this person's really arcane phobia is coming true,
like the nightmares happening. Yeah, that's what it is. That's a great one.
That's so good. I also love Dog Threat Letter. That's what he has a regret about. He was a perfectionist and would sometimes agonize over like I should have done this or that, which is just I don't know. It's hard if you're wired that way. But as any kind of creator, my advice is to just go with it and don't look back on your work and regret something
that you didn't draw perfectly. But in Dog Threat Letter, it was it's a it's a panel of these cats, one cat sitting down in a in a fat chair, and another one standing there, and there's a broken window, there's a letter that the cat is reading. There's glass on the floor, there's a dog bone on the floor, which is so perfect to me because clearly this this dog threat letter was wrapped in this bone and thrown
through the window, right. And it's the little cutout letters like a like a you know, a kidnappers letter would be cut and pasted, and it just says arm and the cats aren't reacting, in fact, it's the backs of their heads. There's a portrait of a framed cat on the wall, which is a nice touch. And he regrets showing the dog running away through the hole in the window as if he had just thrown it. He wishes he had just not had the dog. But I think it's great as is.
Yeah, I don't think it detracted from it at all.
Yeah, but I'm not Gary Larson.
No, it's true. He also he got even more obsessive than that with a regret which was Harry Houdini's final undoing, which was that Houdini died because his fingers got caught in Chinese finger traps, and that that was the thing that he couldn't get out of. So now his dead body is on the ground, leaning up against the wall, and he's a skeleton and it's hilarious. But the thing that Gary Larson was upset about was that the tilt of Harry Houdini School should have been looking downward a
little more. I'm like, dude, it's fine, Yeah, it's great. Like no one else except you thought that what you just said.
Yeah, totally agree. Should we take another break? Yeah, all right, we'll be back and we're going to finish up at the Midvale School for the Gifted right after this.
Soft we jowsh.
Soft all right? So drawing seven of these a week, you know, he put one out every day. That's that's the work of a cartoonist and a comics It's crazy. It's hard, you know, even though it's a single panel. You got to come up with something that great every day because he wanted to be great, and everyone who does that kind of stuff wants to be great. So that's a lot. He took a fourteen month sabbatical in nineteen eighty eight. By this time he was married to
an anthropologist, no surprise, named Tony Carmichael. They traveled all over the world. They went to the Amazon they went to Africa. He lived in New York for a few months, taking jazz guitar lessons from the great Jim Hall. Apparently the story goes that he drew one of Jim Hall's album covers, and I don't know if it's true or not. It might be apocryphal, but he initially said I'll do it for a million bucks and then said, how about this.
You give me jazz guitar lessons in exchange. So he was living his best life in retirement, you know, enjoying himself. He came back and said, all right, I can give you five a week instead of the seven.
Yeah, so that was eighty eight to I think eighty nine or early ninety and I guess eighty nine. And so even drop two cartoons a week, he was clearly getting tired. He was more than that. I don't know if more, but at least tied with it. In addition to fatigue, he was really worried that he was his creativity was gonna go downhill, and that he was going to start making mediocre cartoons. And that is that is the mark of a creative genius, I guess, or at
the very least a deeply creative person. Yes that they're like, I have to walk away because I don't want to start making something mediocre, not even bad mediocre. Mediocre is actually worse than bad in situations like that.
Yeah.
So the fact that he cited that, in addition to fatigue, I thought was really telling about you know who he is.
Yeah. Absolutely. He also was never super comfortable in the spotlight. If you look up Gary Larson in an image search, you're going to see a couple of old black and whites back in the day. If you specify like Gary Larson today, I saw like one or two pictures of him now. So he didn't give a lot of interviews. He never was comfortable being in the limelight. When he did do interviews, he felt like he screwed him up.
There was one particular interview where he got tripped up by a question and later on said, I couldn't think of anything to say. I was rooted to the spot like the proverbial rabbit caught in the headlights, which may have been the problem because I think it's a deer.
Yeah. The question was also like where is the far side and how do we get there? Yeah, Like this is like your first questionable man. Yeah, so on January. I don't remember the date, but let's just say January nineteen ninety five, the very final far side. We should save the original run the final far Side ran, and it is. It's perfect, as perfect as the ending of the original Bob Newhart Show.
Yeah agreed, where he.
A man named Gary who looks vaguely like Gary Larson is standing with Glinda the Goodwitch, and he's surrounded by every character in the far side of the cows, the cats, the beehive hairdo lady, the nerdy kid with.
The glasses Yeah, ten, Gallahat guy.
Yeah ten, gallon hack guy. Everybody is surrounding him, just kind of watching him talk with Glenda the Goodwitch, and she says something like, well, basically what Dorothy was told in the end of Wizard of Oz.
Right, Yeah, should I read it?
Yeah? Definitely.
She says, why Gary, you've always and that's underlined, You've always had the power to go home. Just close your eyes quack three times and think to yourself. There's no place like home. There's no place like home.
