Funny Bones
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay, then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner, Wayno whose weekly blog post I recommend highly.
And here’s this week’s ANSWER KEY to the Secret Symbols.
Greetings, Jazz Pickles. Last week I announced my wife’s new website. She got a tremendous response from my readers, almost two hundred people have signed up for her email list, and she’s sold a few prints. Thanks a llama from both of us!
I rarely know what I’m going to write about in these posts until I sit down Sunday morning to do it. In this case, however, I’ve been hankering all week to tell you about a TV series we recently discovered that is blowing our minds in a big way.
It’s called Severance, and, unfortunately, it can only be seen on Apple TV+. Here in Mexico, local TV is a bust, so we have to get all our entertainment needs met online. Accordingly, we subscribe to several more of these kinds of services than we likely would if we were still living in the U.S. and had access to regular cable TV or whatever.
I like the additional choices of streaming TV, but damn, I hate how difficult it has become to watch TV. Just viewing an episode of a sit-com requires a user I.D., passwords, wifi fed through a VPN (to pretend we’re in the U.S. for some inscrutable reason), and a DNA sample transmitted by hologram to ascertain our identity. Just hacking our way into Hulu is often as difficult as winning a Jeopardy Tournament of Champions.
But back to Severance, it’s a phenomenal new series with one of the most fascinating plot devices I’ve seen. I often criticize TV series and movies for not realizing that no amount of clever casting, direction, and production will make a story worth watching if the writing isn’t great. This is why I’m an adamant supporter of the current writer’s strike in Hollywood; writers are the reason these shows are watchable, and they get paid less than almost anyone on set. Meanwhile, the execs own private islands and Lear Jets to take them there. God, how I hate that kind of wanton greed.
But I digress.
Severance is extremely well written, from the original concept to the individual episodes. I’ve no idea how well the writer(s) were paid.
The premise (not a spoiler; I never spoil!) is that a corporation at some unknown time in the past, present, or future requires anyone who wants to work there to be “severed,” which, in this case, means a chip is inserted in their brain that separates their work life from their private life.
A given employee goes to work each morning at a huge office complex and steps into an elevator. While inside, their brain is triggered to switch to its work side. When the door opens on their floor, they have no memory of who they are outside of work, where they live, what their past was, whether they’re married, have kids, live alone, nothing. They have total amnesia for anything that happened before their first day on the job, including agreeing to do this.
When they ride the elevator down at night, they are switched back to their normal consciousness and have no memory or knowledge of their work life; as though it never existed. To that side of their mind, they got into an elevator in the morning and got right back out moments later, in the evening.
I say an “unknown time” because some of the show seems futuristic—like the brain chip—but much of it seems oddly retro, like a corporation from the sixties or seventies. This floating timeframe aspect of the writing and art direction is also brilliant, and often very funny.
As the plot progresses, it gets increasingly complex in several ways: practically, psychologically, politically, and existentially. Each episode is a strange thrill ride that is at once fascinating, funny, dramatic, and weird as hell. We LOVE it, in all caps. The cast is awesome, of course, and includes Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken, as well as a few people who are new to me but also very good. So far, there’s not a weak link in this show. In my humble opinion, of course.
That bit of business aside, the photo below is not from the latest issue of Decorative Injuries Monthly but was sent to me by a father/son team of Bizarro readers who seem to have been unable to avoid having images of my Bizarro Jazz Pickle applied to their bodies forever. This is not to be seen as an encouragement to do the same, just a bit of fan fun. Thanks to Ron and his son, Harvey for the photo! And thanks again for being thoughtful enough to ask if I minded that you do this.
Lastly, and most importantly, next weekend is the annual National Cartoonists Society convention and awards dinner. It’s an industry event so I can’t invite you, but I’d like you to know that our very own Wayno is among the three cartoonists nominated in the Newspaper Panel division! We’re proud of the nomination and thankful that he does such a stellar job on Bizarro. And we hope he wins! The dinner is Saturday night, so I’ll tell you how it went in next weekend’s post.
Without further ado, here are Wayno’s latest Bizarro cartoons…
I’m thankful Wayno spared us the hole in the kid’s face.
Ask the Interwebs how many times its own weight an ant can carry and you’ll get “official” answers ranging from 20x to 100x. But ants weight nothing, so it’s kind of like multiplying by zero.
Some say cancel culture has gotten out of hand.
Have you considered wearing an iron turtleneck before getting snarky with your customers?
That face is evolution at its best. Dogs that looked smug didn’t survive to reproduce.
I tend to think of the walls around gated communities as protecting us on the outside from those on the inside, not the other way around.
And that brings us to our last pu pu on the platter. Thanks for sticking around to help us clear the table. If you enjoyed this week’s niblets and that we don’t make you dodge pop-up ads and clickbait, please consider helping us keep it that way via one of the links below. We’ll smile at you in our hearts.
Until next week, may your climate be temperate.
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