If you're not familiar with the divine wit of Gary Larson, you're missing out. He was my favorite cartoonist when I was a kid (I still have my battered copy of It Came From The Far Side), and I still marvel at his ability to impart socio-scientific theory onto such absurdity. His affinity for humanizing everything from protozoa to dinosaurs somehow makes the humor more salient, and as a political satirist, he was ahead of his time: a panel from 1986 shows a dozen penguins stranded on the same block of floating ice, most looking with concern at the receding iceberg, one penguin not realizing the significance of the situation. The caption reads: "Bob! Staring contest...Go!"Armed with a communications degree and a love for science, Larson poked fun at everything from physicists' egos to relationship tedium among single-celled organisms to farm animals' ever-evolving plan to enact revenge on their carnivorous owners. Always a pun-loving bunch, the scientific community paid him back in kind with several new species names: Strigiphilus Garylarsoni, Serratoterga Larsoni and Garylarsonus. With trademark deadpan, Larson said in response, "I consider this an extreme honor. Besides, I knew no one was going to write and ask to name a new species of swan after me. You have to grab these opportunities when they come along." (Wikipedia)
From books to t-shirts to New Yorker covers, Larson captured the satiric zeitgeist of the 80s and 90s--culminating, perhaps, in his wildly popular There's a Hair in My Dirt! A Worm's Story--and then he retired from cartooning to study the jazz guitar. In 2003, he anthologized his work in a 2-volume, 4,300-panel (1,100 of which have never been published before) 18-pound "hernia-giver" of a book, The Complete Far Side 1980-1994. I guarantee you will laugh out loud, probably for hours, and then you will mourn the lack of new pithy barbs from the likes of Frank and Edna.
And now back to those randy amoebas...
(Both images scanned, poorly, from The Far Side Gallery 3.)
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