Creative Blogs

People say some pretty funny things. Sometimes it is meticulously planned out by a comedian. Other times, it is our President mangling the English language. Either way, the following should make you crack up.

1. Rodney Dangerfield - With my wife I don’t get no respect. I made a toast on her birthday to ‘the best woman a man ever had.’ The waiter joined me.

2. George Bush - I’m not the expert on how the Iraqi people think, because I live in America, where it’s nice and safe and secure.

3. Steven Wright - The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.

4. Henny Youngman - A drunk was in front of a judge. The judge says “You’ve been brought here for drinking.” The drunk says “Okay, let’s get started.”

5. Dave Attell - Yeah, I know, some people are against drunk driving, and I call those people the cops. But you know, sometimes, you’ve just got no choice; those kids gotta get to school!

6. Steven Wright - I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.

7. Rodney Dangerfield - I came from a real tough neighborhood. I put my hand in some cement and felt another hand.

8. George Bush - One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected.

9. Bill Maher - Kids. They’re not easy. But there has to be some penalty for sex.

10. Steven Wright - A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.

11. Jerry Seinfield - Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God’s final word on where your lips end.

12. Jay Leno - Al Gore has found a new job - teach journalism at Columbia University. Ironic isn’t it? The guy who did all the coke winds up going to the White House, the guy who didn’t do coke goes to Columbia.

13. George Bush - To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say: You, too, can be president of the United States.

14. Jay Leno - In California, 50 women protested the impending war with Iraq by lying on the ground naked and spelling out the word ‘peace.’ Right idea, wrong president.

15. Bill Cosby - A word to the wise ain’t necessary — it’s the stupid ones that need the advice.

At the end of the day, we all usually need a good laugh. Hopefully, the above quotes and jokes provided it. If not, there are tons of sites with them, so get to clicking!

Getting access to information these days is the easiest it probably has ever been in the history of man. The internet, of course, plays a huge role in this. That being said, I bet you don

Ever wondered who is the most popular cartoonist working today? It is relatively easy to tell with movie stars, simply looking at box office sales and how often they appear on talk shows. But cartoonists are a private bunch.

In the last quarter of the 20th Century, i would have to say my two favorites were Gary Trudeau (Doonesbury) and Scott Adams (Dilbert). Adams is still going strong with Dilbert. He happens to have an economics degree, worked many years in corporate America, so probably has a lot of stories to tell, and does so well in his strip. Even as late as 2000, the late great Charles Schulz was drawing Peanuts (he retired that year). Many say his later work was some of his best. I tend to agree, but he took some risky chances during the Viet Nam War and ruffled some feathers. In the early 1970’s his strip debated sensitive issues such as religion, war, and politics. He was never one to make excuses or take prisoners.

Adams was known to have drawn funny pictures of his bosses. But more importantly, he rendered a reflection of “new corporate America” which was a bit inhumane, at least architecturally due to the fact we were all packed in cubicles, which he, as most workers, hated. Gary Larson (The Far Side, Rick London (Londons Times Cartoons), and Dave Coverly (Speed Bump) go down as my all-time favorites. Of course cartooning like any art is subjective. I like this kind of cartooning because of what I call “extreme editing”. All three cartoonists use single panels to tell a story that could be written in a book. To me, that takes more than genius. It takes something that not even many Mensans can claim to have or implement.

Mensa, to me, is a bit outdated in that it does not take EQ Emotional IQ into account. Some of the brightest people I have ever known or been exposed to, these brilliant cartoonist for instance, might not be Mensa material, but they are just as brilliant. This new type of brilliance was discovered by author Robert Goleman in the mid-1980’s and he wrote a best-seller on it called “Emotional IQ” which I have read and is excellent.

I doubt seriously that Larson, London, or Coverly could pass the Mensa test, but I also doubt any Mensan could do what these three high EQ geniuses can do.

When Gary Larson and Dave Coverly started, periodical and newspaper publishing were king. In fact, the Internet was in its infancy and rarely if ever used for cartooning. I wish Coverly had more books out. I am sure it would be like when Gary Larson did and I collected them and kept them near my bed. If i felt tired or bad, I simply opened a Far Side book and my mood changed for the better. That is how I feel when I go to Rick London’s cartoon site today.

Rick London and designer Yves St. Laurent had similar challenges. Both were in artistic fields and neither could draw. So they formed a “team of creative illustrators to illustrate their work, and then it was manifested into products. St. Laurent retired at the top of his field, and London is still plugging away with Londons Times, creating new cartoons daily that appear on his site, over 8500 in all. It is truly amazing.

Choosing best in working cartoonist today is no easy task. But when one views Rick London’s collection, many of them well-known classics, published worldwide and highly critically-acclaimed, one has to wonder how he did it starting with nothing. but he did. My vote is for Rick London as the greatest cartoonist and humorist in our lifetime.

I like to pontificate about The Far Side because I can only name a few humorists who had a great impact on my life before I launched Londons Times Cartoons. Two were cartoonists and one of them had a very major impact, Gary Larson The others were comedians and actors such as Steve Martin, Mike Myers, Steven Wright, Red Skelton, Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason, Lucy, Rowan & Martin, Peter Sellers, and several dozen others. One other cartoonist was the late great Charles Schulz, and they all influenced me in a different way.

