Crazy Couch

Bizarro is brought to you today by Dog Walker.

Have you ever been up sh*t creek without a paddle? (I cleverly added the * to that word so that it would be family friendly. Everyone knows that children are no good at Wheel of Fortune.)

Of course you have, we all have. And the message of this cartoon is to pay more attention to your paddle than to your wardrobe. Of course, if you're up sh*t creek without a paddle, this advice is useless. And if you're out canoeing in one of those smiley face shirts, you deserve whatever you get because everybody hates those things. Unless you're wearing it ironically, in which case you probably deserve to be visited by hillbillies, ala Deliverance. (Wow, that was bitter. I didn't know until I typed this how much pent up aggression I have toward ironic shirts.)

This cartoon about light reading is a bit of nonsense with no particular message. Unless it would be that if you find yourself bored enough to read the ends of light bulbs over and over, it's probably time to quit your job, leave your wife, and go on a violent odyssey of some sort, ala Going Native, by Stephen Wright. (One of my favorite books, but not written by the Steven Wright who is a stand-up comedian and not funny.)

As long as we're discussing my damaged psyche, let's take a quick visit to Sigmund's Couch. I quite like this old cartoon from 1997, written and drawn two years after my divorce and the most therapy-intensive period of my life. Notice you can read "ID" on the sign above the door to rhyme with "bid," which is a Freudian term! Hahahahahahah! Also notice that back then I was often drawing the cartoon outside the borders. I did it because I liked it, I stopped doing it for reasons unknown. Probably laziness.

Let's hear it from all those readers who have enjoyed psychotherapy at some point in their lives. I only go when I'm really troubled, but I have to admit I love it. Something so soothing about talking about myself for 45 minutes without fear of interruption.

If you'd like to see these cartoons on various fine tidbits of merchandise, just click the 'toon. It's fun and painless!

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Retro Shrink Arms Nerd Speaker

Bizarro is brought to you today by Adult Speakers.

Gosh, it's good to be back at blogging. I've been busy as a very busy person this past week, out of town, suffering from inoperable hair loss, you name it. But now I'm back and blogging like a mofo, as the kids say.

Clifford, the retro caveman is a suggestion from my good friend, Cliff, so I named the character after him. He doesn't look anything like this, he looks more like this.

This cartoon with the doggy at the shrink was popular among shrinks. Several wrote to me about it which led to long email exchanges about my early childhood and feelings of inadequacy.

The long-armed doctor cartoon is one of those jokes that I wrote just to have a chance to draw a funny picture of a guy with very long arms. Every now and then that happens. Over the many years of my career, since the late 1900s, I've drawn an exaggerated version of just about every body part you can imagine. Except the naughty ones that god did not mean for us to acknowledge in public, of course. If we were not meant to be ashamed of parts of our bodies we wouldn't have been born into this word wearing underwear, I always say.

My last cartoon today is about a super hero calling himself "The Nerd." After this was published I thought I should have had a funnier line as a response. Something like, "I fill the inboxes of criminals with lame jokes." I'll likely change it to something like that for the book of super hero cartoons I have coming out in the spring.

Must get back to deadlines now, dear reader, for I am off to Columbus on Friday for Ohio State University's Festival of Cartoon Art at which I am a speaker.


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Conspiracies

Bizarro is brought to you today by Conspiracy Theories.

This cartoon got some angry letters from readers who believe that 9/11 was an inside job and felt I was making fun of them. Most of the letters were polite and chided me for being uniformed about the various holes in the "official" story and included links to prove their case. I've seen most of these sites before but viewed them again so I could be totally, totally informed.

I don't mean to insult any of you who believe this, but here is my position, for what it's worth. I have no doubt that Cheney and Bush (word order intentional) would have done such a thing if they could. But considering their utter failure at everything else they touched, I find it inconceivable that they could have pulled off a mission so huge and complex without everything going wrong. First, a lot of people would have had to be in the loop and history tells us that people are not good at keeping secrets; someone would have come forward by now with irrefutable evidence, not just conjecture. Second, you can find holes in every story, true or not. The human brain is irresistibly drawn to conspiracy theories, it's part of our evolutionary nature to study events, construct a story and draw conclusions. Different people come to different conclusions, but they can't all be true. As it turns out, the simplest explanation is usually correct. Bin Laden is the simplest explanation here, by far.

