If you’re wondering why Gary Larson penned a special message to a Tampa resident in today’s Far Side cartoon (on the back page of this section), wonder no more.
Bill Sutton, who Larson sends a “thanx and tip o’ the hat to” is a fictional person made up to imitate a cartoon called They’ll Do It Every Time by James Hatlo. Hatlo’s readers often supplied him with material, and when he used an idea, he thanked the contributor in the corner of the drawing. “Thanx, and with a tip o’ the Hatlo hat to . . . ,” he would write.
“Gary wasn’t thanking anyone in particular, he was just making fun of those cartoons,” said Universal Press Syndicate editor Jake Morrissey. “It’s a takeoff on the old line. It was kind of a silly cartoon to begin with. That’s the whole point.”
Larson is layering a turn of the phrase: ‘crack the whip’…which means: to use power or authority to make a person or group work harder or behave in a disciplined way.
The dogs taking over control is part of the joke. Another part is if you look at the dogsled chain as a whip and were to ‘crack it’ like an actual whip, that would send the musher (authority figure) into the water…and thus breaking the chain of your oppressor.
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