The reason Gary Larson had such an impact is that, like a lot of confused young people in our society at that time, his even greater confusion made sense of it all, and did so with very few words, sometimes no words, but only an illustration. He was a step above so many other cartoonists in that he most often “stuck to what he knew”. He had a major in biology and aside from the frequent use of cows and insects, biology and mad funny looking scientists were often his theme-de-jour. Before Larson launched The Far Side, he was working on a cartoon called “Nature’s Way”. The Seattle Times was the first paper to publish it in 1979. A year later, Chronicle Features picked The Far Side up for syndication and it ran fifteen years. Larson put down his pin on New Years Day, 1995. For awhile we heard nothing. Then he wrote a very biologically-accurate children’s story about worms titled “There’s A Hair In My Dirt” which quickly became a New York Times Best Seller. When asked why he was retiring, he said, he simply didn’t want to become mediocre. He stopped while he was ahead. He could be labeled more than a cartoonist, perhaps a “cartoon surrealist” of sorts. A lot of his cartoons featured bovine behavior and conversations that cows had when no people were around. The behavior was often erudite to make the reader understand he or she perhaps might not be so much smarter than these cows (and other animals, from squid to deer to bears. A great many dogs and cats appeared in The Far Side as well, usually as “mortal enemies”. One of the most popular is a dog who has led a trail with chalk that said “Cat Fud” that led to an open dryer in a laundry mat and the dog thinking while holding the door open ready to close it, “Oh Pleeeeeze”, but the cat is just standing in the middle of the laundromat not taking the bait.

One popular Far Side panel features two chimpanzees grooming each other. One discovers a blonde human hair on the other and asks “Conducting a little more ‘research’ with that Jane Goodall tramp?” Her institute board members felt it was in bad taste, and had their lawyers draft a letter to Larson and his distribution syndicate, in which they described the cartoon as an “atrocity”. They were stopped in their tracks, though, from no other than Goodall herself, who loved the cartoon. Since then, all profits from sales of a shirt featuring this cartoon benefit the Goodall Institute. Most recently, Larson has published a 2007 calendar and 100% of the royalties benefit Conservation International. Not many people, including myself, have the kind of talent, Gary Larson has. And when they do, they don’t behave as well as he does. People are always looking for role model and turn to sports, acting etc. They might try turning towards this quiet retired cartoonist. I think he has his act together. I will always remember The Far Side, and its continued impact on me, and even better knowing there is such a good guy behind it.

Around 1986, I was a happy-go-lucky tv producer and playwright in Washington, D.C. I wore the gratuitous gray pinstripe suite and red or yellow power tie. I lived on Capital Hill, just a few blocks from the Smithsonian. I never went unless I had out-of-town guests.

The phone rang about 3 p.m one Thursday. It was my two friends Julie and Beverly, originally from Mississippi like me, and now my neighbors on The Hill. I was being invited to a Far Side exhibit at the museum. I wanted to sleep. They talked me into going.

Though I loved and The Far Side and still do, thought is hard to find, when the invitation came in mid-afternoon at work, I already had burnout, and knew i wanted go go to sleep early. I was usually dead-tired at the end of a work-day, and the though that went through my head was, “Why wait in a long line for Gary Larson when he’ll be in the paper tomorrow?”

I could tell Julie and Beverly were not listening, soI got dressed. They picked me up and we at the museum within five minutes. The lines, though long, moved quickly and the exhibit was beyond my wildest imagination. The panel cartoons had been blown up onto 5 or 6 foot poster boards and were hanging from the ceiling. Many of them were some of my most memorable from the newspaper.

I was like a little kid in a candy store running from one cartoon to the next. I had seen almost all of them in the Washington Post. Suddenly I was a kid again and a happy camper.

Suddenly a feeling came over me that I can’t explain. It was an odd one and not very comfortable. Though I laughed and chatted with my friends about our favorites throughout the event, I remember the discomfort that I couldn’t seem to shake.

After exhibit I went straight home and couldn’t hold back the tears much longer. I remembered something very important from 3 decades earler. I had written a shoebox full of cartoons very much like the futre Far Side. The year was 1973 and it did not yet exist. I put that, and many other dreams behind me to make a living. But this one persisted. I had to try it before my death.

I remember making the mistake of showing them to my mom, who told me to “throw them away and do my homework”. I continued to do my homework, but I never through away the cartoons. They remained in my closet until that very night.

I remembered sharing them with mom and her negative response, but, I remember thinking, “Even if Mom is not around, I would still be scared to launch such a project for fear that people had thought I lost it”. It was then that I realized Gary Larson was not just a cartoonist but a brave pioneer in the world of print journalism.

Ten years later, I launched Londons Times Cartoons with one other artist. Since that time I have worked with numerous artists and I’ve continued writing and assigning the cartoons. The site has become the biggest of its kind on the Internet and certainly the most visited (over 8.9 million visitors since 2005 when we began counting). The cartoon itself is nearly 11 years old. We have seven cartoon merchandise stores.

So may obstalces and naysayers, so little time. Was I to listen to the naysayers or follow my bliss? Bliss one out and I was able to make a rea contribution to the world, as small as it was. If I can do it, anyone can.