A Tribute To The Far Side

The Far Side is one of the greatest cartoons in history. Today we go to great lengths to convince you of that. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 2:38Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:48Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. Jerry's here too. She just had to step away for a second, but she'll be back, we imagine. And when she gets here, it'll really be Stuff You Should Know.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  That's right. I'm excited about this one because this is sort of filed under our tribute series to things we love.

• 3:07Josh Clark?

  Tribute to your taste.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  Uh, 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.

• 3:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 3:19Speaker 04

  Uh, 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.

• 3:33Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. He definitely, The Far Side, I should say, definitely helped 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 years, help shape your humor. And if you go back and look at them now, they're still great, but there's, 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, 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

• 4:13Josh Clark?

  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.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  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 over the past couple of days just reading these over and over.

• 4:50Josh Clark?

  Oh, good, yes. No, I like them too. But I'm, yeah, there's just something, I guess it's, I don't know what it is. I think I already said it.

• 4:56Speaker 04

  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, in one picture, sometimes with words, sometimes without words.

• 5:21Josh Clark?

  It's kind of like comparing a book to a poem. Like, a good poem is really, really hard to write compared to prose 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 Far Side, 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.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. It's a cartoon that ran for 15 years. It's been gone for about 30 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. It 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, 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.

• 6:34Josh Clark?

  No, and sometimes they would have names, but it was totally inconsequential. It'd be somebody addressing them and just using a name.

• 6:41Speaker 04

  Right, right, right.

• 6:41Josh Clark?

  Like, you wouldn't point to that person and be like, "Oh, there's Barry," or something like that. Like, they were just interchangeable archetypes that he created.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  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 1950 and raised in Tacoma, Washington, and got his sense of humor, apparently, from his family. He said, "My older brother and his parents," his dad was a car salesman, his mother was his secretary, and they just had a really wacky sense of humor. But he hasn't done a ton of interviews over the years, but in the interviews he's given, he said, "That was just my family's sense of humor, and I didn't hear things like wacky and left of center until much later."

• 7:29Josh Clark?

  Right, yeah. Like, people would describe his family like that. It's not like the family was like, "Look at how wacky we are," right?

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so one of those big influences, in addition to like his mom and his dad, was his older brother, who I think you 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

• 8:20Josh Clark?

  to like the beauty of a jellyfish, and then also used that same jellyfish to smack me in the face with.

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:27Josh Clark?

  Which I think it's a, that's a good big brother right there.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, he sounded like kind of the classic tormenting big brother, but in a, in a loving way is what I gathered at least.

• 8:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  But yeah, he's always been into animals. He's very much into nature and animal, the treatment of animals and conservation now since his retirement. He's gotten really into that, but he went to school at Washington State in 1972. Go 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.

• 9:07Josh Clark?

  He said, it's one of the most idiotic things I ever did.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:10Josh Clark?

  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 side is because he had a lot of time on his hands. So after he graduated with the communications degree, he got jobs like playing banjo or working in a music store. I think very coolly, he became a humane society investigator.

• 9:35Josh Clark?

  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 far side without, with a different name essentially.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was the far side. The, the San Francisco Chronicle changed the name, which, you know, that they've asked him about that. Cause I remember Charles Schultz was very particular about naming it peanuts and keeping it that. And Gary Larson did not mind the, the name change, but he, he sold, he, 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, he didn't have any formal art training at all.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  And I love his, his, his style, but none of that was like from art class or anything like that.

• 10:19Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  And in 1976, sold six cartoons to Pacific Search, Regional Science Magazine for 90 bucks. Sold another handful to another local magazine for, you know, three to five bucks each. And then eventually got in 1979, got a weekly gig at the Seattle Times for Nature's Way at $15 a week.

• 10:42Josh Clark?

  Right, which is, I think, eighty-five bucks, something like that now.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, so not money to live on.

• 10:50Josh Clark?

  But he did have a place in the local paper. I mean, Seattle Times is big time, right?

• 10:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:56Josh Clark?

  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 them 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-changing. And Laura Clausen helped us with this.

