Dan Piraro's Blog, page 3

Punny

(To see this cartoon in all it's large, detailed glory, click the caveman's over-hanging brow.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Reader Appreciation.

Here is number 12 in my occasional series of "Sunday Punnies." If you missed the first 11, click here.

The deal is that readers send me their puns and I use some of them for these kinds of cartoons. If you've got a pun that you think might be good, post it in the comments section of this blog or email it to me. My email address can be found on Bizarro.com. Please don't abuse it, it's feelings get hurt rather easily.

Rules and notable things:
1. You get no compensation other than the delirious thrill of seeing your idea in the funnies.
2. Tell me what name you want me to sign it with if I pick your pun.
3. It has to be original. Don't be sending me no dang thang you heard at the beauty parlor or on the Interwebs.
4. I will not post the puns that people leave in the comments section, so don't expect to see them listed there and don't be afraid to leave me your name or email or whatever. I'm good at keeping secrets.
5. If you are Joe Flacco, don't bother leaving a pun, I won't use it. You and your Baltimore Ravens knocked the Kansas City Chiefs out of the playoffs and upset my dad.

That's about it. Any time you have a couple minutes to spare and want to LOL outloud, I hope you'll drop by this blog. I post 3 or 4 times a week and feature new cartoons, old ones, odd videos, funny pictures of me and my clan, and peculiar musings from the inner recesses of my brain goo. Thanks for stopping by.

To see some of the past Sunday Punnies, click here. For real this time.

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Thoughts

Bizarro is brought to you today by Free Thinkers.

I've been remiss in my posting this week so here's a batch of cartoons to catch us up. Do we have to discuss them all in detail? I'm not convinced we do.

The fly cartoon that kicks off today's show was very popular with readers according to emails and comments I've received. What can we deduce from this? That my readers are into poop jokes. It makes a cartoonist proud.

Here's a very weird and slightly disturbing cartoon about a pregnant woman. What does it mean? Why does her uterus have a voice mail system? I'd be happy to tell you if I knew.






As a result of many emails from various folks, I do know that this cartoon about a seeing-eye dog for the colorblind is funny albeit totally impossible. Dogs don't see color the way humans do so they would be pretty useless at this task. That's just one of the many reasons this is a cartoon and not an illustration in a medical textbook. Don't take these things so seriously, kids.

Static electricity is always funny, especially when it has to do with embarrassing undergarments. Enough said.









Years ago I had an obese doctor who smoked in the office between seeing patients. You could see him down the hall in his office puffing away. I always thought it was funny. You don't have to actually practice good advice to give it. That's the lesson I hope you take away from this cartoon.

Not that my cartoons are about teaching, they're not. In fact, don't follow any advice I give in a cartoon, I don't want to be responsible for your life. If you can read a cartoon, you have a brain. Learn to use it responsibly and things will go better for you. Most of my readers are already independent thinkers so I realize I'm preaching to the choir. I'm just talking to that one guy somewhere who is taping my cartoons to his walls every day, studying them, trying to spot patterns and messages, devising a path by which to live his life, running a piece of red yard from one pushpin to another creating a giant mess that will later mystify detectives when they are investigating his gruesome crimes. Yes, you know who you are. Stop it.
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Conway

A classic comedy sketch from a true genius, Tim Conway.

Pooh Talk

(For a big, whopping view of this cartoon, click on Pooh's honey pot.)

Bizarro is brought to you today by the Human Heart.

I don't normally post my Sunday cartoons until later in the week, but this one was so popular that I decided to chuck it up on the Interwebs a bit sooner. This was a collaborative effort between my buddy, Cliff, and I . He suggested the pun, "Edgar Allan Pooh," and I came up with a way to portray it.

My chosen vehicle, of course, is from Edgar Allan Poe's story, The Tell-Tale Heart, in which the narrator kills his roommate because his gooey eye creeps him out and buries him beneath the floorboards of his house. When the cops come over to chat with him about the disappearance of his roomie, he arrogantly invites them in to sit down just above the hidden body, believing he is so clever he can never be caught. He clearly had not seen a single episode of CSI, where they can catch you because you left behind a mite from your eyelash. (Sidenote: If his roommate had been CSI's David Caruso, I could totally understand his behavior. That guy creeps me out more than a hairy, talking mole.)

