Tears For A Last Laugh - A Clown Prince Of Cartoonists Calls It Quits
The Age
Saturday January 7, 1995
For aficionados of the Far Side, Gary Larson's regular cartoon, the first news of 1995 is bleak. Larson is pocketing his pen and putting his surreal bestiary out to pasture. Alexander Cockburn pays homage.
SUDDENLY, the world has become a sadder and more boring place. On 1 January Gary Larson hung up his sketch pad, which means the end of the universe as Larson has successfully managed to reconstruct it in the past decade-and-a-half.
Larson is not the first satirist to tell parables through beasts.
But, before him, cows never had the sensitivities of Proust, nor dogs the wisdom of Solomon. There have been great painters of nature, but none with that exquisite precision which catches the taut excitement of an ant-eater as it sits in its burrow watching television and shouting, ``Vera, come quick. Some nature show has a hidden camera in the Ericksons' burrow. We're going to see their entire courtship behavior."
It took Larson, who hasn't even got a degree in biology, to overthrow Darwin and prove the new theory of unnatural selection, with man at the bottom of the great chain of being.
What's remarkable about Larson's decision to retire is that by cartoonists' standards, he hasn't been in the game very long. He offered his first portfolio to a Seattle weekly in the late '70s, and became a Seattle Times regular in 1979.
A year later, he signed on for syndication through the San Francisco Chronicle, which gave his cartoons the running title The Far Side.
These days, at 44, he's one of the world's most popular cartoonists, with nearly 2000 newspapers carrying his daily offering and bookshops awash with his collections.
It's not the first time Larson has taken a break. He had a 13-month lay-off at the end of the '80s, saying he wanted to learn jazz guitar.
This time it's more serious; he says he just doesn't enjoy cartooning anymore. He can afford to stop, and he has. As for coming back a second time, Larson is just as much in the dark as anyone else.
A Larson cartoon can depend on a pun, an historical allusion, a surrealist nightmare. Take the one of the shadowy elephant in a greatcoat whispering from behind the stairwell to a man opening his mailbox: ``Remember me, Mr Schneider? Kenya, 1947. If you're going to shoot an elephant, Mr Schneider, you'd better be prepared to finish the job."
I've always love the noir feel of this and that Bogartian look was, Larson has written, exactly the tone he was trying to catch. Normally, it's risky, he said, to write long captions, because they tend to break continuity with the static image. ``I think this works, however, because there's no exaggerated action in the drawing. The elephant is speaking under his breath and Mr Schneider has turned around and frozen in his tracks. Even if this little scene were animated, we wouldn't see much more movement than what's captured in the cartoon."
At least with this freeze-frame we know what happened in Kenya and what's likely to happen to Mr Schneider, just as we do in another elephant cartoon captioned: ``The party had been going splendidly and then Tantor saw the ivory keyboard."
(My other favorite elephant joke by Larson is one that the Los Angeles Times refused to run, dismissing it as being too grim to be viewed by tender-hearted readers. It showed an elephant with a wooden leg standing in a telephone box and trumpeting incredulously, ``What?
They turned it into a wastebasket?") But often the before-and-after narrative is much more obscure, as in the great cartoon showing a duck and one of Larson's patented mad scientists on a desert island, sinking ship in background, with the duck quacking triumphantly, ``So, Professor Jenkins! . . . My old nemesis . . . We meet again, but this time the advantage is mine! Ha!
Ha! Ha!" The joke comes out of the linking of the line from old kitsch thrillerdom to the abashed Jenkins-triumphant duck confrontation. But what were those past circumstances? And what will the duck do? Again, Larson's fans will remember a frame in which a mad scientist has a duck and a human lashed to operating tables, having switched their brains. Since Larson drew this in 1986, three years after the desert island cartoon, maybe he was trying to figure out a convincing story.
There are plenty of red teeth and blood-stained claws in Larson's world, too. ``Let's move it, folks . . . Nothing to see here . . .
It's all over . . . Move it along, folks . . . Let's go, let's go," says an officious Larson zebra to the rest of the herd, while in the background we can see the hooves of a dead zebra poling up from beneath a contented lion.
This unsentimental aspect of Larson's work got him dropped from his first job at the Seattle Times, whose editor said complaints were pouring in. Fortunately, Larson had just returned from San Francisco, where he'd managed to interest the Chronicle in his work.
Protests from outraged readers have continued. There was an uproar in 1984 when Larson drew a cartoon of a woman shouting out of the window, ``Here, Fifi! C'mon! . . . faster, Fifi!" The eager little hound is dashing up the path, aquiver with doggie trust, but we can see that the dog door is stoutly barred on the inside and that Fifi is going to fetch up against it with a tremendous wallop, a wallop that was as nothing to the torrent of complaint from the sort of citizens you meet in the newsagent's, buying birthday cards for their pets.
Brooding on the fuss, Larson wrote: ``The key element in any attempt at humor is conflict. Our brain is suddenly jolted into trying to accept something that is unacceptable.
Most of the civilised world, I'm convinced, hates rat-sized dogs named Fifi, but in this cartoon there's an immediate conflict: the reader is asked to accept the unacceptable that the dog's master (the standard, heavy-set matriarchial-type woman) is setting up her own dog for an unpleasant experience. Why, of course, no one knows. So, what you see in this cartoon is the classic conflict."
Though Larson is relentlessly facetious about his childhood, he does exhibit some fairly bumpy psychic terrain.
In one of his collections, The Pre-History of the Far Side, Larson offers what are purportedly childhood sketches saved by his mother from the kindergarten period of his career. These feature prison bars on the windows, slavering hellhounds, a father holding him above a crocodile's jaws and other fun scenes from the dark vale of infancy.
He talks about nightmares and the ordeal of being locked in the cellar by an older brother and other familiar childhood traumas.
In fact, a whole series of Larson cartoons are about hell, as a permanent situation. Larson says he's cynical about humans and often he flops this cynicism into an animal setting. ``The cape, Larry! Go for the cape!" shout two bulls outside the ring as their friend stands uncertainly before a toreador. They mean well, or do they? Even if they do, they've got it disastrously wrong, and Larry is going to pay the price.
Larson takes some of the most worn set-ups in cartoondom shrink's couch, desert island, take-me-to-your-leader and gives them a twist into freshness, weirdness, black comedy.
That man at the Seattle Times wasn't the only editor to quail at the anger or revulsion Larson can stir in readers. In Pre-History, Larson offers some cartoons he never even bothered to send out for syndication. ``Jesus rises from the grave," says the caption under a picture of a rather haggard Redeemer frying up some breakfast next to an open coffin and thinking: ``I wonder what time it is . . . I feel like I've been dead for three days." -- The Independent.
© 1995 The Age