Summary
- Much like stand-up comedians, Far Side creator Gary Larson sought to provoke an immediate reaction from his readers – except as a cartoonist, he was largely isolated from his audience.
- For Larson, the "reader" was largely an abstract concept, a hypothetical individual that he directed his humor toward, rather than worrying about trying to please an entire "audience."
- Larson valued the solitude of creating cartoons, though he also acknowledged that the stand-up comedians get from live performances – as long as they can handle failure – is incredibly valuable.
Gary Larson, creator of his observational eye for comedy wouldn't necessarily have translated into the world of stand-up. According to Larson, one major thing separated these two distinct types of humor: how the audience engaged with them.
Just like a comedian's jokes, Far Side cartoons were designed to get an immediate response, but the major difference was that a stand-up comic is traditionally there in the room with their audience. By the nature of the medium, newspaper cartoons operate in insolation.
In other words, they give their authors no quantifiable way to gauge audience ' reactions – except of course, that editors continue to put their cartoons in the paper. While for stand-up comedians the audience is all too real, for cartoonists like Gary Larson, readers were a more abstract matter.
The Complete Far Side is a two-volume set collecting the entirety of Gary Larson's body of work; the collection also includes retrospective essays from Larson discussing many aspects of his career and creative process, making it an invaluable resource for any fan of The Far Side. The author's comments on cartooning & stand-up comedy can be found in Volume Two.
Gary Larson On The Thing Separating Comic Writers & Stand-Up Comics: The Audience
Larson Couldn't Bear To "Bomb"
As funny as he was, and as much as he might have been capable of doing stand-up, he was quick to recognize that he didn't have the constitution to tell jokes in front of a live audience.
Of course, the success of The Far Side during its time in publication gave Gary Larson some sense of how readers were responding to his work at the macro level. At the same time, both positive interactions with fans, and negative reactions from critics alike offered him insight into his work's impact on individuals. Still, writing in The Complete Far Side Volume Two nearly a decade after his retirement, Larson itted that the extent to which this informed his work was limited, contrasting his medium with a more notorious form: stand-up comedy.
According to Larson:
I never got bogged down thinking too much about what was going on "out there." Really, a cartoonist is largely blind to reader reaction. This is the big wall that separates us from our distant and hairier cousins, the stand-up comedian. (I actually don't know if the "hairier" part is true; I'm guessing.)
Elaborating further, the author went on to explain that, as a cartoonist, he was insulted from failure, in contrast to the way that stand-ups directly expose themselves to it. Larson wrote:
Compare and contrast these two branches of the humoroid tree. For starters, we cartoonists are in ignorant bliss when we "bomb." We don't see the frozen faces, or heart the collective groans or the universal "HUH?" that our little opus generated. For a comedian, however, bombing is a very public, very humiliating experience. I prefer ignorant bliss.
For Gary Larson, attention was the least appealing part of being a successful artist; as funny as he was, and as much as he might have been capable of doing stand-up, he was quick to recognize that he didn't have the constitution to tell jokes in front of a live audience.
Gary Larson ired The Creative Evolution Of Stand-Up Comedians
The Far Side Creator Respected Artistic Growth
For those who could handle the pressure of getting up on stage with nothing but a microphone and trying to make a group of people laugh, Gary Larson considered this to be an amazing forge of creative ability.
Despite noting that he was personally more suited, as a humorist, for cartooning than stand-up, Gary Larson did acknowledge the upsides to embracing creative failure – if one can withstand it:
The enviable side of this same coin is that comedians, perhaps at the price of such humiliating moments, are always learning from experience, throwing out jokes that didn't work, fine-tuning the ones that do. Small audiences become testing grounds for bigger audiences, and the comedians in turn are undoubtedly being shaped by the experience.
Despite his apprehension about stand-up comedy, Larson was actually not a stranger to being on stage and performing for an audience. In addition to creating The Far Side, Gary Larson was a jazz guitarist; though where a musician can obscure a mistake in the flow and the din of the other instruments around them, a stand-up comedian is out there alone, and that is exactly what he ired about them.
Still, for those who could handle the pressure of getting up on stage with nothing but a microphone and trying to make a group of people laugh, Gary Larson considered this to be an amazing forge of creative ability. In a sense, this was the kind of scrutiny that he both wished he could endure, and was happy to avoid. When he sat down to work at night, it was just him and the page; ironically, Larson was perhaps his own harshest critic, and the most difficult to please audience member of all.
