Far Side creator Gary Larson brilliantly described the difference between cartoonists and comedians

Gary Larson, creator of The front sidehad a sense of humor that was as iconic as it was iconoclastic – but according to him, his observational eye for comedy would not necessarily translate into the world of stand-up. According to Larson, one main thing separates the two different types of humor: How the crowd dealt with them.

Just like a comedian’s joke, For side Cartoons were designed to get an immediate response, but the main difference was that a stand-up comic was traditionally there in the room with their audience. By the nature of the medium, newspaper cartoons operate in insol.

In other words, they give their authors no quantifiable way to evaluate the reactions of the members of the audience – except, of course, that editors continue to put their cartoons in the newspaper. While for stand-up comedians the audience was all too real, for cartoonists like Gary Larson, readers were a more abstract matter.

Gary Larson on the thing separating comic writers and stand-up comics: the audience

Larson can’t stand to “bomb”

Of course, the success of The front side During his time in publishing Gary Larson gained some sense of how readers responded to his work at the macro level. At the same time, both positive interactions with fans, and negative reactions from critics, offer him insight into the impact of his work on individuals. After that, write in The Complete Front Side Volume Two Almost a decade after his retirement, Larson admitted 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 thought too much about what was going on “out there”. Indeed, a cartoonist is largely blind to reader reaction. This is the great wall that separates us from our distant and hairy cousins, the stone. (I really don’t know if the “hurrier” part is true, I’m just guessing.)

The author went on to explain that as a cartoonist he was offended by failure, in contrast to the way those who stand up rise from it. Larson wrote:

Compare and contrast the two branches of the humoroid tree. For starters, we cartoonists are in blissful ignorance when we “bomb.” We don’t see the frozen faces, or heart the collective groans or the universal “Huh?” What 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 able to do stand-up, he was quick to recognize that he didn’t have the constitution to tell jokes in front of a live audience.

The front side Creator respects artistic growth

Although he noted that he was personally better suited, as a humorist, to cartoons than stand-up, Gary Larson recognized the upsides to embracing creative failure—if one can withstand it:

The flip side of the same coin is that comedians, perhaps at the cost of such humiliating moments, always learn from experience, throwing out jokes that didn’t work, fine-tuning those that did. Small audiences become testing grounds for bigger audiences, and the comedians in turn are undoubtedly shaped by the experience.

Despite his concerns about stand-up comedy, Larson is actually no stranger to being on stage and performing for an audience. In addition to creating The front sideGary Larson was a jazz guitarist; Although where a musician can amplify a mistake in the flow and the noise of the other instruments around them, a stand-up comedian is there alone, and exactly what he admires about them.

Still, for those who can 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 examination that he both wished he could endure, and was willing to endure. When he sat down to work at night, it was just him and the page; ironic, Larson is perhaps his own harshest critic, and the most difficult to please audience member of all.

Gary Larson’s existential outlook on his relationship to readers

An audience of one

Using the distinction between cartoonists and comedians, Gary Larson continued to offer a more detailed explanation of his relationship to his readers, which was more complicated than it might initially seem. Here, Larson marks another interesting division, Introduce a terminological distinction between “audience” and “reader”, which is almost philosophical in the way it divides the two. For cartoonists, he offered the radical proposition that it is “no community” Stating that:

Cartoonists learn nothing from experience. There is no experience, really. At least nothing is gained from “audience interaction.” There is no audience. It’s just an editor. And you, of course. Here you are, probably sitting by yourself much like you are at the moment, reading your local newspaper or some other cartoon-accessorized publication. Maybe you are 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 are as alone reading one of my cartoons as I was when I drew it. It’s the only way I can bear it, I think. No “audience” – just you. Alone. Like me.

instead of a “Audience“To worry about—that is, many readers, and many different reactions—Larson instead concerns himself with the imaginary singular reader.

that is, When Gary Larson thought about how a reader would respond to The front sideIt was this hypothetical unique reader. He didn’t take the time to worry about how many readers who encountered his work in newspaper comic pages across the country would get his humor. Rather, he envisioned himself as in communication with an ideal “reader” – one who may not “get” his humor every time, but 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 front side Untenable to him, and would have sapped the cartoon of what made it so consistently wonderful during its run. As he said, he decided to “Ignorant happiness“When it came to anything but the abstract conception of a reader, and he abandoned the idea of ​​a “Audience“Totally, in contrast to some of his legendary contemporaries, such as peanuts Charles Schultz and Garfield Jim Davis.

Gary Larson embodies the best attributes of a humorist in any medium

A comic icon

Despite the critical difference that 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 certainly embodied. by The front sideLarson opened up to the world—even if what readers found in was often “Confusing, confusing, esoteric and strange.” As stupid and inscrutable as it can often be, The front side was also unequivocal in its perspective, and although it never hit the reader over the head, there was a quiet confrontational effort that ran throughout the strip from start to finish.

That is, Gary Larson confronted social norms and conventional concepts, delightfully twisting and mocking society and modernity in ways that the audience – to bury their existence for a moment – clearly responded to, making The front side Not only successful in its time, but enduringly popular to this day. This was what made Larson an invaluable humorist of the late 20th century A place of prominence in the history of American humor comparable to stand-up comedy legends like Lenny Bruce or George Carlin.

Hyperbolic as it may initially seem, it is important to consider how unique and how irreplaceable The front side is in the canon of American cartoons. That is to say, it represented a similar kind of seismic shift in the average American’s understanding of what is queer, in the same way that the great standings did. In this way, as critically different as the role of the audience in cartooning and stand-up comedy may be, The front side Gary Larson is a sterling example of the ways in which gaps can be bridged.