A Tribute To The Far Side

Summary

Stuff You Should Know – "A Tribute To The Far Side"

Release Date: September 25, 2025
Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant

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Episode Overview

This episode is a heartfelt and humorous tribute to Gary Larson's "The Far Side" — the iconic single-panel cartoon that helped define offbeat humor for a generation. Josh and Chuck reminisce about the cartoon’s profound cultural and creative influence, break down what made it so innovative, and delight in some of the most memorable panels and controversies. They also explore Larson’s personal background, artistic philosophy, intersection with science, and enduring legacy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Magic and Impact of The Far Side

• Both hosts credit "The Far Side" with shaping their sense of humor during formative years.
• Chuck: “The Far Side by Gary Larson … crystallizes to me the perfect time to be awakened to something like Gary Larson’s sense of humor.” (01:33)
• Josh: The cartoon's influence was so widespread it “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.” (01:57)
• Contrasts between cartoons and comics: The Far Side, as a single-panel cartoon, delivers all its impact in one efficient poetic moment.
  • Josh: “It’s kind of like comparing a book to a poem … a one panel cartoon has to have the same impact or, in the case of The Far Side, a far, far greater impact than a strip…” (03:45)

Gary Larson’s Background and Artistic Journey

• Childhood: Raised in Tacoma, Washington; influences were his older brother (a nature lover and classic ‘tormenting big brother’) and parents with a wacky family sense of humor.
  • Josh: On his brother: “His brother introduced him to the beauty of a jellyfish and then also used that same jellyfish to smack me in the face, which I think that's a good big brother right there.” (06:30)
• Education: Started as a biology major at Washington State, but switched to communications — a decision Larson later regretted.
• Early Career: Worked odd jobs (banjo player, music store, Humane Society investigator) before creating his first strip, Nature’s Way, which evolved directly into The Far Side.
• Breakthrough: In 1979, San Francisco Chronicle picked up his work (renamed “The Far Side”) and immediately syndicated it, despite the comics industry being notoriously closed to newcomers.
  • Syndicate salespeople often heard, “This is not a Buffalo product,” from newspaper editors. (11:35)

The Far Side's Rise and Cultural Reception

• Initial reactions to the cartoon were polarizing—some editors loved it, others recoiled.
• Syndication expanded over years:
  • 1979: 30 newspapers
  • Three years later: 80
  • Later peaked at 1,900 papers worldwide.
• "The Far Side" books and calendars sold tens of millions, and were published in 17 languages.
• Despite its popularity, The Far Side remained divisive and occasionally offensive to certain groups, such as religious readers and cat lovers.
• Josh: “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.” (21:26)

Distinctive Features of The Far Side

• No recurring or named characters; used archetypes and stock figures (e.g., the beehive lady, freckled glasses kid, animals, cows).
• Artistic style was unique, recognizable, and deliberately self-taught.
• Larson largely eschewed merchandising — no dolls or out-of-context character products, keeping the humor contextual and avoiding cash grabs.

Signature Cartoons and Their Legacy

Panel Highlights

Chuck and Josh describe several iconic “Far Side” panels, explaining their humor and visual storytelling:

• Early Experiments in Transportation (22:02): Cave people strapping a man to a stone wheel, with another caveman recording the experiment — “It was those extra little bits in the frame … that just took Far Side over the top.” (23:34)
• Midvale School for the Gifted (23:34): A “gifted” kid shoves a door marked “Pull”, with his whole body leaning into the effort.
  • Chuck: “It looks like that kid has been standing there for an hour.” (24:26)
• Cow Tools (24:42): So baffling to readers Larson had to publish an explanation—the joke was that cows would make weirdly unsophisticated tools.
  • Josh: “That's it. … If you start trying to figure out what this tool means or what he's saying with this, it just completely loses it.” (26:53)
• Lupus lipophobia (27:17): “Fear of being chased in your kitchen by timber wolves while wearing socks on a newly waxed floor.”
• Dog Threat Letter & Harry Houdini’s Final Undoing: Showcased Larson’s perfectionism — he later critiqued small artistic choices, worried they impaired the cartoon’s impact.

