fisherdvm
Contributor
- Messages
- 3,577
- Reaction score
- 52
- # of dives
- 200 - 499
I find his cartoons hilarious.
"Larson's comic has been attacked by people and groups to whom it caused offense. Several Far Side jokes have involved violence and murder, often between animals or humans and animals. Though not visually gory, some readers have found such strips to be too gruesome and dark for the comics page.
One cartoon shows two chimpanzees grooming. One finds a human hair on the other and inquires, "Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?" The Jane Goodall Institute considered this to be in bad taste, and its lawyers drafted a letter to Larson and his distribution syndicate in which it described the cartoon as an "atrocity." It was stymied, however, by Goodall herself, who revealed that she found the cartoon amusing. Since then, all profits from sales of a shirt featuring this cartoon have been donated to the Institute. (Larson was attacked by Frodo, a chimp described by Goodall as a bully, while visiting Gombe National Park in 1988. Goodall commented, "He somehow managed to get news of the cartoon.")[citation needed]
Larson has occasionally engaged in self-censorship, acknowledging that some of his cartoons were seriously over the line. The Prehistory Of The Far Side shows a number of these.
In The Complete Far Side as well as The Prehistory Of The Far Side, interspersed with the comics, there are letters from angry citizens to newspaper publishers, demanding the removal of The Far Side from their pages, and often citing a canceled subscription if this was not met. However, these protesters constituted a small enough minority that papers were able to continue to run the strip, with the matter becoming moot when compilation books were produced. Larson himself often laughs at the controversies of his comic as evidenced in The Prehistory of the Far Side, in which he writes that these people have usually misunderstood the cartoon."
"Larson's comic has been attacked by people and groups to whom it caused offense. Several Far Side jokes have involved violence and murder, often between animals or humans and animals. Though not visually gory, some readers have found such strips to be too gruesome and dark for the comics page.
One cartoon shows two chimpanzees grooming. One finds a human hair on the other and inquires, "Conducting a little more 'research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?" The Jane Goodall Institute considered this to be in bad taste, and its lawyers drafted a letter to Larson and his distribution syndicate in which it described the cartoon as an "atrocity." It was stymied, however, by Goodall herself, who revealed that she found the cartoon amusing. Since then, all profits from sales of a shirt featuring this cartoon have been donated to the Institute. (Larson was attacked by Frodo, a chimp described by Goodall as a bully, while visiting Gombe National Park in 1988. Goodall commented, "He somehow managed to get news of the cartoon.")[citation needed]
Larson has occasionally engaged in self-censorship, acknowledging that some of his cartoons were seriously over the line. The Prehistory Of The Far Side shows a number of these.
In The Complete Far Side as well as The Prehistory Of The Far Side, interspersed with the comics, there are letters from angry citizens to newspaper publishers, demanding the removal of The Far Side from their pages, and often citing a canceled subscription if this was not met. However, these protesters constituted a small enough minority that papers were able to continue to run the strip, with the matter becoming moot when compilation books were produced. Larson himself often laughs at the controversies of his comic as evidenced in The Prehistory of the Far Side, in which he writes that these people have usually misunderstood the cartoon."