The Far Side Gallery 2 by Gary Larson  - Page 6

• and believe this cartoon isn't in it, unless it is a late add):
• Two dogs are in a den. One is showing the other his trophies. One trophy is that part of the human anatomy which exists south of the wrist. "And that one is the hand that fed me," the dog is saying (and speaking, one somehow assumes, in the bored but privileged tones of a British burra sahib at the height of the Indian raj).
• This cartoon alone only made me smile. But the effect of Larson's work, unlike that of many surreal cartoonists (I except only Gahan Wilson from the general rule), is cumulative. I found myself not looking at these circumstantial jokes as single things, isolated from one another; they seem somehow connected, and they certainly had a cumulative effect on me, as did my Larson day-by-day calendar. You start smiling; then you're grinning; then you start to giggle; then you start to laugh; then you begin to howl; finally you are lying on the floor, hoping to God you won't have a hernia or a heart altack, telling yourself to stop, for God's sake stop looking at them, but you go along just the same, because he's drawn you into a unique Larsonian world where deer talk with an oddly persuasive matter-of-factness; where Godzilla drives a Plymouth with a license plate reading | 8 NY, one arm cocked out the window, smiling grimly; where a crazed flea marches through hairs the size of Sequoias holding up a sign which reads THE END OF THE DOG IS COMING! It's all insane but you can't stop.
• But that's good, because in the end you feel better. Why? Don't ask me. Don't say things like catharsis or reductio ad absurdum or surrealism. Cartooning is art, and I don't know doodly-squat about art. Like the rock song says, "I ain't no monkey, but I know what i like." And I like Gary Larson a lot, partly because he turs the world as I know it inside out like a sock, partly because he turns the world as I know it into a funhouse mirror, but mostly because he does what artists and humorists are supposed to do: he sees what I would see if l could have his eyes. I don't have them, but thank God they are on loan.
• Like a chill in a dark place, good cartoons are a momentary frisson; they re a hit like a drug that is addicting but does no damage; does, in fact, good.
• Explain him?
• No.
• Explicate him?
• No.
• Enjoy him?
• Yes.
• God, yes.
• Forget the anchovies on your pizza; if you can dig anchovies of the mina you're gonna have a blast.
• Just don't o.d.
• You could die laughing.
• STEPHEN KING