The Bush administration was clearly guilty of ignoring repeated warnings about the attack beforehand and using it as a tool to frighten the nation into attacking a country that had nothing to do with it. And we all know how well that worked out for the U.S. They used 9/11 in the most unscrupulous way imaginable to get what they had been wanting for years and that alone is enough to put them in jail forever. But I don't think they orchestrated it. I think it was Bin Laden. Just my opinion, we all have one.

As I said, most of the letters were polite but here is one that falls into some other category. I found it amusing, I hope you do, too. It appears here in its entirety, except for the signature.

THIS PAST WEEK ?NOT SO FUNNY BUT ALSO A LIE : "BUSH DIDN'T
DO 911 ... "MEANING ? HE DID , OR HE DID NOT ?AND YOU KNOW THE
DIFFERENCE >? BUSH DID NINE ELEVEN AND TWELVE AND 2 WARS ? I
REALLY LIKE THE BIZARRO COMIC , BUT I DID NOT GET THIS ONE ... SHAME ON YOU AND OUR GOVERNMENT FROM 2001 TO 2008 , AND THE LITTLE BOYS STILL COVERING IT UP ... I AM 76 YRS OLD AND DO NOT LIKE JOKES LIKE THAT . THIS /THAT WAS A" FALSE FLAG ATTACK ". MAY THE TALIBAN KICK PETRAEUS AS AND THEN YOURS .. I KNOW HEARST IS A RAG PAPER : I AM JUST ABOUT TO WRITE TO SCARPETTA,(PATRICIA CORNWELL ) PAGE 158 CHAPTER
10 ... BERGER LOOKS OUT HER WINDOW AND SEES FLIGHT 11 CRASH INTO WTC.
THEN THE SECOND PLANE HIT ... NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
FN PLANE CRASHED INTO ANY BUILDING ... CHECK OUT THE STATISTICS AT TRANSPORTATION DEPT (KNOWN HAS RITA ) DEPARTURES ,, FLIGHTS 11,175,77,
93 ? FLEW ON 9/10 , AND WERE PENCILLED IN HAS FLYING ON 9/11/2001
(MISSING THE TAIL NUMBERS AND DEPARTURE TIME ...

I responded to the other emails, but not this one. I don't actually speak this man's language and I couldn't be certain he has a translator available.

ON A DIFFERENT TOPIC:
Hey, kids. A reader just told me that somebody posted some random clips from my Baloney Show on Funny or Die. Please go to that site and vote "funny." I'm too young to die.

Thanks!

http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/d0d4a60502/the-bizarro-baloney-show-by-dan-piraro

Super Babies

Bizarro is brought to you today by Labor Pains.

I like this cartoon because I don't like people who take their kids too seriously. It is natural to think your baby is special: smarter, cuter, cleverer, stronger, faster, quicker, more intelligent, more talented. It's fine, it feels good, it's as it should be, but it is important to realize that it isn't true. It is a simple trick of evolution. If we weren't irrationally in love with our own babies, we'd kill them the first time they woke us up at 4am or puked into our hair. The simple truth that your ancient parental programming is hiding from you is this: your kid is average.

I raised two daughters to be happy, productive adults, so I have some experience in this matter, and, I am a self-proclaimed, unlicensed expert on human psychology and childhood development. As hard as your brain fights to battle my assertion, do yourself a favor and try to consider that I might be right.

Mathematically speaking, your kid has as much chance of being anything but average as you do of winning the lottery, and, as they say, the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. Overwhelming odds say your kid is average. Almost all of us are. That's the definition of the word.

And it means your precious little angel will be happy and healthy having an average childhood in which it plays with a ball, scribbles with crayons, and chews on a rag doll. It doesn't need Mozart in the crib or a French-speaking au pair or mommy/baby yoga class or chess lessons or tennis camp. And it most certainly does not need your constant interference and direction. Don't force yuppie activities on your kid seven days a week in hopes of developing the next superstar at something or other. What you'll develop is the next Lindsay Lohan. Your kid will hate you in the long run and everyone else will hate you now.