• 11:40Josh Clark?

  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.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. It was, and it's still an industry where it's hard to get in, you know, 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. And she, and this is, you know, sort of a point about women in the industry, but she said there are more dead men than living 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, the, the person that, um, that would take it out to the different newspapers

• 12:54Speaker 04

  to syndicate it and try and, you know, sell it to them, um, has some pretty great stories on like the reactions he got. Cause far side is one of those things that you kind of get or you don't. Earlier you 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.

• 13:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah. One of the comments that the salesman got when he was out beating the pavement was this is not a Buffalo product.

• 13:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. I could just see that scene, like the, whatever the Buffalo newspaper is, the guy's just like, this is not a Buffalo product, like very sternly.

• 13:28Josh Clark?

  Please leave, sir.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  Uh, and apparently he said, uh, the initial response has been quite funny and un-editor like, and he was basically like, 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 to like say, get out of my office.

• 13:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Because people would have a visceral response to it. Either they thought it was great. They, 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, in the United States, especially, um, it's just, it's that much funnier now. And you look back and think like people were offended by the far side.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  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.

• 14:35Josh Clark?

  Right. But other people would say like, what a mind this man has. He's brilliant.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Again, it's just one of those things. It was very divisive cartoon. Um, should we take a break?

• 14:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  All right. We'll be right back with more on the brilliant Gary Larson.

• 15:06Josh Clark?

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• 17:32Speaker 03

  Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain

• 18:16Speaker 03

  or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plant-to-be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979, or visit zepbound.lily.com.

• 19:06Josh Clark?

  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.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:15Josh Clark?

  And he went on to blame the placement in the paper. Apparently, they put it next to a kid's crossword puzzle. 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's syndication heads tried to talk him into turning it into a comic strip with recurring characters.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  No.

• 19:52Josh Clark?

  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 are 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.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  Multiverse, huh?

• 20:16Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  All right. So because it was so divisive, it wasn't like wildfire out of the gate. It was in 30 papers initially. I think three years later, it was up to 80. And you might be thinking like, hey, 80 newspapers is pretty great. But for syndication, that's, that's small beans. It really just sort of took a very natural path to growing. In three years, it went from 30 to 80. Then a couple of years later, it was up to 200 and really kind of launched after that. And at its peak was in 1,900 newspapers, which made Gary Larson a very, very rich guy because he started putting out books and calendars in 83, 84, and 85. He had books on the New York Times Bestseller List.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  And eventually, I believe all but one of his 23 books was on the New York Times Bestseller List and sold combined 41 million copies and almost 80 million calendars.

• 21:11Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Those books were like, when you had that book in your hands at the time, it was the greatest thing in the world.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, and those books were coming out when I was like 12 and 13. So it was just Christmas morning at the Bryant House was I would just grab that thing and basically run to my room.

• 21:27Josh Clark?

  Nice.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  And it was also in 17 different languages, which I just...

• 21:35Speaker 04

  I know it's not even a terribly American thing, but I'm just trying to imagine the far side's weird sensibilities going over in a foreign language country. I don't know, it just sort of surprised me.

• 21:49Josh Clark?

  Uh, yeah, you'd think way, way more languages, right?

• 21:53Speaker 04

  No, I'm just surprised it went over at all in other countries.

• 21:57Josh Clark?

  So, yeah, I gotcha. Yeah, I know, I could see there being 17 different languages that could find it humorous.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  No, you could? Alright.

• 22:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, cuz there's like two or three million languages, you know?

• 22:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:09Josh Clark?

  So, um, he was also very unsurprisingly, an award-winning artist and cartoonist. Um, from the, his, the beginning of his peak, I think around 1985, he won, uh, the first award for best newspaper panel. All the way up to the end in 1994, uh, winning for, um, outstanding cartoonist of the year. Um, 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. Um, but he, he, he really kind of drew the line at 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.

• 22:51Josh Clark?

  Like, you're never gonna see a t-shirt with just a picture of the beehive lady, beehive hairdo lady with cat eye 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, 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.

