The Far Side Gallery 2 by Gary Larson  - Page 5

• Wanna hear my definition of a Golden Age as applies to x?
• No?
• Okay, here it is anyway: A Golden Age is a time when so many things about x are wonderful and unique that x itself is taken for granted.
• And you can quote me, honeychile.
• Take the art of cartooning in the '80s.
• I could say that the work of Gary Larson is absolutely unique, and that it will make you laugh your butt off, and that is true, but it means nothing in itself because in the '80s there are at least two dozen cartoonists who can make you laugh your butt off, and all of them are unique. We are living in the Golden Age of print cartoons, friends and neighbors, and the Q.E.D. of the postulate is that we simply take them for granted: Jim (Garfield) Davis, Charles (Charlie) Rodrigues, Charles (Peanuts) Schulz, Gary (Doonesbury) Trudeau, Berke (Bloom County) Breathed... and those are just for starters.
• Gary Larson, however, is uniquely unique.
• You can mention other cartoonists of the surreal - Charles Addams, Gahan Wilson, Virgil Partch - but Larson is as different from all of them as they are from him.
• You want me to tell you why?
• I can't tell you why.
• There's no way to explain humor any more than there is a way to explain horror, which is probably why a man like Larson (or Addams, or Wilson, or Rodrigues) must hear the question I often hear so many times: Where do you get your ideas?
• My answer is Utica.
• It doesn't mean anything, but I don't know the answer, and at least it shuts 'em up.
• I don't know what Larson's answer is.
• And it doesn't matter. Either these cartoons will do it for you or they will not, just as anchovies do it for some people and other people won't touch them - find them, in fact, so revolting that they will commit the impoliteness of wondering aloud why other people eat them.
• It's just a taste you can't explain.
• A cartoon isn't simply a joke; it's a talented eye combining circumstance and joke in a clearly recognizable way which cannot be duplicated. You could copy Gary Larson's pictures, just as you could copy Charles Schulz's round-headed worrywart, Charlie Brown; it's Larson's mind which makes him one of a kind.
• Having said that you can't tell a cartoon, let me tell you my favorite Gary Larson cartoon (and I only do it because I've previewed the book which follows