Two Bizarro cartoons on variations on themes, from art (Magritte’s Son of Man) and science (Schrödinger’s cat):
(#1) A Piraro-only Bizarro from 2012 (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
(#2) A Wayno/Piraro Bizarro from a week ago (with 6 of Piraro’s symbols); Wayno’s title: “Mocking a Thing I Dislike by Doing That Very Thing” (the speaker deprecates Schrödinger’s cat cartoons while serving as the central character in a Schrödinger’s cat cartoon)
The two cartoons also differ in another way. #1 is a play on a specific model work, in this case a painting — so it falls in with parodies (or burlesques) of specific art works as targets, for instance, re-workings of The Last Supper, Nighthawks, and American Gothic, and also with parodies and burlesques of particular songs. #2, on the other hand, is a riff on a topic or situation (Both X and Not X, or, more colorfully, Schrödinger’s Cat), along with more venerable memes, like Desert Island, Grim Reaper, and Psychiatrist.
The two types of playful variations are separately catalogued on this blog.
On the one hand, there’s a Page listing my postings of parodies, burlesques, pastiches, reworkings, riffs, and playful allusions — like joke variants of Magritte’s Son of Man. More generally, there’s a large class of versions of, copies of, imitations of, variations on, variants of, improvisations on, riffs on, or allusions to some model — illustrated in my 5/7/21 posting “Research papers” with riffs on an xkcd cartoon, “Types of Scientific Paper”.
On the other hand, there’s a separate Page on comic conventions, including comic/cartoon memes — among them, Schrödinger’s Cat (as well as familiar memes like Ascent of Man, Caveman, and Ahab and the Whale).
The line between variations tied to specific models and thematic or memic variations is, unsurprisingly, not always clear.
Notes on the two Bizarro cartoons. First, the Magritte (noting that almost all of Magritte’s paintings are already wry, playful, and surrealistic). The original:
(#3) A supremely conventional, bowler-hatted man — but then there’s the astonishing green apple
My 7/1/18 posting “Photobombing Magritte” has an inventory of four earlier postings involving the painting; it’s a recurrent subject on this blog.
Then more recently, #2 in my 1/30/21 posting “Two cartoons on the 30th” is a Zippy play on the Magritte:
(#4)
Then, for some Schrödinger’s Cat cartoons, see my 4/26/21 posting “Houdini’s cat”, in particular:
(#5)
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