• 23:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you could have a t-shirt or a mug or something, but it was just like a, a cartoon.

• 23:30Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  Like a far side panel, uh, which is, was pretty brilliant, because I mean, that's where the humor is. Uh, and also, since they weren't characters, I think that kind of helped that decision along.

• 23:40Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 23:41Speaker 04

  Um, although I gotta say, like, uh, if I had the doll of the little crew cut kid, I wouldn't mind that. I'm sure Etsy might be ripping him off and doing something like that, so I'm not sure.

• 23:52Josh Clark?

  I'll bet you're right, actually, and I know somebody's got a Christmas coming up.

• 23:57Speaker 04

  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 some sort of craven image. Cat people definitely didn't like him because there was 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."

• 24:36Josh Clark?

  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.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:44Josh Clark?

  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 Far Side 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.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  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 what 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 in transportation. And that is a panel, and at the bottom, that's all it says, "Early Experiments in 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,

• 26:04Speaker 04

  and they haven't thought it through, and this guy's going to be rolled over,

• 26:09Speaker 04

  you know, with his 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."

• 26:19Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  Like, you have to put, 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 Larson-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

• 26:45Speaker 04

  to record the results. And it was those extra little bits in the frame, for me, that just took Far Side over the top.

• 26:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. Another good one is the Midvale School for the Gifted.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  My favorite of all time.

• 26:59Josh Clark?

  The best known, yeah. It's just amazing. There's no, 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 says on the door, "Pull."

• 27:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:24Speaker 04

  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.

• 27:37Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 27:37Speaker 04

  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." With his hand against that door, expecting it to open.

• 27:47Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 27:48Speaker 04

  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.

• 27:54Josh Clark?

  Agreed, man. I'm glad you're interpreting these for us, because you're doing a fantastic job.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  Oh, great.

• 28:00Josh Clark?

  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 1982.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:09Josh Clark?

  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.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  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, 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.

• 29:12Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 29:12Speaker 04

  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.

• 29:30Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 29:30Speaker 04

  And to him, it was, it was just that. It's just these dumb rudimentary tools that a cow would make.

• 29:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's all it showed. It was a cow standing, maybe a little proudly, behind a table with their, with their tools spread out. There's a barn in the background, he's on a farm. And one of the tools you can, you can identify as a saw, but the other like three, you're like, I have no idea what that does.

• 29:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:52Josh Clark?

  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 if you start trying to figure out what this tool means or what he's saying with this, it just completely loses it.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  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 in Cheers wouldn't get a far side. Or Homer wouldn't get a far side. So it became a thing to not understand the panels.

• 30:35Josh Clark?

  Right. I wanted to talk about one more. There's that Carrie Soper author was asked, what panel would you pick out as the quintessential far side?

• 30:48Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 30:49Josh Clark?

  And he said, the one lupus lipophobia, which is,

• 30:54Speaker 04

  I think I remember it.

• 30:55Josh Clark?

  Like the caption says lupus lipophobia, fear of being chased in your kitchen by timberwolves 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 a table by two timberwolves 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, the other funny thing about it too, is like this person's really arcane phobia is coming true. Like their worst nightmares happening.

• 31:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:27Josh Clark?

  That's what it is. That's a great one.

• 31:30Speaker 04

  That's so good. I also love dog threat letter. That's one he has a regret about. He was a perfectionist and would sometimes agonize over like, oh, 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,

• 32:14Speaker 04

  which is so perfect to me because clearly this, this dog threat letter was wrapped in this bone and thrown through the window. And it's the little cut out letters, like a, like a, you know, a kidnapper's letter would be cut and pasted. And it just says, arf, arf, arf, arf, arf. And the cats aren't reacting. In fact, it's the backs of their heads.

• 32:31Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 32:32Speaker 04

  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.

• 32:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 32:40Speaker 04

  As if he had just thrown it. He wishes he had just not had the dog, but I think it's great as is.

• 32:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I don't think it detracted from it at all.

• 32:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. But I'm like Gary Larson.

