Dan Piraro's Blog, page 4

Lessons for 2011

Bizarro is brought to you today by Save The Date.

This is my first post of the new year, 2011, unless you count the two posts I did on January 2nd, which could technically qualify as posts in the new year if you want to get all literal about it. One of those, entitled "Plans for 2011" was one of my better efforts, I think, so if you haven't read that yet, please do. I hope, with all humility, that it makes you smile. Or at least twitch in a positive way, no worse off than you were before you began.

Today's offerings are lessons for us all in the new year. In the first cartoon, we see a gentlemen mistaking a dog which has been trained to assist the disabled for a common waiter. Shame on him. The day after this cartoon appeared in papers, I received an email from a person whose living is assisted by a service dog, wishing to place shame on me for drawing this cartoon. Let this be a lesson to us all in the new year: never do anything that might be misinterpreted by anyone on earth.

Our next cartoon is about smart rodents and smart phones. Because of the size relationship between the two, a mouse or rat could use a smart phone as a big screen TV. Like the one your brother-in-law has so he can watch those crappy reality shows he and his ugly wife are hooked on. Like you really need to see Kim Kardashian's butt LARGER than actual size. But our clever little rats have chosen a classic Mickey Mouse cartoon. Good for them. Let this be a lesson to us all: I hate the fact that I even know who Kim Kardashian is. What is wrong with America?

This doctor cartoon is silly. It is a play off the expression, "Money doesn't grow on trees." If you are reading this and saying to yourself, "I have never heard this term, wtf does it mean?" you are likely from another country. That's fine, we like foreign readers here at Bizarro Headquarters. The term is used for situations in which a person is wasting something. If your stupid brother-in-law with the ugly wife buys a new pair of shoes every week and throws the old ones in the trash, his wife might say, "Hey, Rick. Money doesn't grow on trees." Let this be a lesson to us all: Don't say this to your husband if he is a foreigner.

If you would like to see the cartoon I published on New Year's Eve, just look to your left right now. I have used a bit of an Escher-like trick here in turning the pub sideways, to indicate that the gentleman on the street has had too much to drink. Like all teenagers (and anyone of any age who enjoys marijuana), I really love M.C. Escher's work. I have done a number of cartoons based on him and have found that while publishing a cartoon about Escher is considered legal satire, the Escher family is really tight-fisted about letting you use them for anything else. Like if you put one on a T-shirt for sale, they'll sue you.

This last cartoon is one I did in 1997, which I believe would make M.C. himself twitch appreciatively. But don't expect to get it on a T-shirt. The Escher family doesn't want to share even a few hundred of the millions of dollars they have made on their relative's talent. Let this be a lesson to us all: Be born with a talented relative who will leave you his estate so you never have to do any work other than stopping other people from using their talents to comment on him.

That's all the lessons for today. I hope your 2011 is full of rapturous and indescribable joy and prosperity the likes of which no mere mortal has every experienced and lived to tell the tale.

And don't forget to save the date, of course. You'd hate to be out of town at some boring seminar for work on a day like this.

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Comedy Show!

My good friend and one of the most phenomenal comedic talents alive, Will Franken, is playing in San Francisco this coming Friday. Be there or be sad.

Will Franken's "Sunsets in Every Scene" (new one-man show)
Friday, January 7th, 2011
@ The Purple Onion
140 Columbus Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94133
8pm, $20

Buy TICKETS here, daddio.




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Plans for 2011

(Why don't you click this cartoon and make it larger. Are ya chicken?)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Vintage Eyewear.

Welcome to 2011, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls and undecided. It's going to be a fabulous, futuristic year, I can just tell. How do I know? Well, for one thing, 363/365ths of the year is still in the future. What does that tell you?

I'm not one to make new year's resolutions because I drink so heavily that by January 3rd I can never remember what it was that I was going to resolve to do, but here are some things I am looking forward to doing in 2011. I hope you'll join me.

1. Learn to fly. I'm not talking about in a plane –– who can afford all those costly lessons and the big metal machine itself? Not a middle-rate cartoonist like me, I assure you. So I'm going to learn to fly using my mind. Scientists estimate that the average person uses only 10% of his brain. I'm pretty sure I used that much just trying figure out how to set up my Facebook page, but that means I've got 90% of it left to dedicate to flying. I'm going to start working on it tomorrow, which means I'll have to dress pretty warmly.