SPOILER: Anyway, he starts to go nuts (like he wasn't already) and thinks he hears the corpse's heart beating beneath the floor. He thinks the cops can hear it, too, and confesses. I've often wondered how he could think he was so clever in hiding his crime when the thing would begin to stink to high heaven in a day or so but whatever.

The truth is that something very similar to this cartoon actually happened in A. A. Milne's original manuscript for The House at Pooh Corner in 1928. Pooh was quite naturally creeped out by Eeyore's nailed-on tail and becomes obsessed with it. In a fit of hyperactivity brought on by a weekend honey binge, Pooh caves in Eeyore's head with the honey jar and buries him beneath the floorboards.

Believing this would damage the book's "cute quotient," editors removed this episode from the final book.

Video Fun

I'll post a regular entry tomorrow, but for today I wanted to share this video which gave me a big chuckle.

Big

Bizarro is brought to you today by Fairy Tales.

My weekend post is late, I'm sorry for the three or four of you who wait for these things. For the rest of you who just happen by now and then, ignore everything up to this point.

It is well documented on this blog how I feel about reality TV. I don't just think it is awful, I think it is ruining the world in the way that Baptists thought rock and roll was ruining the world in the 50s and Sarah Palin thinks that intellect and reason are ruining the world today.

But as they say in Brooklyn, whatayagonnado? As long as humans run the world we can expect a never-ending wave a classy quality.

Here's a little cartoon about a couple of mosquitoes. I'd like to apologize to my readers whose lives really do suck and this cartoon was but another painful reminder. You see, to a mosquito, sucking is a good thing. Whether you like or dislike this cartoon, take it up with my bodyguard, Big Rey, who thought it up. I didn't want to print it, but I hate to see a grown man cry. Especially one who has grown to the size of Big Rey and is wearing a shoulder holster. It's heartbreaking.










Now we come to my version of a famous fairy tale. I enjoy the visual and the gag well enough, but what really strikes me is the sexual undertones. If that's the old woman who lived in the show with so many children she didn't know what to do, and that's their father and he's 8-stories tall, how did they manage to...?

To make this lurid illustration larger, click Lover Boy's little toe.

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Dancing

I am a huge fan of Tom the Dancing Bug and no fan of political correctness, so it seems fitting that I share this week's brilliant TDB with you. Click the image for greater enlargingmentation.

To read the TDB blog, click the offensive word in this sentence: Sometimes I enjoy a cracker with my soup.

Confusion

Bizarro is brought to you today by

I got a couple of comments from readers who didn't quite get this headache gag. While I fully understand how a person might not understand it, I'm not sure how to explain it. I think it is one of those oddball gags that you either find amusing or you don't. There is no secret to it that you're not seeing, it's just that this guy has a headache and his wife and dog are part of the equation. If you're still out to sea, get married, sit around with your spouse for 10 or 20 years then look at the cartoon again.*

I'd like to say this about the "Backwards Caps" cartoon: I hate backwards caps. Yes, perhaps "hate" is a strong word for how one could feel about a particular fashion, you're right. Okay, I think it is dumb. A baseball cap is designed with a bill to protect your eyes from the sun, not the back of your neck. It's the entire point of its existence. It is like wearing shoes on your hands. However, if you were the only person to wear it backwards, then you're probably just quirky and individual and I admire that. But if you started doing it just because everyone else is, you're just being a sheep. If, on the other hand, you feel confident that you like the way it looks independently and you'd wear it that way even if you had never seen anyone else in the world do it and tourists were asking to take a picture with you because you looked so silly, then it would be wrong for you NOT to wear it backwards just because it was a fad. And if you find that you're just more comfortable looking the same as everyone else, own it, girl, and don't change a thing. There is also no reason in the world why you should care about what I think of your hat stylings.

In the interest of full disclosure, I was wearing what I call "old man hats" a few years before they caught on with youngsters and now they have become a symbol of shallow hipsterism. But I refuse to give it up because I liked them before they became a fad and I still like them. Again, no reason at all you should care.

