Panels and judges

>> Bizarro creator Dan Piraro
on the syndicated life

Dan Piraro has been at the top of the newspaper funny pages for 20 years. You know, the guy who does the single-panel, kind of like The Far Side. While that’s a comparison that has stuck to him since the beginning, it’s hardly an unflattering one. And since Gary Larsen retired The Far Side in 1995, Piraro’s Bizarro has continued on as the longest-running and most consistently clever cartoon in a sea of not-funny, with more than 300 papers carrying his feature, and 14 books in the bag. In anticipation of his appearance at the Blue Metropolis festival, where he’ll deliver a lecture and pared-down version of his acclaimed fringe comedy show, the very good-natured Mr. Piraro let the Mirror in on some of the tougher aspects of life in the syndicated lane.

A joke a day, forever

“Drawing a joke a day is not that hard. Thinking up a joke a day for 22 years—that’s my count so far—is what it takes to be a cartoonist. At first, you’ve got 25 or 50 jokes that you’ve basically had your entire life to come up with, and you manage to impress somebody enough to sign you to a contract. And the first thing that you think is ‘Great.’ The second thing that occurs to you is, ‘Oh my God, I had 25 years to come up with my first cartoons, now I’ve got 25 days to come up with the next 25.’”

The single scene is booming

“When Bizarro was first published in ’86, there were only maybe three people in the country who were doing those kinds of single-panel, oddball, no-regular-character kind of strips. As the artform became more popular in the papers, more people started doing it. Now, every syndicate has got 10 or 15 guys doing the same thing, and there’s a whole lot more competition. And a whole lot more undercutting with editors.

Old, fat cats live on

“I always explain that there are two different kinds of comics: the ones that are personal artistic expression—like mine, and many, many others—and there are those corporate enterprises that are written, drawn and put out by a giant committee, like Garfield, and it’s really just a business. You get compared to each other because you’re on the same page, but it’s like the difference between an independent film and a movie about, oh, Pokémon.”

Goddamn political correctness

“The newspaper industry is extremely conservative. You can do cliché God and the Devil and heaven and hell, but you can’t actually portray Jesus... And you can’t even get close to sexual issues. With language: same thing. I used the word ‘damn’ one time—it was a little fish swimming alongside this giant whale. And the fish said, ‘You’re lucky, I beached myself once and nobody gave a damn.’ I got a letter from this pain-in-the-ass guy who has decided that profanity is the root of all evil, it’s what’s wrong with America, and our children, and crime and everything... The U.S. is the world leader in political correctness. That’s what we do here. In lieu of actually making changes, we just make changes in our language and pretend to be politically correct, and everybody goes home happy. I despise the whole movement—it does way more harm than good.”

DAN PIRARO PERFORMS SATURDAY, APRIL 28, 2 P.M.,
AND JOINS AISLIN IN A PANEL DISCUSSION ON SUNDAY,
APRIL 29, 4 P.M., AT HOTEL DELTA CENTRE-VILLE
(777 UNIVERSITY). INFO: WWW.BLUEMETROPOLIS.ORG.