2. Write, produce, direct and star in an Academy Award winning film. This is something I've been wanting to do since I was a kid. I'm not getting any younger, so this is my year. If you're a member of the academy, please vote for me next December or whenever it is that that happens.

3. Invent teleportation. I think this could be big. For years, people have been complaining about how crappy the airlines have gotten, well wouldn't it be cool if we didn't need them at all? We could just push a little pocket remote or something and appear wherever we wanted to like magic? I think it would really catch on. Of course, those of us who have learned to fly with our mind might still take that option from time to time if the weather is nice and we want to see the sights.

4. Clean my motorcycle. I ride my motorcycle all the time in good weather and I kind of neglected keeping it clean and shiny last year. I'm going to keep up with that in 2011.

5. Change some football rules. I like to tape football games (college and NFL) and play them back while I'm inking and coloring cartoons. It's mindless entertainment, something I don't really have to watch all the time, I can just look up when I hear the announcers getting excited. But some of the rules need changing. One is that if you act too much like an orangutan, you get thrown out of the game and can never play again. I don't like it when somebody makes a good tackle or scores a touchdown, then beats his chest and bears his teeth and stomps around like King Kong. It's just not good sportsmanship. I say, let your skills do the talking and skip the drama. This new rule will put an end to that.
Another is that if a referee makes a bad call and they don't reverse it after I see the slow motion replay, they get fined. While I'm at it, I'll make it so the money they pay comes to me.

I think that's all I am planning for the new year but it is after noon so I'm pretty drunk, so who knows, I may be forgetting something. If you've made resolutions for the new year, make sure it isn't to join a gym and get in shape, because statistics show that the gym will be super crowded by people like you for the first couple of months, then you and everyone else will stop going but you'll have to send money to the gym every month for a long time. That's their secret business plan. For the rest of the year you'll not only hate yourself for being out of shape, but also for being $? a month poorer. A better way to stay in shape is to steal someone's purse three times a week. It encourages you to run like hell and you'll make a few bucks each time.



















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Four for Fun

Bizarro is brought to you today by Ghostbusters, 33 A.D.

What are your plans for New Year's Eve? My plans include food, drink and my sofa. Leaving the house on NYE in NYC is as attractive to me as trying to tie a bonnet on the head of a wild gorilla. It might make for some good pictures but it isn't worth the risk.

Here are four cartoons from last week's Bizarros as they appeared in newspapers. I got a few emails from readers who enjoyed the "outside the box" gag, but none from anyone who objected to it. When I do funeral gags, I often get mail from someone who had recently attended a funeral and that consequently found my cartoon a painful reminder. I sympathize, but dark humor always carries that risk and I believe that laughing at tragedy is a valuable part of the human psyche, so I soldier on.

My editors and I worried that I might get some negative feedback from the "Family Outing" cartoon, especially since it ran right before Christmas. Most of my readers enjoy this kind of irreverence but some are offended by anything that might cause them to have to explain something to their children that they find uncomfortable. (If you are one of these kinds of parents, drop me an email, I'd be happy to tell you how to deal with these things. The technique is called "The Simple Truth," and you'd be surprised how easy it is and how well it works.)

Still others are only sensitive about controversial issues during holidays, which mystifies me beyond my comprehension. I could go crazy trying to predict all of those points of view so I just print the ones I think are funny when I think of them and put on my comedy helmet to deflect the potential poo storm.

"Check/Background Check" is a dating gag. Nothing new to report about this one except that it is a good idea to run a background check on anyone you intend to date more than once. Especially my cousin Keith, who is a complete tool and will destroy your credit, ladies.

My "Gettysburg Tweet" cartoon got lots of positive response and I am grateful, for I, too, really like it. One reader told me I got the quote wrong, however. Apparently the correct verbage is "fathers," not "forefathers." Before I drew this one, I looked it up to get it right but then threw "forefathers" into it somehow. Maybe my brain was regurgitating part of one of the Tea Baggers favorite catch phrases. Or maybe I just slept through my 7th grade history classes too often. At the time, I couldn't imagine why a big famous rock star was going to need that info so I just blew it off.

Let this be a lesson to you kids in school: you'll probably never succeed at anything, certainly not at what you think you will, so study hard in school so you won't be both a failure and an idiot. You'll thank me later for this advice.