What your kid does need is affection and common sense discipline. If you don't have that to give then god help you both.

(This post is only meant for other people, of course, not you. Your kid actually is amazing and all the other parents are jealous. But let's keep it just between us. :)

Gay Cowboys

Bizarro is brought to you today by Flamenco Segway.

Here's a fun little ditty about a topic I've discussed here before. Among groups known for being homophobic are "cowboy types," whatever that means exactly. I was raised in Oklahoma and Texas and can vouch for the accuracy of this stereotype. In fact, when I was a teenager in Tulsa, I was often accused by strangers of being gay simply because I did not dress like a local hick. (I leaned more toward the British punk rockers at the time.)

But viewed objectively, one can't argue that cowboy clothing is unusually feminine: pearl buttons, embroidered shirts (frequently of flowers), fringe, scarves, pants with the butt and crotch cut out (chaps), high heel boots with pointy toes (often with embossed flowers and swirls), big shiny belt buckles with more flowers and swirls on belts with yet more embossed flowers and swirls and dangling handguns (the ultimate phallic symbol), flamboyant hats that make Truman Capote's seem macho by comparison.

Perhaps getting in touch with my own feminine side, I wear a lot of western shirts, though not the rest of the garb. I'm a fan of fancy, vintage cowboy shirts and have a collection of about two dozen. As a matter of fact, I'd really love to get hold of one of those outlandish suits that country western performers used to wear at the Grand Ole Opry, but I'm not holding my breath. I can't afford a new one and finding an old one that fits and is in good shape is a long shot at best. It's not the sort of thing you come across on Craigslist.

It is a common belief that those who complain most about gays are most likely to be closeted gays themselves, just as those who champion family values are the most likely to be caught with an underage prostitute. Maybe Brokeback Mountain is more common than we know.

Smart Apes

Bizarro is brought to you today by Ebony and Ivory.

Is there nothing to see here? Really?

One might have thought that there was nothing much left of racism in America until recently. Racism is a very primitive impulse, at one time in our distant past, it was beneficial to distrust those not from your "tribe." And while most of us have evolved to see the foolishness in that kind of thinking in modern society, there are still plenty of us who operate from the primitive parts of our brains. This kind of grunting, chest-beating throwback to our hairier ancestors rises and falls throughout history and so I suspect that this current wave, too, shall pass. Let's hope no serious casualties result in the meantime.

I often wish that "intelligent design" were true, so that our species might behave more intelligently.

This cartoon has nothing to do with racism, of course, it's just been on my mind lately. Tomorrow, a funnier post.

Parrot Psychology

Bizarro is brought to you by The Life of the Artist.

Knowing how to ask for what you want in life is an important skill. Many people suffer through years of discomfort within a relationship because they don't know how to ask for what they want from their partner.

This includes everything from simple things like, "I'd like you to spend more time on the backs of my knees during our lovemaking," to more complex issues like, "I would feel more comfortable if you did not sleep in full combat gear."

After years of therapy, I recently asked CHNW if she would be more sensitive to my insecurities regarding my checkered past. Specifically, I'd like her to stop introducing me as her "former jailbird husband." She happily complied, she'd had no idea it bothered me. Why did I wait so long?

I encourage all of my readers to work on these areas, as our friend the parrot is doing today.

Anorexia Pride?

Bizarro appears before you today courtesy of Contraceptive Lingerie.

When this cartoon appeared in the paper I got an email from a reader asking me why I don't like fat people. I get this kind of mail every time I do a joke about weight, usually from a person who claims that they eat right and exercise but are simply genetically predisposed to be large.

I am well aware that this kind of person exists and on the rare occasion when I make a fat joke, I am not poking fun at those kinds of people. In this case, however, I am not poking fun at fat people of any sort. This is simply a bit of word play: What kind of food would they serve in Heaven? Soul food, of course. If a soul eats too much of it...

So my sincere apologies to any readers who thought this was a cheap shot at large people. It was not, but I can see how it could be interpreted that way.

