I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic, and this is my weekly blog post. The large Sunday Bizarro comic above is mine, as are the comments below. The past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics that follow were 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.
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This week’s Sunday cartoon, above, is a bit of illustrated wordplay I hope gives you a chuckle. It goes deeper than that for me, however, and reminds me of the balancing, or at least, mitigating power of humor.
I’ve been spending more time at healthcare facilities of late, because my parents are nearly 90 years old and their bodies and minds are rapidly failing. They are no longer who I’ve known them to be my entire life. That’s been hard for my sisters and me to watch, and even harder for our parents to live out daily.
Though Mom and Dad are struggling physically and mentally and are often unable to negotiate normal thought processes, remarkably, they’ve not lost their sense of humor. My sisters and I have used humor not only to relate to our parents but to ease our own difficulties with this process. I can’t always get through to my mom on every topic these days, but we can still always make each other laugh.
We all have our challenges, and no one escapes life with an unbruised heart. Wayno and I have both had to write and draw cartoons to stay on deadline through personal tragedies, as all cartoonists have at some point. It may be the hardest part of our jobs, but it can also be distracting and healing.
Many of us have found that a little humor—when you can find it in the dark—can be a powerful salve.
I speak with my parents via video conferencing each week. My mother is somewhat aware of her loss of memory, and each time my dad mentions they are turning 90 this year, she smacks him hard on the shoulder and shouts, “Why are you reminding me of that?!”
It always gives us all a good laugh.