Until next time, enjoy your day, study hard, and if you learn nothing else in this life, learn to recognize sarcasm.


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Holiday Gone

(click the image for LARGERNESS)

Bizarro is brought to you today by Glad It's Over.

I had a dandy holiday weekend, hope you did too. CHNW and I went up to Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary to hang out with a small group of our best friends, ate, drank, napped, hiked, watched movies, regretted having eaten and drank so much, then ate and drank more. On the way home on Sunday, we were nearly trapped in the blizzard that hit the Northeast Coast and only barely made it home.

Thinking back to Hurricane Katrina and the number of wingnuts who claimed that god hit New Orleans with that storm to punish the gays, I can't help but believe that this year god chose to hit one of the most populated areas in the world on one of the busiest travel days of the year to punish those of us who celebrate Christmas. Following that logic, I'd have to say that it is not a Christian god that is in charge of weather. Where are the wingnuts now?

The cartoon above has three puns donated by readers. If you think you've got an original pun that might work nicely in a future Bizarro Sunday Punnies, leave it in the comments section of one of my posts. I don't publish these suggestions, whether good or bad, so don't be alarmed if you don't see your suggestion in the comments section later.

Semi-interesting note about the cartoon above: I send in each cartoon in several different sizes and formats for the various uses that my various clients use variously. In one of them, the one used for the Interwebs, I mistakenly put "Lone" Ranger, instead of the punnier, "Loan". So if you saw the one that says "Lone Ranger" on the web somewhere, that's why. I told you it was only semi-interesting.

Got to get back to removing snow from my various orifices. Hope to be seen by you here tomorrow!


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Cartoon Festivus

Bizarro is brought to you today by The True Meaning of Christmas.

In case you're at home this weekend surfing the net and ignoring the holidays, here are some cartoons to help. Or, if you're completely engrossed in the holiday jamboree, are dressed like a flying reindeer, find yourself between two rounds of caroling and decided to check your favorite blog (why, thank you!) here are some cartoons to entertain your head. Or, if you're sitting in the jungle somewhere surfing the net on some magical device that needs no electricity and have no idea what holidays I'm even talking about, here are some cartoons for whatever reason makes sense in your freakish world. Let's get on with it.

1. Larry is limber and this means nothing at all but I just think it is a very funny, deadpan joke. My wife is very limber (lechers are thinking, "lucky you! woof! woof!") and sometimes does this exact stretching move while we're watching TV at night. I don't mind that, of course, but occasionally she'll do it on a commercial flight and even though I know I shouldn't, I get embarrassed. She has other painful-looking stretching behavior as well, the strangest of which is one wherein she swallows her own foot and leg, poops it out and balances on it as it sticks out of her butt. She says it's a "great stretch."

2. Do you like odd coincidences? Well, I sure do! I wrote this cartoon as sort of a follow-up to a cartoon I did about a "Mothman" super hero back in October. In this case, the insectarian super hero will be called on to eat a sweater that is smothering the city. (When you have stopped laughing, dry your eyes and move on to the coincidental part.) Here's the coincidental part: I wrote this most recent Moth Man cartoon in mid-November, drew it and sent it in to be published on December 15, which just happened to be the next day on my schedule. No other reason that that. Around December 1st, a couple of weeks after I drew this and a couple of weeks before it appeared in papers, I saw a movie called "The Mothman Prophecies." I'd never heard of it before, but it is about a legend that has grown around a fatal bridge collapse in West Virginia back in the 1960s. It had nothing to do with my cartoon but was sort of a fun movie and I didn't think anything about it. On December 16, the day after this cartoon appeared in papers, a woman wrote to me and said her husband lived in that small town in WV when the tragedy happened and he got a kick out of my cartoon appearing in the papers on the anniversary of the bridge collapse! WHAT?! Mothman lives!

Side note, I totally missed the point that cardigan sweaters button up the front. My bad. I think I meant to say Dr. Argyle.

3. Here is another gag by my friend Cliff. He's funny. How does someone in 3 B.C. know that Jesus will be born in 3 years? And I'll bet they didn't even have cartons of milk then. The whole thing is just ridiculous.

4. But wait! Here is another cartoon about expiration dates. What in tarnation? If it were possible for you to know the date of your death, would you want that knowledge? I'm on the fence about it. It would help immensely in planning your finances and career moves and you could engage in all kinds of dangerous behavior with the confidence that it wouldn't kill you. On the other hand, it would loom over you like a damp yak dangling by a thread. No matter what you did, you would never lose sight of that date approaching and even if you could forget it from time to time, you'd still be able to smell it. Hmmm.

