The Old In and Out

I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, a short essay, and then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner Wayno, whose weekly blog post I highly recommend.

And here’s this week’s ANSWER KEY to my Sunday comic’s Secret Symbols.

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Welcome to this, Jazz Pickles. I’ve been hard at work backstage at the Bizarro Cabaret setting up my new subscription newsletter for the new year, which I’ll be calling The Naked Cartoonist. I’ve been writing some fun and interesting (IMHO) articles and stories to take readers on a tour of the back alleys my strange mind regularly roams. I hope you’ll consider joining me.

Later this month, I’ll post samples of what you can expect to get from The Naked Cartoonist and links to where you can subscribe. It will be added to this site, so you won’t have far to go.

In the meantime, let’s chat about this week’s Sunday cartoon, above. The Tunnel of Love is a time-honored trope in cartooning, even though the thing being parodied likely no longer exists. 

In olden days, I guess this was a common feature of amusement parks and carnivals. We still have weird little boat rides, but these days, they seem mostly to be haunted house kinds of things with glow-in-the-dark skeletons that pop out and whatnot. At least, that’s my impression. I haven’t hung around carnivals or amusement parks since that misunderstanding with the Tattooed Lady and the police.

But way back when, these manmade caverns were likely filled with hearts and Cupids and other Valentine’s Day doodads. The real attraction, though, was having a few minutes alone in the dark with your sweetheart. It was more private than making out in your car (Lovers Lane is another extinct trope) and you couldn’t check into a respectable hotel or motel unless you could convince the desk clerk you were married. It was a simpler (and more judgmental) time.

My cartoon, however, uses the trope to create a cautionary tale about marriage. As anyone over a certain age and experience level knows, falling in love and dating is a piece of cake compared to cohabitating and raising a family. It’s similar to the difference between jumping on a trampoline and becoming a NASA astronaut.

We’re warned about this by our world-weary elders when we’re young and considering marriage, but we’re no more likely to understand or believe it than an 8-year-old bouncing merrily on a trampoline would understand the rigors required to get a seat on a moonshot.

All human relations are more complicated than we first suspect, but especially romantic ones. What begins as effortless joy becomes unfathomably complex very quickly. In his book The Course of Love, contemporary life-skills philosopher Alain de Botton warns us in this way (read with British accent):

“Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.”

His view of the likelihood of all your problems being your spouse’s shortcomings is also worth a glance:

“We don’t need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.”

So marriage is part finding out who your partner is and managing their insanity, and part having your insanity exposed and managed as your partner finds out who you are. The backdrop to this chaotic circus is the accumulation of a warehouse of expensive objects and infrastructure that you need to raise a family in the modern world. Before you know it, what started as a sexy feeling in your pants has become a gory, gothic tale of obstinance, misunderstandings, and injustices. You can be forgiven if at some point you assess your marriage as having been an expensive way to ruin your sex life.

That’s an exaggerated metaphor, of course, but I’m on my third marriage and that isn’t a wholly inaccurate description of the first two.

But, there’s good news! If you can survive the period after infatuation that invariably comes, you can begin to transition into what can honestly be called “love.” It isn’t easy, but it is worth it. 

One of the most important tidbits of wisdom I’ve ever heard is this: “Love is a choice, not a feeling.” (― Matthew Kelly, The Seven Levels of Intimacy: The Art of Loving and the Joy of Being Loved)

Once you fully know the jerk your partner can be and choose to love them anyway, you’re on your way. They have to be able to do the same with you, of course, so keep your fingers crossed and try not to be such an ass.

It has taken me three tries to get to these calmer waters, most because of the breadth and depth of my own jerkitude and insanity. Admitting that is a big step toward forgiving your partner when they aren’t the perfectly agreeable and charming young thing you remember from your first ride into the tunnel. 

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We now join Wayno and his Bizarro cartoons from the week, already in progress…

Wayno and I both worship at the Church of Coffee, so for us, this cartoon verges on religious iconography.

I’m a huge fan of spiders and always recommend people learn how beneficial they are to your household and not kill them or put them outside. Yes, they’re creepy, but they aren’t as dangerous as our nervous system suggests. Spiders are amazing and do not mean us harm. (I know you don’t believe me or care, but humor me.)

I know a guy who can get that ice out in seven seconds. (He owns a blow torch.)

I think this comment that somebody left on my IG account is interesting:

In that time period they actually had very sophisticated tricks similar to photoshop, including portraits of people with their dead relatives portrayed as ghosts and images of animals and people blended together to create human like portraits of animals etc.

Wait a minute. Was Frankenstein’s monster also a croupier?

Deathbed humor always kills.

That concludes this week’s humor memorial service. Thanks for sticking around until we put the hearse back in the garage. If you like that we do this for free—without ads or clickbait—please consider helping us keep it that way via one of the links below. The email notification of your generosity will make us giggle and cry like Sally Fields when she won an Oscar.

Until next week, don’t think it can’t happen here—that’s where it has always happens.

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