Gary Larson

So the brief came in, and they had mentioned somewhere on the brief that, that we could do TV.

So what did the agency see? You know that old Gary Larson cartoon of what you say to dogs and what dogs hear? So, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah Rex.

You know, when the, you're saying to the dog, "Look, Rex, we've been out before.

There's some food..." But anyway, he's just hearing his name.

And certainly when I was overseeing registrars in their training, the question would sometimes crop up, does this person have the necessary hand-eye coordination to do surgery? And my usual response to that was, well, if they can get up in the morning, get dressed and drive to work, they have the necessary hand-eye coordination to be a surgeon.

And if they adhere to the Gary Larson cartoon with the guy sitting on the side of the bed and the sign in front of him on the wall that says, first the pants, then the shoes.

Exactly.

Well, thank you so much, Tim.

We humans are profoundly influenced by the people and the environment around us.

In November of 1982, when I was still a teenager, cartoonist Gary Larson published in the newspapers we were all reading in those days- He published one of his wonderfully absurd cartoons.

It showed a single sheep standing on its two hind legs, its arms raised, trying to get the attention of a large herd of sheep that continued grazing without paying much heed.

The sheep cries out, "Wait, wait, listen to me.

He's got a big nose, he's got a big chin, but he mostly looks like all of them.

All of the other ones, except, yeah, he's like, "I feel like drawing a bigger nose and chin." It's starting to, like, you know, like, you, you look at a comic artist, like, if you're watching, like, The Far Side or something, and you're like, "Yeah, it's just a Far Side Gary Larson comic"?

Yeah.

That's what these have become.

And I was like...

And, you know, every day you would get a new comic from, you know, uh, J- Jim Davis, Gary Larson, uh, um, the Dunes, the new Doonesbury.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

We bought five Yoppy Bebs and didn't say shit.

Do you know Gary? No.

What?

Oh, I was, what are, what's the other Larson? Isn't there a Larson that wrote like sci-fi shit? Larson sci-fi?

I would argue that Gary Larson wrote sci-fi shit.

Is that, is that what I'm, is that who I'm thinking of?

No.

Oh, you would argue that though? Wait, so Gary Larson like is in, as in the far side.

And yeah, I think...

At the time, Gary Larson was very popular.

Do you remember Gary Larson? I don't know if he's still with us, but his cartoons are very heavily syndicated, single panel cartoons, oblique sense of humor.

I thought I could do something like that, like Gary Larson.

So I think I sort of attempted to do that and I sent...

I made my first book of cartoons, which was called Slug Trails.