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.

Thanks for stopping by, Jazz Pickles. It’s good to imagine seeing you. 

I’ve occasionally wondered about the people whose job it is to wear big mascot costumes. They aren’t only used for sports teams—various commercial characters in crazy costumes can also be seen scaring children at street fairs or in front of fast-food joints waving at passing cars.

When my kids were small, I took them to Disney World and that place is crawling with big, foam-rubber characters altering the reality and future expectations of countless children. That was when I first started thinking about the people inside those things. (The character costumes, not the children.)

Though I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt I was still sweltering, so I felt both curiosity and compassion for whatever unfortunate souls were inside the various Disney character costumes awaiting parole. Steve Martin got his start as a magician at one of the shows at Disneyland, so I imagined the inmates of those cartoons-come-to-life might be teenagers who aspired to be in show business one day. It would be fun to find out that a young, unknown Charlize Theron or Bradley Cooper was playing Minnie Mouse or Donald Duck back in the early 90s when I was there. Maybe I have a photo of my kids with one of them.

I can’t find it now, but that trip inspired a Bizarro cartoon in which a little kid and her father are meeting a Disney character. As she shakes its hand, the toddler asks her dad why Mickey smells like a sweaty teenager.

Regarding sports mascot characters, I’d guess those people running around in front of the stands at baseball games wearing forty pounds of foam rubber and fabric have more endurance than the guys standing in the outfield doing mostly nothing through the entire game. I can jog ten yards to stand under a fly ball or swing a stick at home plate a few times over the course of an afternoon, but I sure as hell could not execute maniacal gymnastics up and down the foul lines for hours. 

Are there any statistics on how many people have collapsed from heat stroke while dressed as Winnie the Pooh or the Philie Phanatic? As long as it wasn’t anyone you knew, their funerals might have verged on comical. Like a clown who was crushed while squeezing too many of his kind into a tiny car. Insensitive, yes, but no less amusing.

Side note: My auto-correct seems not to have been trained on sports mascots. It keeps changing the name of the Philadelphia Phillies mascot I mentioned above to “Philip Phonetic,” which might be a good name for a team called the Grammarians.

***

As we turn the page to Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons for the week, let’s imagine someone in a huge slice of pie costume running around like an amphetamine enthusiast… 

Confession: I’d never seen or heard the word “bespoke” until a couple of years ago. It’s weird when you’re over a certain age and learn something that seems to be general knowledge. The word means something that is made for a specific customer, like a tailored suit; bespoke tailoring. It still doesn’t sound to me like it should mean that, though. I’d be more likely to associate it with a talking suit.

That’s the end of this week’s whatchamacallit. Thanks for helping us put the dealybobbers away.

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