One objection I have to the "I eat right and exercise but I'm genetically disadvantaged" position is that obesity, especially among children, is epidemic in the U.S. and the "genetic defense" is far too often used completely erroneously. For the vast majority of people, eating right and exercising are plenty enough to keep them within the realm of what was a normal-sized American 40 years ago. But these days, a "normal-sized" person in the U.S. is someone who is under six feet tall and for whom anything smaller than an XL T-shirt is too tight. It's very difficult to even find a Medium T-shirt being sold at a public event where shirts are for sale. Vendors bring L, XL, XXL, and XXXL, because that's what sells. (And the majority of these shirts are not being sold to young men who are going for the baggy fashion thing.) This sea change in a couple of generation's time isn't a medical mystery. The simple fact is that as a society, Americans are sedentary, eat garbage, and way too much of it.

Class picture, 1970........ Class picture, 2008

The complaints many have about the fashion industry selling rail-thin girls as an ideal are warranted, to be sure. Being underweight is as dangerous as obesity. But I believe the movement to accept obesity as a natural or healthy state for more than a tiny percentage of the population is equally wrong. The added stress this puts on our already crumbling health care system is reason enough to fight this epidemic, especially among children. I'm not advocating discrimination against overweight people any more than I advocate discrimination against LGBTs or Muslims. But to my mind, being proud of obesity isn't much different from being proud of anorexia. It's just a more mainstream condition.

Just my two-cents worth, as usual. Sorry if I offended anyone and hope you got a smile out of the cartoon.

Laws of Nature and Beyond

Bizarro is brought to you today by Better Living Through Force.

I haven't much to say about this GPS cartoon other than I hope everyone understood it. The idea was that the GPS led them to a cliff above their destination, then instructed them to drive off the edge. It seemed funny when I thought of it, but I'm not sure about the final result. I like GPSs but I don't like the voice. I prefer to just use the map part, like the one on my phone, and find my own way. I don't trust the robot voice to always know the best way.

At long last I am back in front of my computer where I belong. I went to Florida this past weekend with CHNW. I was hired to do a speech for a humanist group down there, the Center For Inquiry folks, and had a great time. Good people, smart questions, laughed a lot, took me to lunch after. What's not to like?

After the talk on Saturday, CHNW, her dad and I drove to an interesting little place called Ybor City where we hit some shops and had a beer. In old timey times there was a big cigar factory there where hundreds of people hand-rolled cigars all day. The tradition continues as there are cigar shops all over the place and a few people sitting in storefront windows rolling away. If you're into cigars, this is a real treat.

This pic at left was taken with my iPhone and I think it turned out pretty swell.

Even if you're not into cigars, it is strange to see so many smoke-friendly establishments within
the borders of our law-infested land. Smoking is so uniformly despised in the U.S., even outdoors, that walking down 7th Street in Ybor City feels more like Cuba than Florida. I often get chastised by friends and fans for smoking cigars, but I try to be considerate. I usually smoke at home and never smoke around crowds of any kind unless I'm walking quickly. I figure if my passing by with a cigar is enough to set someone off, they need more help than anti-smoking laws can give them.

Lots of things annoy me momentarily in public – bad music, mullets, cologne, confederate flags, cigarettes(they smell very different from cigars because they are crap tobacco and full of chemicals), people wearing fur, the smell of someone's fastfood, people who talk too loud on cell phones, defenders of Dick Cheney, the way everyone but me drives – but I just figure that's the price of leaving my house.

I cannot imagine a society in which we legislate against everything that briefly annoys someone. This encyclopedia of signs at a playground in Sarasota springs to mind. Looks like fun, doesn't it?

THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT!

So here it is President's Day and Valentine's Day back-to-back. Who can afford all of the presents for both such important holidays, especially in this sluggish economy?!

The solution is to get that special someone (and yourself) a Bizarro iPhone app! Boy, am I excited about it! I've been working for months with some very cool app designers here in NYC and we've come up with a new innovation in the comics-for-phones field!

Previously, with other comics apps, you could only buy a given number of cartoons and cram them into your phone and when you'd seen them all, that was that. Could take you ten minutes, could take you ten years.

