Hippy Snob Poo
Bizarro is brought to you today by Friends Don’t Let Friends Paint Drunk.
These three recent cartoons proved a little challenging to a few readers, so I shall now set about to throw some elucidation on the situation.
One reader was confused by the term “The Man.” If you were not alive in the U.S. in the 1960s and have carefully avoided absorbing any information about the dreaded “hippy” movement, you may not be aware that “the man” was a term used to refer to anyone in authority: police, government officials, corporate executives, etc. In short, “the man” equals “the establishment.” (Note to sticklers: This use of the term actually goes back much further than this, but that has nothing to do with this cartoon.)
This cartoon confused a reader from Billings, Montana, who wrote, “Huh?” After trading a series of emails with this reader I found out that he was, in fact, not a human at all but a potato with a face drawn on it. Nonetheless, I shall explicate explicitly: There are some snobby, would-be intellectuals who like to brag that they don’t own a TV; as though owning such a thing would diminish their awesomeness. There are others who admit to owning a TV, but only watch PBS. As a lover of TV (though I would never watch network TV!) I am appalled by this narrow-minded attitude, and so my TV-writer buddy, Andy Cowan and I devised this scenario in which the snobs take it to the next level. If you still don’t get it, jump back in the potato sack.
Okay, I admit that nobody wrote to me asking what this pigeon cartoon meant. Maybe everyone got it just fine, or maybe those who didn’t get it just didn’t care enough to write. I can’t blame them. Nonetheless, here is my exegesis:
Pigeons like to sit on statues and anything a bird of any sort sits on gets covered with bird shit. In this case, the pigeons are not pooping on the statue of their kind, and understandably so. If your town had erected a statue of you, I would seriously doubt you would think it was acceptable to defecate on it. That would just be very churlish.
Can you buy just about any Bizarro cartoon on tons of different products? Yes, you can.