Right, Okay, So that's panel one. It's in color. The second panel, and this is very rare. He usually only did one panel. The second panels in black and white, and now Gary is in bed waking up, ostensibly in Kansas, and he's surrounded by his family and friends, and they all resemble the cow and the cat and the nerdy kid, and he says, he explains to them that he just had this crazy dream and all the people in the dream looked like them, just like the end of Wizard of Oz. It was just beautiful.
Yeah, it was, I mean, the perfect way to go out. I kind of wonder if he the story behind that, if he came up with it just sort of when he went to do the last one, if he always sort of had something in mind. Yeah. I always wonder that about TV shows too, if they sort of had the final shot or the final episode in their brain when they're doing it. But yeah, it was a beautiful
way to go out. He had in ninety four to ninety seven animated films Tales from the Far Side and Tales from the Far Side too.
Did you see those?
I did not? Surprisingly Are they good?
I don't know. The only place I can find it is a Russian website and I no, okay, our work computers won't let us go there.
Did it say?
Yet right, but they look awesome. I did see a clip and it's the cow, but a real life version, a real life animated version. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah, of a cow is just their hoof playing a video game. And the video game I think it's called Stampede and in the video game, the cows from the far side are stampeding and it's just weird because you hear the cow breathing and that's it. Like they're just playing the game, but they're breathing as they're playing it, and that's all
you just see. They're hoof playing with the joystick. Yeah.
I made an intentional decision to not see those, and I still don't want to see them.
Okay, I'll see him for us and then I'll be like yay or niet.
Yeah, let me know, because I just I don't know. There's something, you know how it is when something exists in your mind as a certain thing and it's just kind of a perfect memory and thing for me still, and I don't want to take the chance of not liking it, so I'm not going to do it. He also had a kid's book in nineteen ninety nine. I feel bad that I didn't know about this. I would have gotten it when Ruby was littler. There's a hair
in my dirt. She'd probably still like this. Actually, yeah, Colon a worm story, a book about a princess from the worm's point of view, which is very Gary Larson.
Speaking of kids' books, there was something that he cited. A screen rant has like five hundred articles on Gary Larson in the far Side. Apparently somebody there really likes him. But they turned up that he cited a children's book from nineteen fifty, the year he was born, as just kind of helping him develop, like his sense of humor. But it's called mister Bear, Squash you flat, Like that's
mister Bear's name. And it's this bear who goes around the woods and sits on the other animals houses and squashes them and basically just makes all sorts of enemies and then finally gets his come up and s at the end. And it's really bizarre, Like just the sample I saw, it's like illustrated like in nineteen fifties children's book, but the storyline is really weird, and the title itself is incredibly weird too. That apparently just stayed with Gary Larson.
Yeah, they almost they someone tried to develop at some point a live action far Side movie, and I just thank god that that never happened, because there's no way that would have been good.
No way, no.
How so we mentioned talk of science. This is kind of one of the most fun things about Gary Larson to me now that I'm an adult who is sort of more into science than I was when I was twelve, but he very much had an interest in science. It was pervasive through the series run, whether it was animals or weird nature things, and there's a it was its Tentdrils kind of reached through the science world at the time.
In nineteen ninety eight, the head of the National Institutes of Health, doctor Harold Varmus, said, boy, doctor Harold Barmas, has there ever been a more app name to lead the National Institute of Help?
Right, it's also a far side name too.
Oh really did he use that?
No? I'm just saying like that's a pot oh yeah name.
No, I totally agree. It wouldn't have surprised me though, because as we'll see, they sort of overlapped here and there. But he said his influence is pervasive. I can't tell you how many seminars been to that had a Gary Larson slide in them, and he ended up getting like real animals named after him.
Right, well, a chewing lause at least. Yeah, there's a type of louse that's found on the feathers of the South African white faced owl, and the parasitologist Dale Clayton named it after Gary Larson Strigaphyllis Gary Larson i. And he said he wrote to ask permission that it's simply meant to honor the enormous contribution that my colleagues and I feel you have made to biology through your cartoon, and.
Like not saying you're a lause, right exactly.
Yeah, And so Gary Larson was quite honored, he said. He wrote that he was honored. In the Prehistory of the Far Side. He mentions it, what's funny is that the Prehistory of the Far Side came out before the paper naming that chewing lause Strigophyllis Gary larsoni. So that the paper actually cites the book The Prehistory of the Far Side in it to basically prove that it's actually a thing.
It's pretty good. He had also had a butterfly name for him in nineteen ninety, but sadly, fourteen years later the sarah Totega Larson i was found to not be a distinct species, so it was removed. So for a while, I guess fourteen years he had a butterfly named after him as well, and then I love the story of the thagamizer.
We'll take it.
There was.
