Today’s Bizarro, which requires that you recognize a painting and know the word photobomb:
(#1) (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)
From the point of view of the peach and the orange, the image on the screen (Magritte’s painting “Son of Man”) is a photobombing of a portrait of a conventionally dressed bowler-hatted man (Magritte himself, it seems). A green apple appears unexpectedly in the portrait, in this case, interfering with and obscuring the portrait’s central image. In photobombing, the unexpected element may appear in the field of view unintentionally — irrelevant but noticeable things just happen to be caught in the scene — but it can be intentional — the unexpected element has been deliberately inserted into the scene by someone, as a prank. Only rarely does the unexpected element obscure the central image in the scene.
So from the point of view of the fruit, Magritte’s image is doubly awesome: it’s intentional (the work of a prankster, but who? why not the apple itself, acting on its own!); and it conceals the identity of the portrait’s subject (as in other bowler-hat paintings by the artist), thus subverting the idea of portraiture itself, while making a piece of fruit the actual focus of the work. Fruut Rulz.