I hope this has been sufficiently confusing so that you now don't know what the hell to do with your baseball cap. Life is like that and we've all learned a valuable lesson.

And here, to round out our confusion, is a cartoon from 1997 that even I don't understand. I have no idea why it occurred to me or why I thought it was funny but it did and I did and I still do. Figure this one out for yourself, you're on your own.


*I'd like to mention that this cartoon in no way reflects my own marriage to CHNW. We have a ball virtually every day and she gets more adorable and interesting year by year.**

** Yes, she is a regular reader of this blog.

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Prepared

Bizarro is brought to you today by Preparedness.

If your head and eyes are not frozen solid in a single position, move them just an inch or so to the left and see the cartoon there. This will increase your understanding of my next sentence. People liked it.

Sometimes simple ideas work best and this one is a perfect example. I got lots of emails from readers who really liked the "interest-free checking" cartoon. It was the result of a collaboration with my buddy, Andy Cowan, who is a former writer for "Seinfeld". (He was responsible for their most famous episode, in which Kramer is elected Supreme Dictator for Life of all of North and South America, then has the rest of the cast executed. Rent it if you haven't seen it.)

Our next offering today is in the field of locomotive laziness. I think we can agree that the Segway scooter is an odd invention. On a scientific level, it represents an amazing breakthrough in gyroscopic technology as regards ambulation without moving your legs. God forbid we should burn one calorie more than is necessary, that would be unAmerican. But, like trans-gender immigrants, it has had trouble fitting into American society. Segways are not powerful or safe enough to be in traffic and most communities consider them too dangerous to allow on sidewalks, so they're pretty much confined to open fields and empty parking lots.

People with absolutely no sense of vanity occasionally use them for security purposes at malls or airports, but what was once predicted to be the biggest thing since indoor plumbing has mostly become an expensive novelty. I have no compunction about looking ridiculous, so I ride these things any time I can hijack one. I don't own one, of course, but they're fun to buzz around on when you can get hold of one. I kind of feel sorry for them, like trans-gender immigrants.

For some reason, the Interest-Free Checking gag reminded me of an old favorite of mine from 1997, so here it is. Again, I like the simplicity of it. I hope you do, too.

We're expecting another big snow storm tomorrow, so I've got to get to the gun store today and stock up on weapons and ammo in case there is a run on supplies at the corner food shop. Good Americans can never be too prepared.


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Zombie Fools Day

Bizarro is brought to you today by a 20% Chance of Snow Flurries.
What better day to talk about April 1, 1997 than January 8, 2011? Mankind may never know, so let's talk about it today.

Somebody in the National Cartoonists Society decided back in late '96 that it would be fun to get all the syndicated cartoonists to switch strips on April Fool's Day, '97 and not tell anyone, as a joke on readers everywhere. Not all of the artists cooperated, of course, but plenty did and the funny pages everywhere were full of comics drawn by the wrong person that day. You can imagine the laughter, knee slapping, and dumbfounded drooling that ensued all across North America. (Neither can I, but play along.) The way it worked is that each participating artist was assigned another feature to draw and their own feature was assigned to someone else. None of these were direct swaps.

Here are the two results I was involved in (click the pics for a larger view.) I was asked to draw Greg Evan's strip, "Luann," and Bill Griffith of "Zippy" was asked to draw Bizarro. If you're interested in seeing more of these legendary swaps, go here: April Fools Cartoons 1997.

Next, Let's talk about last Sunday's wide-screen, technicolor, panoramic Bizarro comic. Because I'm a semi-public figure, I am connected to a lot of people on Facebook. So I get about eleventy dozen requests a day to sign onto some kind of cause or page that aims to end a crisis or petition to ask someone to stop doing something or start doing something or think about what they're doing. It's mind boggling. And my mind already has a tendency toward bogglation. I could be wrong but I can't imagine a Facebook page ever solved anything other than getting Betty White to host SNL. So this cartoon is the result of the boggling caused by the godzillian FB requests I get everyday. You can't fight Zombies with Facebook: words to live by.

(again, click the cartoon below for a view that achieves largerness)












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