5 . For those of you sitting in a jungle unaware of the holidays much of the world is celebrating this week (see first paragraph) the term "seats in the nosebleed section" refer to seats in a huge arena or stadium, way up near the top at the back. The idea is that you are so high up, the altitude will make your nose bleed. Well here are nosebleed seats of a different sort! Hahahahahahahahahahahahah!

Hope everyone has a smooth and salubrious holiday weekend. I'm off to Woodstock Sanctuary to hang with my peeps.

NY Giants

I'm a sports fan, though not fanatically so. I was writing to a friend of mine about the hideous loss by the NY Giants yesterday, a game which they led by a score of 21-3 at halftime. I thought some of you might enjoy it. You will find it funnier if you have a good understanding of football, but others might enjoy it, too. Let's begin.

Eric,
I watched the Giants/Eagles game yesterday and was severely injured. The onslaught of utter idiocy by several members of the NY Giants football club in the second half was more than I could bear. I closed my eyes, covered my head, crawled underneath a heavy piece of furniture, held my nose. But still, the tempest was too great and my entire body was crushed by the debris that was their 2nd half performance. Even with my nose pinched closed, it filled my lungs. Now I have Stupid Lung Disease.

When I watch pro football, I often find myself exclaiming, "How can you be so stupid as to jump offsides on 4th and four? Shouldn't you KNOW by now that that's what the other team is counting on? They are NOT going to hike the ball. They're going to wait until time runs out, take the penalty and punt. Just relax, wait for 15 seconds, doze off if you like, the whistles will wake you. Or, if these concepts are too abstract for you, look at that ball that is right in front of you. Don't move unless it does."

Or sometimes I say, "How did you get this far in the NFL and not know that the people wearing costumes different than yours are going to try to take that ball out of your hand? They aren't chasing you because they like your cologne, it's the ball you're holding loosely, away from your body. If you want to save your body a lot of wear and tear, just hand it to them. But if you, like them, want to keep the ball, you should consider holding it snugly, perhaps with both hands."

And I frequently say something like, "The whole reason those big numbers are on the front and back of everyone's blouse is so participants can be identified. See that number? That belongs to their best receiver. You, or someone dressed like you, will want to stay close to that person in case the ball comes near them. It's the ball you're after, remember?"

And when the Giants play the Philadelphia Eagles I often find myself exclaiming to the people in blue on my screen, "See that guy who gets the ball first thing on every play? He can run real fast. May I suggest you put someone who can run real fast up close so they can stop him? Those huge, fat guys don't seem to be able to touch him unless he stands stock still. I doubt they could catch me either, and I'm 5', 7" and 52 years old."

So during yesterday's ass-raping defeat, I wondered why the coaches have so much trouble drilling these simple principles into their players' heads, concepts that are the sort of thing that anyone should be able to manage, athletic ability notwithstanding: Hold it tight, don't move until the ball does, don't let that one guy run around by himself. It seems so simple, but then I remember that it is professional football players they are talking to. Some of them are smart enough to understand deeper concepts than "hit anyone wearing different clothing than yours real hard," but there are always plenty on any team who couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for the coaches. Like trying to teach a dog not to bark when someone knocks on the door, or teaching a cat to purchase her own cat food online. Some of these guys are only using a small, primitive part of their brain that the rest of us have abandoned for all uses except illicit sex in an airplane toilet.

I can't help but feel sorry for the smart people on a team, but then I remember that that is why I dropped out of football in Junior High, even though I was still pretty good at it. Success depends on a team effort and there were just too many drooling idiots on the team. So I suppose smart NFL players got what they asked for by sticking with it.

I won't get started on how much money some of these neanderthal primates make. Anyone who thinks life on earth is a meritocracy is a big enough boob to play pro football.

Thanks, I feel better.
d

"This is why I don't carry a gun to games." –– Tom Coughlin, NY Giants head coach

Holiday Message

For those of you who care about this sort of thing, here is a link to an essay by comedian, Ricky Gervais, about his reasons for being atheist and how he deals with it in a world that is predominately hostile towards his lack of belief. His views also happen to be mine.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/12/19/a-holiday-message-from-ricky-gervais-why-im-an-atheist/

Bizarro Family Holiday Newletter

The Bizarro Family Holiday Newsletter, 2010, is brought to you by Holiday Gift Ideas.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Crazy Quanza, and Happy New Year to you all! Well, it is hard to believe that another year has passed here at Bizarro Headquarters, it certainly was a full one and brought many blessings!