• 32:49Josh Clark?

  No, it's true.

• 32:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:50Josh Clark?

  Um, he also, he got even more obsessive than that with, uh, regret, which was, um, Harry Houdini's final undoing, which was that Houdini, um, 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 just on the ground leaning up against the wall. And he's a skeleton and it's hilarious. Um, but the thing that Gary Larson was upset about was that, um, the tilt of Harry Houdini's skull should have been looking downward a little more. It's like, dude, it's fine.

• 33:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:26Josh Clark?

  It's great. Like no one else, except you thought that, what you just said.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally agree. Uh, should we take another break?

• 33:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  All right, we'll be back and we're going to finish up, uh, at the Midvale School for the Gifted, right after this.

• 33:55Speaker 04

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• 34:14Josh Clark?

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• 36:29Speaker 04

  Hey, everybody. The holidays are coming up, so let us throw this out there. Are you prepared to host friends or family? Like, really prepared? Because there's a difference between having people stay at your house and properly hosting them.

• 36:40Josh Clark?

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• 37:03Josh Clark?

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• 37:15Speaker 04

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• 37:26Speaker 05

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• 37:48Speaker 04

  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 comic strip writer.

• 37:57Josh Clark?

  It's crazy.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  It's hard, you know? Even though it's a single panel, you gotta 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 14 month sabbatical in 1988. 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 he, I don't know if this is true or not, it might be apocryphal, but he initially said, I'll do it for a million bucks. And then said, all right, how about this? You give me jazz guitar lessons in exchange. So he was living his best life in retirement, you know? Enjoying himself.

• 38:42Speaker 04

  He came back and said, all right, I can give you five a week instead of the seven.

• 38:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so that was 88 to, I think, 89 or early 90. And I guess 89. And so even dropping 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 gonna start making mediocre cartoons. And that is, that is the mark of.

• 39:20Josh Clark?

  A creative genius, I guess, or at the very least, a deeply creative person.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  A pure artist.

• 39:26Josh Clark?

  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.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:38Josh Clark?

  So the fact that he cited that, in addition to fatigue, I thought was really telling about, you know, who he is.

• 39:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. He also was never super comfortable in the spotlight. If you look up Gary Larson in an image search, you're gonna see a couple of old black and whites from back in the day. If you specify like Gary Larson today, I saw like one or two pictures of him now.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  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 that he was looking for.

• 40:25Josh Clark?

  The question was also like, where is the far side and how do we get there?

• 40:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:30Josh Clark?

  This is like your first question, man. Yeah. So on January, I don't remember the date, but let's just say January, 1995, the very final far side, we should say of the original run, the final far side ran. And it is, it's perfect. It's as perfect as the ending of the original Bob Newhart show.

• 40:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, agreed.

• 40:57Josh Clark?

  Where he, a man named Gary, who looks vaguely like Gary Larson, is standing with Glenda the Good Witch. And he's surrounded by every character in the far side, the cows, the cats, the beehive hairdo lady, the nerdy kid with the glasses.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, 10 gallon hat guy.

• 41:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah, 10 gallon hat guy. Everybody is surrounding him, just kind of watching him talk with Glenda the Good Witch. And she says something like, well, basically what Dorothy was told at the end of Wizard of Oz, right?

• 41:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, should I read it?

• 41:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 41:31Speaker 04

  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."

• 41:42Josh Clark?

  Right, okay, so that's panel one, it's in color. The second panel, this is very rare, he usually only did one panel. The second panel's 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.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  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.

• 42:22Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 42:23Speaker 04

  I always wondered 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 94, 97 animated films, Tales from the Far Side and Tales from the Far Side 2.

• 42:38Josh Clark?

  Did you see those?

• 42:39Speaker 04

  I did not, surprisingly. Are they good?

• 42:42Josh Clark?

  I don't know, the only place I can find it is a Russian website.

• 42:45Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 42:46Josh Clark?

  Our work computers won't let us go there.

• 42:48Speaker 04

  Did it say yet?

• 42:50Josh Clark?

