Have You Heard the Good News?

Bizarro is brought to you today by I'll Never Eat Peanut Butter Again.

It isn't often you see a cartoon that combines the darkness of deadly disease with childhood candy icons, and that's just the sort of experience that Bizarro hopes to provide from time to time. I don't know if anyone else likes this cartoon, but I'm sort of proud of it.

I don't eat M&Ms anymore because I'm vegan and they have milk chocolate in them, but I used to love them. It's not so bad to have an ethical reason to avoid things like M&Ms, though (I say that because health reasons wouldn't be enough to keep me away from them). It's a good way to avoid unnecessary calories. I used to be really hooked on milk chocolate and didn't like dark chocolate much at all, but now that it is the only kind I will eat, I've developed a taste for it and love it. I tried a bite of milk chocolate not long ago and thought it was really wimpy. Dark chocolate is actually good for you (if not sweetened with sugar) so it's one of my acceptable vices. As opposed to heroin*, which my doctor told me to cut back on.

*Note to children and gullible adults: I don't use heroin.

Late addition: A reader wrote to me about this post and mentioned that much of the world's chocolate is harvested by slaves (many are children) and that it is important to choose "fair trade" chocolate. Which I always do. I should have mentioned that, thanks for the correction! Here's a quick article explaining that and a list of companies that do and don't use slave chocolate. As of this writing, Mars company, who makes M&Ms still uses slavery cocoa. http://fairchocolate.org/

NO CONTEST TODAY

High School Stereotypes

Bizarro is brought to you today by Future CEOs.

I'm sorry to say that my high school class has not had many successful reunions. The 10th, in 1986, was reportedly large and well-attended but I missed that one. They've tried it a few times since, I went to a couple, but there were very small turnouts.

Mine was not a stereotypical high school experience, I attended a magnet school that tended to attract kids that did not "fit in" at their neighborhood schools, so many of my classmates were really smart or artistic or musical or unusual in one way or another. (That is to say that most of us were the kid on the ground in this cartoon.) This led to a lot of interesting adult careers, spread out all over the globe, but we were by nature a class of more independent sorts, thus making it difficult to get everyone together again. At least that's been my impression. Either that or they're having fabulous reunions every few years and I've just not been invited.

I was never beaten up by a jock for being brainy, like this poor kid, but I was regularly called a "fag" by redneck types because I was artistic and didn't dress like Ted Nugent. This didn't happen at my high school, Ted Nugent types tended not to apply or get accepted there, but it happened in other parts of my hometown of Tulsa. Thanks, Booker T. Washington High School, for saving me from a miserable high school career as an outcast.

I think it would be fun to have a large high school reunion but I've given up hoping for it. I'm content to run into them occasionally on the streets of New York and other places my classmates tended to escape to.

Pea in Your Ear

Bizarro is brought to you today by the Technological Advances.

When I was growing up, I remember hearing people remark about how amazed really old people must feel. "Just imagine! They were born during horse and buggy days and now we've sent a man to the moon and can watch it live on TV! Such an amazing time to be alive!"

Yes, it is remarkable but I'm guessing old people born in 1910 probably got just as bored at seeing amazing new inventions every ten years as we do at seeing them every ten seconds.

When I was small, there were four channels on TV if you could get the antennae to work, there were about five computers in the whole country, each filling an entire room, and if you didn't already have the bust line you wanted, you just had to get over it because there was no such thing as a boob job. Cable TV didn't exist. Recording was something you could do to sound, but recording pictures off of TV was crazy talk. Movies were something you could watch on TV once a week on Saturday night, or at one of the three movie theaters in town, each playing only one film each. Phones had wires that connected to the wall and you couldn't even unplug them. If you didn't want to be disturbed by its ringing, you left it off the hook. Nobody but tobacco executives knew that cigarettes caused cancer. Typewriters sounded like machine guns and to correct a mistake you had to use white paint. Dark-skinned people used different water fountains and restrooms and no one batted an eye. If you wanted to cook something you had to use heat and wait half an hour – "microwave" was a word only astrophysicists recognized. Larry King was a middle-aged guy on the radio.

But today if you told me that I could stick something the size of a pea pod in my ear and hear the thoughts of any person from the past 10,000 years, alive or dead, just by thinking about them, I'd nod my head and say, "cool." Nothing surprises me except what we can't do. I'm still surprised an airplane is the fastest way to get from L.A. to N.Y.C. How quaint. When are they going to work the bugs out of that teleportation thing? Airplanes bore me, even with 42 channels of TV in the back of the seat. I can't surf the web on my laptop while we're in the air? What am I, Abraham Lincoln?

Perhaps I was born too soon.

Be a Doll

Bizarro is brought to you today by Ventriloquism.

We finally have what passes for warm weather in New York City at this time of year and it has buoyed my spirits considerably. It's been in the low fifties for the past couple of days and it feels like Mexico. I rode my bike around Prospect Park yesterday dressed in something lighter than an Eskimo suit. It was glorious. Today I may go riding again, perhaps to the local dollar store to see if they have rubber sheets*, or across the Brooklyn Bridge to see how many tourists are mindlessly walking in the bike lane. Every year they repaint the signs and walkway markers and still somebody gets creamed.

For anyone who is not familiar enough with the mystical techniques of ventriloquism to understand this joke, just try to say a "B" without moving your lips. Ah, now you've discovered the magic of ventriloquism. Somehow, doll-wielding entertainment icons like Beverly Massegee can make the sound of a "B" inside their mouth and not with their lips! If you try it, it will sound like a "G." That's why all over the globe people flock to pay big bucks to see this rare art form.

*For use in making it easier to clean up after some of our foster animals.

Sunday Punnies #5

(Click the image to engorge with size)

Bizarro is brought to you today by 24 Hour Party People.

Look, boys and girls, just above the lettering, it's another edition of Bizarro's Sunday Punnies! I think this is the fifth or sixth one I've done in the ongoing series. (If only there were some way to keep track.)

I didn't get a chance to post a Sunday cartoon over the weekend, so here's one now. As I've mentioned before, the majority of the puns from this series are from readers. People send me lots of puns but I rarely think they are worthy of a stand-alone cartoon. My Sunday Punnies series is a fun way to include them in a bonus pack of punnery. So send your puns now! They must be original (you didn't get it from another cartoon somewhere) and you must acknowledge that you will get nothing in return for your donation, other than a wink and a hearty thank you from yours, truly. But isn't that the true spirit of giving?

You can't imagine the fun of opening the Sunday Comics (or the Internets) and seeing your idea illustrated in full color by a legendary comics icon such as myself until it actually happens! Even then, you'll have to pinch yourself to be sure you're not dreaming!*

*The author of this blog does not accept responsibility for any injury or disfigurement resulting from the pinching of readers. If you feel you may be at risk of somnambulistic self-mutilation, experts recommend wearing mittens to bed.

Syllables

Here is a video, the memory of which you will take to your grave.