Going all the way back to last spring, we received the wonderful news that my eldest daughter, Krapuzar, was getting married even though she was neither pregnant nor getting ugly. Having long ago become convinced that she was a lesbian, this was a shock to the entire family. And the best news of all was that the young man she married is not an asshole in any way, shape, or form. I don't think he even has an asshole, that's how special he is! We couldn't love him more, unless he were rich.

My youngest daughter, Krelspeth, had a very blessed year, too, as she did not add a single letter or piece of punctuation to her police record. Yes, 2010 will go down in Piraro family lore as the year that her police file remained in the file drawer throughout! Great job, honey! We all love you! (If you're reading this, call us. We won't try to find you or judge anything you've done. We just want to know you're all right.)

CHNW and I are doing well, too, and have much to be thankful for this year. We finally stopped going to the marriage counselor and so we saved a lot of money! We have also found that we argue less and enjoy each other's company more since the majority of our marital strife in recent years seemed to be centered around the fact that that cow of a counselor always took CHNW's side on everything! Even when she was caught shoplifting. I mean, I think a man has a right to complain about the cost of bail and legal representation when his wife is arrested for attempting to steal a pregnancy test, which she could easily have afforded! Don't you? Especially when that man got a vasectomy 7 years ago, so she couldn't possibly be pregnant in the first place. Give me a break.

I also received news from afar that was quite a surprise. Apparently I have a son that I never knew about and whose mother I don't even remember. He lives in a part of far northern Canada that can only be reached by dogsled and is very dangerous to even attempt to get to, and it only costs him $500 a month to live there. That's pretty cheap considering it includes food, utilities, housing and transportation! I'm sending it to him until he gets on his feet, one of which was nearly gnawed off by a polar bear he startled late one evening while taking out the trash. I feel really blessed by this new relationship, not only because he is a terrific young man, but because he could easily have lived somewhere like Paris and needed way more money every month. I mean, when I was traveling in Paris in my early years, I got lucky WAY more often than when I was in Canada. Which, to be honest, I don't remember ever visiting.

Career-wise, Bizarro has had a terrific year, too. To date, I have made over $61 from the ads on my blog, which thousands of people read every day for free. Forget about the PayPal Donation button just to the right of this post, just knowing that my copious efforts give you an occasional smile is payment enough for me.

Another great feather in my cartoonist cap is that another year has passed without some big, lumbering corporate movie studio making some glitzy, multimillion dollar 3-D animated abomination of my cartoons. What could be worse than having some Hollywood blockbuster with your name all over it and then watch it in the theaters and say, "Hey, that's not what I had in mind at all. That's kind of stupid." So, I've dodged that bullet for another year, thanks for asking.

Speaking of "dodging a bullet," I was very lucky and blessed to have dodged the one fired out front of our building last October. It seems the instigator of that particular flying piece of hot lead was the girlfriend of the guy who works at the tattoo parlor on the corner. She suspected he was "fooling around" with her cousin, to whose buttocks he evidently had recently applied a "Tweety Bird" tattoo. I was on my way to the deli across the street when I heard the whole story, or her side of it at least, and the bullets began flying. One narrowly missed my left ear by the sound of the air being cleaved by it. The tattoo guy was not as blessed as I was that day, however, as she managed to blow holes through several brightly-colored carp on his chest. Now we'll never know his side of the story.

That's the update from Bizarro Headquarters this year, hope your year was as special as ours. From all of us to all of you, may the invisible super hero in the sky of your faith bless us all in the coming year!


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Rust

Bizarro is brought to you today by Ironing Man.

A reader wrote to me and suggested a cartoon involving Iron Man's difficulty with water and this is what came of it. I'm particularly proud of the art on this one so click on the image and blow it up right big like to fully peruse it. The only thing I used reference for was Iron Man himself, the rest of it was pulled out of the gooey gray gelatin in my noggin. I get excited by being able to draw something particularly convincing right out of my head. Such is the simple life of the simple-minded artist.

It's the weekend, so this is short and sweet.