  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?

• 42:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:00Josh Clark?

  Of a cow, and it's 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 their hoof playing with the joystick.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I made an intentional.

• 43:26Speaker 04

  Decision to not see those and I still don't want to see them.

• 43:30Josh Clark?

  Okay, I'll see him for us and then I'll be like yay or nay.

• 43:35Speaker 04

  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 of not liking it. So I'm not going to do it. He also had a kids book in 1999. I feel bad that I didn't know about this. I would have gotten it when Ruby was littler called There's a Hair in My Dirt. She'd probably still like this, actually.

• 43:59Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 43:59Speaker 04

  A colon, A Worm Story, a book about a princess from the worm's point of view, which is very Gary Larson.

• 44:06Josh Clark?

  Speaking of kids books, there was something that he cited. Screen Rant has like 500 articles on Gary Larson and the Far Side. Apparently somebody there really likes him. But they turned up that he cited a children's book from 1950, the year he was born, as just kind of helping him develop like his, his sense of humor. But it's called Mr. Bear Squash You Flat. Like that's Mr. 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 comeuppance at the end. And it's really bizarre, like just the sample I saw. It's like illustrated like a 1950s children's book, but the storyline is really weird.

• 44:49Josh Clark?

  And the title itself is incredibly weird, too. That apparently just stayed with Gary Larson.

• 44:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, they almost, 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.

• 45:02Josh Clark?

  No way, no how.

• 45:06Speaker 04

  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 12. But he very much had an interest in science that was pervasive through the, through the series run. Whether it was animals or weird nature things. And there's a, it was, its tendrils kind of reached through the science world. At the time in 1998, the head of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Harold Varmus said, boy, Dr. Harold Varmus, has there ever been a? More app name to leave the National Institute of Health.

• 45:41Josh Clark?

  Right. It's also a far side name, too.

• 45:44Speaker 04

  Oh, really? Did he use that?

• 45:45Josh Clark?

  No, I'm just saying like that's a perfect far side name.

• 45:48Speaker 04

  No, I totally agree. It wouldn't have surprised me though, because as we'll see, they sort of overlapped here and there, but

• 45:52Josh Clark?

  For sure.

• 45:52Speaker 04

  He said his influence is pervasive. I can't tell you how many seminars I've been to that had a Gary Larson slide in them. And he ended up getting like real animals named after him, right?

• 46:03Josh Clark?

  Well, the chewing louse at least.

• 46:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:06Josh Clark?

  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, Stridophyllis gary Larsoni. 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

• 46:31Speaker 04

  Like not saying you're a louse.

• 46:33Josh Clark?

  Right, exactly.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:34Josh Clark?

  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 louse Stridophyllis gary Larsoni. So the paper actually cites the book, the, the prehistory of the far side in it to basically prove that it's actually a thing.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  It's pretty good. He had also had a butterfly name for him in 1990, but sadly 14 years later, the Sarah totarga Larsoni was found to not be a distinct species, so it was removed. So for a while, I guess 14 years, he had a butterfly named after him as well. Uh, and then I love the story of the Thagomizer.

• 47:20Josh Clark?

  We'll take it.

• 47:21Speaker 04

  There was a, a scientific term that has kind of caught on from one of his cartoons, and that is the Thagomizer, T H A G O miser. That was from a 1982 panel where there's a caveman teaching a class about the end of the stegosaurus tail, the little spikes on the end of a stegosaurus. And the caption was, now this end is called the Thagomizer after the late Thag Simmons. 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 the semi-formal name and ended up in the Dinosaur National Monument at the Smithsonian.

• 48:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like their displays of the stegosaurus mention its thagomizer.

• 48:06Speaker 04

  That's amazing.

• 48:07Josh Clark?

  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.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 48:17Josh Clark?

  If you called someone a nerd, you're 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 glorifying nerds at a time when nerds were not super thought well of.

• 48:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, man. That's very astute. I never really thought about that, but that's absolutely what he was doing. He was, he was making fun of himself and also shining a light on nerd-dom at the same time.

