Dummy Love
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic, and this is my weekly blog post. The large Sunday Bizarro comic above is mine, as are the comments below. The past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics that follow were written and drawn by my partner Wayno. For more fun, check out Wayno’s weekly blog post.
And here’s this week’s ANSWER KEY to my Sunday comic’s Secret Symbols.
Good moment to you, Jazz Pickle.
As I’ve mentioned in this space before, cartoonists enjoy a kind of unspoken competition regarding common cartoon tropes. Ventriloquism is one of those themes that lots of cartoonists dip into, along with things like heaven, hell, crash-test dummies, castaways on a single-palm-tree island, etc.
Wayno and I have both done numerous ventriloquist cartoons, and I’m sure we’ll do more. Here are a few of my favorites.
I drew this one ages ago, but as I write this, it reminds me of the kind of thing RFK Jr. might do when testifying before Congress. I could see him bringing a ventriloquist dummy to testify as an expert on one of his crackpot theories. Of course, the question of which one is the dummy would be inescapable.
I’m particularly fond of this one as it satirizes the violent and superstitious nature of so many members of our species. The way a certain political party has used trans people as demons in their culture wars jumps to mind.
OMG! People wearing the “wrong” clothing! Call out the National Guard while we build a bonfire!
This is a fun one that leaves open the question of whether the ventriloquist is being cleverly deceptive or the dummy is sentient.
Here’s a different take on a similar scene from Wayno. I love that it employs two common cartoon tropes at once, making the humor multidirectional. I’m assuming it’s just a coincidence that he named the dummy “Danny.”
Finally, I recently heard from a reader asking permission to use one of my Secret Symbols as a tattoo. I happily agreed and appreciated that he bothered to ask. Reappropriating our cartoons without permission is so common these days that it’s nice to know at least some of our species understand the concept of copyright and intellectual property.
Thanks, Jazz Pickle Lew! I hope you enjoy your leg for years to come!
Time to enjoy some chuckles from Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons from the week…
If you’re an accomplished air guitar player, as I am, you’ll enjoy Wayno’s version of the art form with ukulele. Wayno plays a 3-D ukulele in his 3-D life, so he draws this character from experience. If you’d like to see the selfie he took for reference, it’s here in the latest edition of his free, weekly newsletter. (Not the same as his weekly cartoon roundup blog post.) You’ll admire both his dedication to the role and the shirt he’s wearing in the photo.
A reader wrote to me asking what the above cartoon means.
They say it’s bad form to explain a joke, but I think it’s a little elitist not to. Not every reader gets every joke. I don’t get every New Yorker cartoon (that qualifies me as a member of a large club, I know), but when one is explained to me, it doesn’t ruin my chuckle of appreciation if I think it is funny. Although in the case of the modern New Yorker, it’s a 50/50 proposition at best. (That comment was a bit elitist, come to think of it.)
The cartoon above is an illustration of the common typo or spelling mistake between “desert” and “dessert.”
Modern students only need a bag big enough for their cell phone, which contains all the information in the world so far. Who needs to think when you can afford a device to do it for you?
In the theater boxes of Shakespeare’s day, it was common for people to participate in any activity of their normal lives during a performance. In addition to waste product expulsion, people engaged in cooking, eating, bathing, copulation, performing surgery, working on their cars, and golfing.
Or so says AI.
Orwell’s masterpiece of an inevitable dystopian future has recently been retitled “Project 2025,” and it’s much scarier.
It’s also Paleo/Keto-friendly, no doubt.
If you pop over to Wayno’s weekly blog post (different from his newsletter I linked to above) you can see a photo of Jazz Pickle Sheila, who is very happy with one of our new Secret Symbol T-shirts. Nab one for yourself and send us a photo of you in it, and you, too, can experience 10 seconds of the 15 minutes of fame you are due.
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