With the Bizarro app, a NEW COMIC is added EVERY DAY! (The same comic that appears in newspapers.) PLUS, at any given time there is a YEAR'S ARCHIVE of comics that can be accessed super easy and fast from a handy-dandy calendar page. You can also click to access bio info about me (oh! so funny!), info about Bizarro (more humor!), and a help link if pushing buttons on a phone ends up being more than you can handle. Also, you can shoot an email to your other cool friends who might like this app, and you can leave comments. Last, but not least, you can
click to access this very ever-lovin' blog.

ALL FOR ONLY $1.99 PER YEAR! How can we give all of these laughs, drawings, insights, and life-changing experiences away for only $1.99 per year? I'm not sure, I'll have to ask them about raising the price to something more appropriate, like $10K per week. But for now, the price is DEAD CHEAP, so don't miss it!

As you can see from the graphic below, the home page is super long, so scroll down, amigos!

MAY I READ MORE ABOUT IT NOW?
YES! READ MORE ABOUT IT NOW!





Click it to big it...

Belief

Bizarro is brought to you today by Other Bigfoot Disguises.

I have a few friends and acquaintances who believe in Bigfoot, Sasquatch, whatever you want to call it, so it's been on my mind lately and I've done more Bigfoot cartoons per calendar year than I normally would. Just for the record, I'm open minded but generally not a believer of things that can't be proven and I'm not a believer in Bigfoot. But how fun would it be to see Bigfoot in a pair of big, whapping clown shoes? Pretty dang fun, I reckon.

Some people say that not believing in things that cannot be proven takes the mystery out of life. But I think there is more mystery and wonder in the actual scientific nature of the universe than I could ever hold in my nano-noggin, so I don't feel the need to believe in magic, monsters, fairies, "signs", wizards, angels, gods, devils, spirits, or the like. It just doesn't interest me. If it interests you, go for it. Whatever works.

Tell your friends about tomorrow's contest, it's more fun the more people that play. Look how happy these previous winners are.

Happy Trails

Bizarro is brought to you today by High Class Motors.

I got lots of emails about this one. A few were from people who liked it because they'd had various types of personal experiences with babies on motorcycles (!) and the rest were from so-called "airheads," people who are fans of the BMW air-cooled "slash-5" series motorcycles from the early 1970s.

The bike in the pic is fashioned after mine, although mine is white, and many readers familiar with this era of BMW bikes recognized it and wrote to ask if I am an airhead. It was nice to meet so many other airheads around the country, thanks for checking in. Once the weather turns nice here in the northeast, how about we all meet for a weekend ride?

Thanks also to all of you who wrote to me with suggestions of where I should move to escape the NY winters. All were good suggestions, and I adding them to my research list. I suspect that eventually I shall end up in California somewhere, probably more southern than northern if only because of the weather, but you never know.

One thing that surprised me was how many people suggested Austin, Texas. It's a great town and I love it but I always sort of thought that it was because I used to live in Texas. It is nice to see that it ranked so highly among people nationwide, right alongside the SF Bay Area and southern California in general. Way to go, Austin!

Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Victoria, B.C. are all great and I'm very fond of it up there, but it rains too much. I've definitely got that light deprivation thing where if I don't get a LOT of sunshine, I begin invading neighboring countries and impaling people on tall sticks. Just bought one of those light-therapy-box-things and I hope it works.

Here's wishing you sunshine and unicorn until we meet again...

Countdown to Catastrophe

Bizarro is brought to you today by The End Of The World.

A lot of people wrote to "high five" me about this cartoon. It seems there is no shortage of folks annoyed by the gullibility of their family and friends regarding this latest threat to our survival. We humans are always looking for secret clues to the ultimate catastrophic ending, as though the universe were controlled by Dan Brown.

But it is an irresistible part of our nature as apes with huge, mutant brains: we take our natural instincts to spot patterns and guard against injury, and extend them to ludicrous degrees. My apologies to those readers who don't like hearing this, but in my opinion it is the very reason humans have always invented gods to explain the things we don't understand or can't comprehend. We live in a world with natural rules and order and when the facts of our existence fall outside of our understanding, a make-believe answer is more comforting than no answer at all. Most of us need to know that there is a Purpose to our existence and a destination beyond death.