• 48:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  In 1987, the California 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.

• 49:04Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:05Speaker 04

  And evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson wrote of, he had a couple of scientists write forewords in his books. E.O. Wilson wrote the foreword 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.

• 49:21Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 49:22Speaker 04

  Wrote the foreword for the Far Side Gallery III and called him the national humorist of natural history.

• 49:29Josh Clark?

  And then there's a story we talked about in the Jing Goodall episode. I think it's worth mentioning again.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I thought we did. Yeah.

• 49:35Josh Clark?

  So in 1987, 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, he meant nothing by it. Like, if you start to read too deeply into it, you're like, wow, this is what's he got against Jane Goodall? That's not, it'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.

• 50:14Josh Clark?

  And she wrote a truly angry letter to the cartoon editors that, I guess by then he was at Universal Syndicate, basically just lambasting them for even running it.

• 50:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, she said, "It's incredibly offensive and in such poor taste that readers might well question the editorial judgment of running such an atrocity in a newspaper that reutes to be supplying the news to persons with a better than average intelligence."

• 50:37Josh Clark?

  Right, so she was mad.

• 50:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:40Josh Clark?

  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."

• 50:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:51Josh Clark?

  She ended up writing a foreword 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 2007 Far Side a day calendar to Conservation International. So he was the real deal.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then I think Sue ran to the bathroom and cried.

• 51:19Josh Clark?

  I'll bet, dude.

• 51:20Speaker 04

  "Nothing's ever good enough for Jane."

• 51:22Josh Clark?

  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.

• 51:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, oh god, how great would that be? I would just retire tomorrow if I found out he, like, listened and liked this.

• 51:40Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah, not that he was about to die?

• 51:42Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no. He'd probably find that funny, though.

• 51:46Josh Clark?

  Probably.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's got a website he finally put up and apparently will occasionally put out a new thing or two here and there. Definitely will put out some, like, lost archival stuff or, you know, stuff like that. But I think he got like a sort of digital drawing thing and 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 my website."

• 52:15Josh Clark?

  That's right. You got anything else?

• 52:18Speaker 04

  Got nothing else. That was a fun one.

• 52:21Josh Clark?

  Just to thank you, Gary Larson, thank you for doing what you did and being you.

• 52:24Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 52:26Josh Clark?

  And since we just thanked Gary Larson, everybody, as foretold in 2008, we've just unlocked listener mail.

• 52:35Speaker 04

  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 orcas are dolphins, I think you guys said that this means they aren't real whales. In reality, all dolphins are whales. In phylogenetics, dolphin is a type of whale. Okay, thanks. Love you. Bye. Josh.

• 53:02Josh Clark?

  Josh, you just come along and razzle dazzle us with the word like phylogenetics and expect us to believe you? I don't know.

• 53:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:10Josh Clark?

  We're gonna have to look that one up before I formally thank Josh.

• 53:13Speaker 04

  I looked it up. Yeah. All dolphins are whales.

• 53:16Josh Clark?

  All right. Well, thank you, Josh. We appreciate that correction. That was actually a pretty good one.

• 53:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:21Josh Clark?

  If you want to be like Josh and get in touch with us, please do. Send us an email. Send it off to [email protected].

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness? I'm Shaquille O'Neal, and this shouldn't be anybody's experience. Ask your doctor about Zepbound trisepotide, the first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in adults with obesity.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15-milligram injection. Zepbound contains trisepotide and should not be used with other trisepotide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens, or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it. Or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction.

• 54:49Speaker 03

  Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plant to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbound.lily.com.

• 55:18Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 55:49Speaker 06

  Do you ever feel like your computer is tracking you? Well, it's not. It's your browser following you. But not if you come back to Firefox. Firefox blocks the trackers automatically, doesn't follow you from site to site, and supports the ad blockers other browsers dropped. Plus, you can switch AI on or off when its intelligence is acting too artificial. And switching? Totally painless. Your bookmarks, passwords, and browsing history come right with you. Come back to Firefox. Visit firefox.com.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.