The Creative Burden and Retirement

• For years, Larson drew seven panels weekly; the pressure led to fatigue and creative anxiety.
• Sabbatical: Took a 14-month break in 1988; returned with a reduced schedule.
• Retirement decision: “He was really worried that his creativity was gonna go downhill and that he was gonna start making mediocre cartoons. … A pure artist.” (34:31)
• Final official panel (Jan 1995): Spoofed The Wizard of Oz—the perfect meta-ending, blurring the line between his universe and ours.

Science and The Far Side

• Larson’s passion for nature and science permeated his work; scientists loved his cartoons for making science “cool” and relatable.
• “His influence is pervasive. I can't tell you how many seminars I've been to that had a Gary Larson slide in them.” — Dr. Harold Varmus, NIH director (40:47)
• Honored in biology:
  • A louse named Strigophilus garylarsoni
  • A butterfly (for a while) named in his honor
  • “Thagomizer” (stegosaurus tail spikes) — a made-up term from a Far Side panel now used semi-formally in paleontology (42:27)

Controversies and Reactions

• Occasionally inflamed readers or editors; e.g., Jane Goodall Institute protested a cartoon, but Goodall herself found it funny and later wrote a foreword for one of his books.
  • “She ended up writing a foreword to one of the Far Side books. And then that cartoon was licensed for the Jane Goodall Institute… So he was the real deal.” (45:57)

Larson’s Shyness, Legacy, and Occasional Returns

• Disliked the spotlight, rarely gave interviews, remains a semi-reclusive figure.
• Brief returns: Played with digital illustration, sporadically published new or archival panels on his website.
• Despite pressures, never compromised his unique vision or commercializes unduly, maintaining integrity and affection from fans.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On defining his artistic approach:
  • “It’s kind of like comparing a book to a poem … a one panel cartoon has to have the same impact or, in the case of The Far Side, a far, far greater impact than a strip…” (03:45, Josh)
• On divisiveness:
  • “Some people never do. Some people hate the Far Side still.” (11:35, Chuck)
  • Salesman’s feedback: “This is not a Buffalo product.” (11:41, Salesman via Josh & Chuck)
• On the ‘Cow Tools’ uproar:
  • “The problem was everybody was looking way too deeply into it … it was just these dumb rudimentary tools that a cow would make.” (25:36, Chuck)
• On science geeks:
  • “He was glorifying nerds at a time when nerds were not super. Well, of.” (43:13, Josh)
• On perfectionist regrets:
  • “He got even more obsessive than that with Regret, which was Harry Houdini's final undoing… the tilt of Harry Houdini’s skull should have been looking downward a little more. It's like, dude, it's fine.” (29:31, Josh)
• Final closing sentiment:
  • “Just a thank you, Gary Larson. Thank you for doing what you did and being you.” (47:27, Josh)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:33: How The Far Side influenced the hosts
• 03:45: The panel-vs-strip distinction
• 06:30: On family influence & collecting animals
• 09:06: Larson’s first cartoon sales
• 11:41: Editorial reactions — “This is not a Buffalo product.”
• 17:53: The Far Side’s explosive popularity, sales numbers
• 22:02-29:31: Favorite panels and verbal illustrations
• 33:03: Larson’s creative fatigue and sabbatical
• 36:03: The perfect “Wizard of Oz” inspired final cartoon
• 40:47: Intersection with academic science community
• 42:27: The legacy of the “Thagomizer”
• 45:32: Jane Goodall controversy and its resolution
• 47:27: Heartfelt closing thanks to Gary Larson

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Conclusion

Josh and Chuck’s tribute to Gary Larson and The Far Side is both an entertaining walk through comic history and a nuanced appreciation for an artist who made the absurd mainstream. It's a must-listen (or read) for anyone who loves dry wit, science, or seeing the world a little sideways.

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Listen to the full episode for more wry riffs, panel breakdowns, and the unfiltered joy of two lifelong fans celebrating a cultural landmark.

Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

This is an I Heart Podcast.

[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh 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 imagined. And when she gets here, it'll really be stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Tribute to your taste.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know how you feel, cause 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. It spanned from like 5th or 6th 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.

