The New Yorker vs. Gary Larson

I can’t decide if this Danny Shanahan cartoon from the August 27th issue of The New Yorker is a tribute to Gary Larson’s Far Side panel shown below, a ripoff, or just a coincidence.

I think Shanahan is reaching with the “funny” pun; it took me a while to realize that, oh, it’s a clown the elephant has stepped on and clowns are funny. See, it’s a play on words.

Larson is more to the point, and you can’t deny the humor in the grimace-face of the flattened caveman. If I remember the history behind Larson’s cartoon correctly, he couldn’t even get it by the censors at his syndicate, and it either lay unpublished for years or ran with a watered down version of the caption (“I THOUGHT I heard something squeak.”).