Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro is an advanced exercise in cartoon understanding: a wordless strip (no speech, no caption) in which a tuxedoed performer takes a bow, next to a toy piano:
Ah, he seems to be a pianist, and the tiny piano, no more than a foot long, must be his instrument; at that point, you are baffled — unless you’re familiar with a classic walk-into-bar joke (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there’s only 1 in this strip — see this Page)
In this variant of the classic joke, that piano is in fact 12 inches long, a 12-inch piano, so the performer is a 12-inch pianist. This is the status conferred on him by a genie when he wished for a 12-inch penis. Whoops.
But his playing is fabulous. Performances on the level of Schroeder’s on his toy piano (which is a grand piano, rather than this pianist’s jazzier upright). He is the very model of a modern 12-inch pianist.
On this blog: my 5/2/13 posting “The 12-inch pianist”, about the bar joke and some of its variants.
December 5, 2025 at 1:36 pm |
I had heard that joke in my youth, but it never crossed my mind when writing and drawing this cartoon. The gag is simply that the musician has tiny hands, so he plays a toy piano.
There’s nothing in the panel to indicate that the piano is meant to be exactly 12 inches long, and, besides, I wouldn’t do a gag that does nothing more than illustrate an old joke to make readers think of the word “penis.”
I had assumed that a reader might not immediately notice the impossibly small hands, giving the joke a slightly delayed payoff.
If it doesn’t work as planned, that’s a failure on the cartoonist’s part, although I’d submit that calling someone who plays a 12-inch piano a 12-inch pianist is quite a leap.
The cartoon may remind someone of the old joke, but proposing a deliberate connection seems forced. The examples in your 5/2/13 post show that referencing it has been done to death.
I appreciate anyone who reads my work closely and thinks about the mechanics of a cartoon, but this post is either a misreading or I didn’t draw the hands small enough.
Thanks for your always thought-provoking comments.
December 5, 2025 at 2:35 pm |
Wow. I totally got this wrong. The tiny piano connected to the old joke in my mind, and I completely missed the small hands of the performer as relevant. Maybe a caption would have pointed me in the right direction, I don’t know. In ay case, I’m sorry to have misunderstood you.
December 5, 2025 at 2:52 pm |
No apologies necessary!
It’s fascinating to learn how a memory can influence the way one reads a cartoon.
December 5, 2025 at 8:20 pm |
I for one did not notice the small hands and think “tiny”. Before I spent enough time on it to perhaps see this, I read Arnold’s interpretation and thought “fine,” though I thought it was pretty obscure for a Bizarro comic. Since my go-to “man walks into a bar” jokes don’t happen to include this one, I accepted as normal the fact that I did not make the association on my own, though the 2013 article was most helpful in understanding others’ reaction to it.
December 6, 2025 at 6:49 am |
Arnold, our discussion triggered a memory of a cruder, related joke I heard years ago.
In this variation, a guy is sitting at a bar, and a tiny man appears from nowhere, runs across the bar to steal the guy’s cigarette, crush his potato chips, and dump a beer on him (following the rule of three). The customer explains that he was granted a wish and asked for a twelve-inch prick.
December 6, 2025 at 8:12 am |
😀 😀 Nice. New to me. We clearly have a joke family here.
Maybe the moral is to avoid organ overreach — offered a wish by a genie, never go for a 12-inch organ (they exist, but are extraordinarily rare), but bid for nothing longer than 10 inches, and it might be wise to ask only for 9, which is the pornstar standard length. Do not tempt the genie’s native instincts for turning wishes into curses.
December 6, 2025 at 8:02 am |
Well, I missed the small hands too, and in fact the cartoon was entirely opaque to me. I also think that version of the “penis” joke is not quite right; it’s the bar pianist himself who is only a foot tall, the genie having misconstrued a wish from the bar owner. This makes more sense as quite a few people (not me!) pronounce “pianist” as two syllables, with the accent on the first – a practice, by the way, mocked in several of Ring Lardner’s short stories.
December 6, 2025 at 8:22 am |
The original joke, the Urspaß, is subject to variation in many ways.
December 7, 2025 at 7:02 am
And of course I meant to say “three syllables” up there. (Don’t bother going to the effort of fixing it, please.)
January 4, 2026 at 9:48 am |
Wow, what a terrible cartoon. Awful execution! Thanks for explaining it, I was totally baffled: “Bowing to a tiny piano, is that some obscure wordplay?” YES, of course he should’ve drawn the hands smaller, a LOT smaller! And besides, even if he needs a super-tiny piano to fit his tiny fingers (I’m still not laughing), there’s no reason for not putting the tiny piano onto a regular-sized table, so the guy could at least play it without having to crouch onto his knees, or lie flat on his belly!!