A scientific term that is kind of caught on from one of his cartoons, and that is the thagamizer. A thhag o miser i was from a nineteen eighty two panel where there's a caveman teaching a class about the end of the stegosaurus tale the little spikes on the end of his stegosaurus. The caption was, now, this end is called the thagamizer after the late thag Simmons, right, which is so such a Gary Larson sort of sense
of humor, sensibility in and of itself. And apparently paleontologists sort of started using that such that it became a semi formal name and ended up in the Dinosaur National Monument at the Smithsonian.
Yeah, like there displays as a stegosaurus mentioned it stagamizer.
That's amazing.
So yeah, I think one of the reasons that scientists really appreciated him is this was a time when nerd was a genuine put down. It was not a hip term at all, Like right, if you called someone a nerd, you were being mean to them. And he was celebrating them, even while also making fun of them to some extent, but no more than any other humans he was making fun of. He just had a really deep interest in science and biology and it just happened to kind of
cross paths. So I thought that was worth mentioning that, like he was, he was glorifying nerds at a time when nerds were not super well.
Yeah, man, that's very astute. I never really thought about that, but that's absolutely what he was doing. He was making fun of himself and also shining a light on nerdom at the same time. Yeah. In nineteen eighty seven, the Californa the Academy of Sciences did an exhibit that ended up touring all around the country, including the National Museum
of History of Science. Related far side comics and evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson wrote he had a couple of bi or scientists write forwards in his books.
EO.
Wilson wrote the Ford for the children's book There's a Hair in My Dirt, and a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist named Stephen J. Gould, I believe we've talked about before wrote the forward for The Far Side Gallery three and called him the national humorist of natural history.
And then there's a story we talked about in the Jing Goodall episode. I think it's worth mentioning.
Again, Yeah, I thought we did. Yeah.
So in nineteen eighty seven, Gary Larson had a cartoon showing an ape that's grooming another ape, and it seems very clear that they're married, and the one ape with glasses I think is the wife says, well, well, another blonde hair. Conducting a little more research with that Jing Goodall tramp. And of course you meant nothing by it, Like if you start to read too deeply into it, you're like, wow, this is what's it got against Jane Goodall.
That's all superficial, just hilarious, right, that's not at all how Sue Engel, the executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, apparently she read way too deeply into it, and she wrote a truly angry letter to the cartoon editors that I guess by then he was at Universal Syndicate, basically just lambbassing them for even running it.
Yeah, she said, it's incredibly offensive and in such poor tastes that readers might well question the editorial judgment of running such an atrocity in a newspaper that reputes to be supplying the news to persons with a better than average intelligence.
Right, So she was mad.
Yeah.
It turns out that Jane Goodall was in the field when all this happened. She hadn't seen the cartoon, and when she got back and did see the cartoon, she's like, actually, this is funny, Sue. I think you may have overreacted. She ended up writing forward to one of the Far Side books, and then that cartoon was licensed for the
Jane Goodall Institute. I'm quite sure on very favorable terms, because Gary Larson is a genuine conservationist, and in fact, I think he gave all the proceeds from his two thousand and seven Far Side a Day calendar to Conservation International, so he's the real deal.
Yeah. And then I think Sue ran to the bathroom and cried, I'll bet dude, nothing's ever good enough for Jo.
And also I want to say, I keep using was Gary Larson is still very much alive, So I'm not sure why I keep referring to him in past tense. I don't know anything that he doesn't know, So don't worry if you're listening to this Gary Larson.
Yeah, God, how great would that be? I'll just retire tomorrow if I found out he like listened in like this.
Oh yeah, not that he was about to die.
No, no, no, no, okay, he'd probably find that funny though.
Probably.
Yeah, he's got a website he finally put up, and apparently we'll occasionally put out a new thing or two here and there. Definitely will put out some like lost archival stuff for you know, stuff like that. But I think you got like a sort of digital drawing thing, and I was like, hey, I found that. I'm sort of enjoying this again. And everybody I remember when that happened, and everyone was like, oh my god, is it happening.
And he's like, no, it's not really happening, but you know, here's here's my website.
That's right, You got anything else?
Got nothing else? That was a fun one.
Just to thank you, Gary Larson, Thank you for doing what you did and being here. That's right, And since we just thank Gary Larson everybody has for told in two thousand and eight, we've just unlocked a listener mail.
That's right. I'm gonna call this a short and sweet correction. Hey guys, longtime listener, love the podcast, et cetera, et cetera. That's actually what Josh of the letter writer Josh says. Guys, I'm sure you're getting millions of emails about this, but while orc is are dolphins, I think you guys said that this means they aren't real whales. In reality, all dolphins are whales and philogenetics, dolphin is a type of whale. Okay, thanks, love you bye, Josh.
Josh, you just come along and razzle dazzle us with the word like phylogenetics and expect us to believe you.
I don't know, yeah exactly.
We're gonna have to look that one up before I formally thank Josh.
I looked it up. Yeah, all dolphins are whales.
All right, Well, thank you, Josh. We appreciate that correction. That was actually a pretty good one. Yeah. If you want to be like Josh and get in touch with us, please do send us an email, send it off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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