[Josh 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 year, 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 to try 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. It's a cartoon that ran for 15 years. It's been gone for about 30 years, but is still one of the most. Like just his style is so instantly recognizable as Gary Larson. He's not a guy that used characters. It wasn't like Family Circus where 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.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And as we'll see 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, is 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 sense of humor. And I didn't hear things like wacky and left of center until much later.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So one of his 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 to the beauty of a jellyfish and then also used that same jellyfish to smack me in the face, with, which I think that's a good big brother right there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, he sounded like kind of the classic tormenting big brother, but in a loving way is what I gathered at least. But, yeah, he's always been into 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 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.

[Josh Clark]

They 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 Sides, because he had a lot of time on his hands. Because 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. 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 with a different name, essentially.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it was the Far side. The San Francisco Chronicle changed the name, which 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 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 style, but none of that was, like, from art class or anything like that. And in 1976, sold six cartoons to Pacific Search Regional Science magazine for 90 bucks. Sold another handful to another local magazine for 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.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Which is, I think, 85 bucks, something like that now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So not money to live on, but.

[Josh Clark]

He did have a place in the local paper. I mean, Seattle Times is big time, right? Yeah. I think that same year in 1979, 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 30 different papers across the country automatically. This is, like, beyond life changing. And Laura Claussen 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 that it just all fell together for him like this.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 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 sell it to him, has some pretty great stories on 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 have to really grow to love it, but some people never do. Some people hate the Far side still.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Like, very sternly, please leave, sir.

[Chuck Bryant]

And apparently he said the initial response has been quite funny and uneditor 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. He's like, I never knew if they were going to offer me, like to stay and have a cup of coffee or just say, get out of my office.

[Josh Clark]

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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. All right.

[Chuck Bryant]

We'll be right back with more on.

[Josh Clark]

The brilliant Gary Larson Learning stuff with Joshua. Stuff you should do.

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[Josh 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. Yeah, 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 going to 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

No.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Multiverse, huh?

[Josh Clark]

All right.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 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 years later, it was up to 200. And really kind of launched after that. And at its peak was in 1900 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. And eventually, I believe, all but One of his 23 books was on the New York Times bestseller list and sold a combined 41 million copies and almost 80 million calendars.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you'd think way, way more languages, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I gotcha. Yeah. No, I could see there being 17 different languages that could find it humorous.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, you could. All right.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because there's like 2 or 3 million languages you know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So he was also very unsurprisingly an award winning artist and cartoonist from the his, the beginning of his peak, I think around 1985, he won the first award for best newspaper panel all the way up to till the end in 1994, winning for outstanding cartoonist 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, 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. Like you're never going to 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, you could have a T shirt or a mug or something, but it was just like a cartoon, 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. Although I gotta say, like, 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.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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. That's, I guess, still sort of 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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, he was just being humorous. And one of the great, great, great things about the Far side is that it's not making a comment on anything.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh 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 Kerry 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. On those moments where it's most pronounced, I guess.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that's. 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 and they haven't thought it through and this guy is going to be rolled over 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. 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 to record the results. And it was those extra little bits in the frame for me, that just took Far Side over the top.

[Josh Clark]

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 says on the door, pull.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 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.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

No, great.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh 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. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh 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? Wow. And he said the one Lupus lipophobia, which is.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think I remember it.

[Josh Clark]

Like the caption says, lupus lipophobia, 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 a table by two timberwolves, and he's wearing socks, and his floor is nice and shiny, and he's kind of hanging onto 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, their worst nightmares happening. Yeah. And that's what it is. That's a great one.

[Chuck Bryant]

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's a panel of these cats. One cat sitting down 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 dog threat letter was wrapped in this bone and thrown through the window. And it's the little cutout letters, like. Like 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. 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.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, but I'm not Gary Larson.

[Josh Clark]

No, it's true. He got even more obsessive than that with 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 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 the tilt of Harry Houdini's skull should have been looking downward a little more. It's like, dude, it's fine. Yeah, it's great. Like, no one else except you thought that what you just said.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, totally agree. Should we take another break?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Learning stuff with Joshua. Stuff you should do.