The Far Side Complete Collection
Fans of the far side can't up this master collection of Gary Larson's finest work. Originally published in hardcover in 2003, this paperback set comes complete with a newly designed slipcase that will look great on any shelf. The Complete Far Side contains every Far Side cartoon ever published, which amounts to over 4,000, plus more than 1,100 that have never before appeared in a book and even some made after Larson retired.
Gary Larson's Existential Outlook On His Relationship To Readers
An Audience Of One
Instead of an "audience" to worry about – that is, many readers, and many different reactions – Larson instead concerned himself with the imaginary singular reader.
Using this distinction between cartoonists and comedians, Gary Larson went on to offer a more detailed explanation of his relationship to his reader, which was more complex than it might initially seem. Here, Larson marks another interesting divide, introducing a terminological distinction between "audience" and "reader," that is almost philosophical in the way it separates the two. For cartoonists, he offered the radical suggestion that there is "no audience," stating that:
Cartoonists learn nothing from experience. There is no experience, really. At least nothing gained from "audience interaction." There is no audience. There's just an editor. And you, of course. There you are, probably sitting by yourself much like you are at this moment, reading your local newspaper or some other cartoon-rized publication. Maybe you're at home, sitting at the kitchen table, or on a bus, or in a diner, or on a park bench, or in a waiting room, or a prison cell...
In essence, I like to imagine that you're as alone reading one of my cartoons as I was when I drew it. It's the only way I could bear it, I think. No "audience" – just you. Alone. Like me.
Instead of an "audience" to worry about – that is, many readers, and many different reactions – Larson instead concerned himself with the imaginary singular reader.
That is to say, when Gary Larson thought about how a reader would respond to The Far Side, it was this hypothetical lone reader. He didn't devote time to worrying about how scores of readers, encountering his work in newspaper comic pages across the country, were going to receive his humor. Rather, he pictured himself as being in communication with an ideal "reader" – one who might not "get" his humor every single time, but would always be receptive to it.
For Larson, this was as necessary as it was liberating – to have wasted his energy worrying about mass appeal would have made writing The Far Side untenable to him, and would have sapped the cartoon of what made it so consistently wonderful throughout its run. As he noted, he opted for "ignorant bliss" when it came to anything but the abstract conception of a reader, and he forsaked the thought of an "audience" entirely, in contrast to some of his legendary contemporaries, such as Garfield's Jim Davis.
10 Genius Far Side Comics About Writer's Block (& Other Creative Woes)
Gary Larson knew the ups and downs of being a writer as well as anyone, as exhibited by these brilliant Far Side s from over the years.
Gary Larson Embodied The Best Attributes Of A Humorist In Any Medium
A Comic Icon
Gary Larson confronted social norms, and conventional conceptions, delightfully twisting and skewering society and modernity in ways that audiences – to begrudge their existence for a moment – clearly responded to, making The Far Side not only successful in its time, but enduringly popular to this day.
Despite the critical difference Gary Larson observed between the art of cartooning and the art of stand-up comedy, there was one virtue exhibited by the best comedians that he unquestionably embodied. Through The Far Side, Larson opened himself up to the world – even if what readers found within was often "confusing, obtuse, esoteric, and strange." As silly and inscrutable as it could often be, The Far Side was also unequivocal in its perspective, and while it never hit readers over the head, there was a quietly confrontational strain that ran throughout the strip from start to finish.
That is, Gary Larson confronted social norms, and conventional conceptions, delightfully twisting and skewering society and modernity in ways that audiences – to begrudge their existence for a moment – clearly responded to, making The Far Side not only successful in its time, but enduringly popular to this day. This was what made Larson an invaluable late 20th-century humorist, with a place of prominence in the history of American humor comparable to stand-up comedy legends like Lenny Bruce or George Carlin.
Hyperbolic as this might initially seem, it is important to consider how unique, and how irreplacable The Far Side is in the canon of American cartooning. That is, it represented a similar kind of seismic shift in the average American's understanding of what is funny, in the same way as the greats of stand-up. In this way, as critically different as the role of the audience is in cartooning and stand-up comedy may be, The Far Side's Gary Larson is a sterling example of the ways that gap can be bridged.
Source: The Complete Far Side Volume Two
- Writer
- Gary Larson
- Colorist
- Gary Larson
The Far Side is a humorous comic series developed by Gary Larson. The series has been in production since 1979 and features a wide array of comic collections, calendars, art, and other miscellaneous items.