So get ready for 2012, only two years to go unless The Rapture happens first. I can guarantee that 2012 will be every bit as catastrophic as the years 2000 & 1000, both of which caused widespread panic (among cultures who happened to use that arbitrary calendar.)

Of course, it would be especially cool if the catastrophe started at the stroke of midnight on 12/31/11, but in which of the planet's 24 time zones would that occur? Maybe the Mayan's time zone! But even they spanned two or three. Hmmm.

NOTE: This cartoon is based on a fairly obvious idea and I have no doubt it has been done before and will be done again. This is a prime example of one of those ideas that lots of cartoonists will arrive at individually.

The God Box

Bizarro is brought to you today by Circular Thinking.

I recently saw Julia Sweeney's ("Pat" on SNL years ago) one-woman show "Letting Go of God," and was very impressed. Like me, she was raised Catholic in a pretty seriously Catholic family. Being indoctrinated from infancy into any religion is a powerful thing and can affect the rest of your life. Julia's show is about how seriously she takes matters of spirituality and her journey to discover the meaning of it all. I recommend it if the subject interests you. It got rave reviews, which are well deserved.

I met Julia once in the greenroom of a small theater in NYC in which we were both performing in the same variety/comedy show. I think we are about the same age and I now know that our spiritual journeys have been remarkably similar. We both were raised to take religion seriously, which we did, then spent years of our adulthood educating ourselves in an attempt to make sense of it all.

This cartoon has nothing to do with her show or that journey, I just wanted to mention it. This cartoon is simply a humorous take on confessional booths, which, for those unfamiliar with the peculiarities of Catholicism, are small wooden booths in which you speak to a priest through a tiny window. The idea is that you tell him your sins and he gets god to forgive you.

My first trip to one of these booths was in the first grade. We were taught what to say and do and led into the booth to kneel before a screened window and tell a stranger (the priest on the other side of the wall) our "sins." Most six-year-olds have very few sins, of course, so the exercise is primarily meant to teach you submission and instill in you a deep-seated sense of guilt and self loathing. This sort of ritualistic Big Brother mentality can screw up a person for life. And it does, as I can attest and Julia explains so articulately in her show.

The good news is that you can find release from these ghosts if you work at it. Eventually, you can get out of the box.

Seeing Things

Bizarro is brought to you today by Hallucinating 101.

Hallucinating can be fun as long as it isn't dangerous. There are many recreational drugs that will cause hallucinations, some are safer than others, of course. As a matter of legality, I'm not recommending any of them. Hallucinating during a fever is no fun, mostly because a fever that high is quite painful and can kill you. Sleep deprivation can also cause you to see things, as any parent of a newborn will tell you.

Turns out it's fairly easy to cause a person to hallucinate. I'm not going to get all grammatically literal about it, but some optical illusions can reach the level of a sort of hallucination. If you've ever been in those fun house places that are built with everything all catawampus, and balls appear to roll uphill and water pours sideways, that's pretty close for my money.

Our brains are actually geared toward this sort of thing. We (and most other creatures) have evolved to spot patterns and make some version of sense of them, which helps us survive. For instance, it is much safer to see a shadow and think it is an intruder than to see an intruder and assume it is a only a shadow. This is one reason people so regularly see faces in random shapes, like the image of the Virgin Mary in your toast or the bark of a tree. One of my favorite examples of this is this image of Jesus in a dog's behind. Wow.

Here's a good one that has nothing to do with religion.

Glory To The Internets

A reader pointed me to this extraordinary page. I pass it along to you without comment, for now.

Placing the cursor over a person will provide a description of that character on the right. Be sure not to miss the group of people in the lower right corner.

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section.
Enjoy... http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/artwork/view_zoom/?artpiece_id=353

Caged

Bizarro is brought to you today by Bunnies.

I've never watched an entire cage match, only a minute or so. I find it fascinating like a car wreck: can't not look but then wish I hadn't. I'm not talking about the phony-baloney wrestling cage events, I'm talking about these Ultimate Fighter competitions, in which two guys literally beat the crap out of each other until somebody gives up or dies.

Humans are such a contradictory species. Without any natural fighting weapons – fangs, claws, stinger, venom, strength – we are still the single-most violent animal on the planet. We're the only one that fights for entertainment, for things we want but don't need, over control of the TV channel changer.