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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, of a cartoonist and a comic strip writer.

[Josh Clark]

It's crazy.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's hard. You know, even though it's a single panel, you gotta come up with something that great every day. Cause he wanted to be great and everyone who does that kind of stuff wants it 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 gimme jazz guitar lessons in exchange. So he was living his best life in retirement, enjoying himself. He came back and said, all right, I can give you five a week instead of the seven.

[Josh 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 his creativity was gonna go downhill and that he was gonna start making mediocre cartoons. And that is the mark of a creative genius, I guess. Or at the very least, a deeply creative person.

[Chuck Bryant]

A pure artist.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. That they're like, I have to walk away because I don't wanna start making something mediocre. Not even bad mediocre. Mediocre is actually worse than bad in situations like that. So the fact that he cited that in addition to fatigue, I thought was really telling about who he is.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. 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, but because I think it's a deer that was looking for.

[Josh Clark]

The question was also like, where is the Far side and how do we get there? This is like your first question, man. Yeah. So in 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. And it is. It's perfect. It's as perfect as the ending of the original Bob Newhart show.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, agreed.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, 10 gallon hat guy.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, 10 gallon hat guy. Everybody is surrounding him, just kind of watching him talk with Glinda the good witch. And she says, Something like, well, basically what Dorothy was told in the end of wizard of Oz, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Should I read it?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, definitely.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

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 panel is 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 94, 97 animated films, Tales from the Far side and Tales from the Far side two.

[Josh Clark]

Did you see those?

[Chuck Bryant]

I did. Not surprisingly. Are they good?

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, okay.

[Josh Clark]

Our work computers won't let us go there.

[Chuck Bryant]

Did it say nyet?

[Josh 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?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I made an intentional decision to not see those. And I still don't want to see them.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, I'll see him for us. And then I'll be like, yay. Or nyet.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, let me know. Cause 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 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 a worm story, a book about a princess from the worms point of view, which is very. Gary Larson.

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

No way, no how.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 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 apt name to lead the National Institute of Health?

[Josh Clark]

Right. It's also a Far side name too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really? Did he use that?

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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 I've been to that had a Gary Larson slide in them. And he ended up getting, like, real animals named after him, Right?

[Josh Clark]

Well, a chewing louse, at least.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh 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, Strigophilus Gary Larseni. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like, not saying you're a louse.

[Josh Clark]

Right, Exactly. 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 Strigophilus Gary Larseni. So the paper actually cites the book the Prehistory of the Far side in it to basically prove that it's actually a thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's pretty good. He also had a butterfly named for him in 1990, but sadly, 14 years later, the Ceratoterga larseni 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. And then. I love the story of the Thagomizer.

[Josh Clark]

We'll take it.

[Chuck Bryant]

There was a scientific term that has kind of caught on from one of his cartoons, and that is the Thagomizer. A T H A G O miser. It 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 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.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

That's amazing.

[Josh 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. Like, 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, of.

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

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. And evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson wrote a. He had a couple of scientists write forwards in his books. E.O. wilson wrote the forward for the children's book There's a Hair in My Dirt. And a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist named Stephen Jay Gould, who I believe we've talked about before, wrote the foreword for the far Side Gallery 3 and called him the national humorous of Natural History.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I thought we did. Yeah.

[Josh 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 Jane 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 Engle, 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 lambasting them for even running it.

[Chuck Bryant]

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 reputes to be supplying the news to persons with a better than average intelligence.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So she was mad.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And then I think sue ran to the bathroom and cried.

[Josh Clark]

I'll bet. Dude, nothing's ever good enough for Jay. 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah. Not that he was about to die.

[Chuck Bryant]

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

[Josh Clark]

That's right. You got anything else?

[Chuck Bryant]

Got nothing else. That was a fun one.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

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.

[Josh 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.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly.

[Josh Clark]

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

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, all dolphins are whales.

[Josh Clark]

All right, well, thank you Joe Josh. We appreciate that. Correction. That was actually a pretty good one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to be like Josh and get in touch with us, please do send us an email. Send it off to stuff podcastheartradio.com.

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.

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[Chuck Bryant]

This is an Iheart podcast.