Bizarre Realty (cont.)
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It’s a street scene with twopeople wearing burkas, you know, fully concealing their clothing. One says “I would love to live in the West. Being a transvestite here is pointless.”

A_P: What cartoons do you like?

DP: My favorite cartoons have always been magazine cartoons. Magazine cartoons don’t have consistent characters or story lines. They are single panel, a moment in time. They are funny because of what was happening, what is happening or what is about to happen. I like cartoonists that are more surreal. Gahan Wilson, Gary Larson, Sam Gross.

A_P: Do you correspond or hang out with other cartoonists?

DP: Oh, yes. I do. There’s the National Cartoonist’s Society awards ceremony every year. I emcee it every year now.  Bill Keane, who does Family Circus, did it for years. He did a heavily vaudevillian kind of show.  A couple of others did it, then they asked me to try it. I did, and they loved it. They basically gave me the job for life.

A_P: And what do cartoonists do with each other at a meeting like that?

DP:It’s tons of fun for all of us. It’s basically all of us talking about the business and getting really drunk. They don’t allow the public. Don’t allow the press. It’s just for us.

A_P: Do you have any upcoming projects, besides the daily cartoon?

DP: I have another book in the works with Abrams. It should be out by Christmas. This one’s a retrospective of my career, called Bizarro and Other Strange Manifestations of the Art of Dan Piraro. It has all kinds of weird stuff.  Then, I’ll have another political satire in a kid’s book format like the Three Pigs that I’ll be working on. I’m tentatively thinking of calling it My Little Book of Freedom-Haters and Evil-Doers. It will be a book of satire on how to help kids think like a neo-con. You know, about how crazy people are to get all worked up about cutting down trees and using fossil fuel. How you can choose your sexual orientation. All those issues conservatives like to address, a book making fun of all that.

A_P: What’s on your performing agenda?

DP: Our show isn’t called Bizarro's PolitiComedy-a-Go-Go anymore. That show was officially over on election night…in more ways than one. We're appearing with Bizarro’s Roadshow Humor Thing in Park City, Utah as part of the Freedom Cinema Festival. Then we’ve got the Sketchfest in San Francisco. I don’t know what comes after that. I must admit, I let the other guys deal with that and they just tell me what time and day to show up at the airport. They tell my wife what clothes to lay out for me.

A_P: I’ll tell you something I found out that I bet you didn’t know. If you put an extra “z” in your Web site, you end up at a porn site.

DP: Actually, yes, I did know about that. It’s funny how I found out. I went to my hometown in Tulsa last year. They had me on one of those shows that airs during the day, you know, the kind that only housewives catch, I guess, and near the end of the interview they put my Web site address on the screen with the porn site spelling, b-i-z-z-a-r-ro. I didn’t realize it until I got home and my dad told me he taped the show. When I saw it, I called Karen, the producer, and told her about it. That’s not a great thing to happen in the old hometown. I don’t know if they got any calls about it. I never heard anything else.

A_P: So all in all, the cartoonist from Tulsa is doing well, right? Are the newspapers still buying?

DP: Yes, things are going well. I have enjoyed steady growth since the very beginning in sales. It’s not like I’m a millionaire, but I make a nice living. It’s been great.

Freelancer Kristen Twedt writes about everything from cartoonists to toe fungus, although some fungi refuse to take her calls. Visit her Web site at www.kristentwedt.com.