But even though I have an elitist/pacifist attitude toward violence, I admit I'm still attracted to it. My favorite sport is hockey and I enjoy reading or watching shoot'em-up stories about good guys blowing away bad guys. But I think a part of controlling our violent nature is to realize it is part of our nature. I've always found it easier to behave ethically if I recognize my ability to behave unethically. I wouldn't take a job as a college professor, for instance, because I prefer to remain faithful to my wife.

When I see these "cage fighters," I often wonder what kinds of horrifying places they must have come from to have honed these kinds of skills to such a high level. (Same with Dick Cheney.) It's probably good to toss them in a cage and let them duke it out where they can't hurt anyone else. In fact, I'm thinking of bringing a cage home for the holidays.

Don't Fear the Squeaker

Bizarro is brought to you today by Sexy Eternal Bozo.

Over the course of my career, I've done a lot of clown gags. I also fear and loathe clowns. Since my cartoons don't criticize clowns this may seem like a contradiction, but I see it more as a subconscious way of conquering my fears. Perhaps if I draw clowns often enough I will no longer fear them.

Nah. I'll always loathe clowns.

If you are a clown, please do not be offended. This is my problem, not yours. As I explained to my therapist a few years ago, it started when I was a child of perhaps three or four years. One of my earliest memories is of a visit to the circus, where I saw a clown that I particularly liked. My parents bought me a doll that looked like the clown, I suppose from a souvenir vendor at the circus, and I took it home. It was a constant companion until a few weeks later when it came to life and murdered my entire family. I escaped by hiding in a potted plant where I was discovered by authorities days later, paralyzed with fear.

I spent the rest of my childhood in a Catholic orphanage where I also learned to hate nuns.

So here's a clown cartoon. I love Smart Cars and enjoy drawing them. And although I hate clowns, I really enjoy drawing them, too.

Que Sero Sero

Bizarro is brought to you today by Clean Skin.

As longtime readers of this blog know, I suffer from chronic depression. My whole family does, except for my younger brother, whom the rest of us killed during Christmas dinner a few years ago. We just couldn't stand all that damned jolliness.

For those of you who are not biologically inclined, serotonin is the crap in your brain that makes you happy. So in medical terms, if you don't have enough of it or the spigot that connects to your serotonin vat is clogged, you get depressed for seemingly no reason. That's why antidepressants were invented. Not really to make everyone happy, just those of us with a rusty vat faucet, and not happy all the time, just normal most of the time.

They work pretty well for me, with a few side effects, all of which are more tolerable than feeling like the world is coming to an end in the next few minutes for no discernible reason.

I envy people with a lot of natural serotonin. Envy is a vast improvement over what I used to feel for them, which was contempt and deep, deep hatred. With the help of antidepressants and meditation, I've found that I'm actually a happy, easygoing person trapped in the body of an *sshole. (Thank goodness I can afford my pills. Lots of people can't, but helping them pay for it would turn this country into Russia and we can't have that.)

No need to leave encouraging comments or send consoling emails, I'm fine now and enjoying life as much as the next guy. And he's got easy access to an average amount of serotonin.

Until next time...even a journey of 1000 miles begins with several frustrating hours on the Internet looking for the cheapest flights that leave at a decent hour and don't have a layover in Atlanta.

Psycho Analyzes

Bizarro is brought today before your face by Signage Improvement.

I'm not sure why I drew myself as the analyst in this cartoon. I didn't really mean to, it just sort of came out that way in the pencil sketch and got even more so when I inked it.

Perhaps it is what they call a "Freudian slip." Perhaps I have a closeted sheep within me that I am afraid to embrace. Buried deep in the cockles of my being could be mounds of squooshy wool and big floppy ears, yearning to bleat and graze and follow the herd from hill to dale.

Or, maybe I am the wolf, wishing I could break the societal constraints of our culture and run naked in the wild, ripping the throats out of weaker beings.

Perhaps I secretly see myself as the table, patiently waiting in silence to offer a sip of water or a tissue.

Or, I'm just an egomaniac who likes to draw himself. Kind of pathetic.


Until next time...if you want to distract the monkeys, you may have to throw some bananas.