Fitz's Opinion: Newspaper cartoonists roasting on an open fire

The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:

I was a chubby doodler with no aptitude for sports, a perfect target for alpha males, bullies and New England whalers who had sailed into Southern Arizona schoolyards.

Thank you for teaching me the art of the preemptive joke, Playground of Hard Knocks. “Yeah, I’m a big boy.”

“How big?”

“My parents had me baptized at Reid Park’s lake.”

Unable to take anything seriously, I was last to be picked for any team activity unless you needed an inept, yet hilarious, goalie in husky boy jeans who did Tweety bird and Jerry Lewis impressions.

Thank you, Myers Elementary school teacher, Mr. Archie Burke, for teaching me how to catch and toss a ball after school. A kind and patient mentor, Mr. Burke loved baseball and good sportsmanship as much as he loved underdogs.

I think of him every time I’m nostalgic for a world where winners are humble and losers are gracious or when I’m reminiscing about my long lost baseball cards. “Put it there, kid, you can do it, right in the glove.”

When I was middle-aged little league dad I watched this goofy, awkward kid who couldn’t hit a ball at the beginning of the season, walk up to the plate, swing and magically score a triple off the last pitch of the last game in the last minute of summer, driving every parent wild with a renewed belief in persistence. Mister Burke modeled persistence, playing joyfully in men’s senior baseball leagues in his 80s, believing in underdogs, disliking bullies and fielding grounders like a pit bull crossed with a ballet star.

Teaching me to draw LBJ, Mr. Burke gave me my profession and unleashed a monster. In middle school I made crude low brow drawings and passed them around the back of the class to evoke snickers.

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The master sergeant loved the Dean Martin roasts. Me, too, pop. I studied Don Rickles, the master of verbally roasting human beings with peerless verbal agility, for I dreamt of being a seventh grade samurai master of the sharp tongue.

Today my standup leans toward roast humor, inviting my subjects on stage for a quick caricature and inappropriate disorienting barbs because interrogative improvisational comedy is more exciting and fun than reciting canned jokes. How many have I drawn and roasted?

I’m going to be roasted by a lineup of playground bullies, back-stabbers, traitors, kiss-and-tell hacks and a former Tucson mayor on Aug. 22. They had better be good because I get the last word and I’ve been polishing my teeth with a metal file. Why anyone would want to roast such a kindly, feeble and doddering Tucsonan — a saint who wouldn’t hurt a tarantula — is beyond me. Try your best, Bobby Rich, Rothschild, Marty Bishop, Elena Sanchez and the rest of your mob. Insults can’t hurt me. My hide’s thicker than a Trump donor’s skull.

I’m offering myself up as an Irish piñata to raise funds to honor Dr. Alfredo Valenzuela, Tucson’s beloved “Mister Mariachi,” with a statue to be placed near Davis Bilingual, because I dig public art that honors the best of Tucson, and because I love mariachi music — which I have asked to be played at my funeral — and which my heretic wife has vetoed, referring to my favorite music as “feral cats mating with bagpipes.”

I love mariachi so much, I’m willing to be roasted on a spit at the beautiful historic El Casino Ballroom, a music hall haunted by the rocking ghosts of James Brown and Fats Domino, performers who shook the rafters back in the day — unlike the jackals showing up to shake down yours truly next Sunday.

The organizer, my former friend, teacher and comedian Dave “Tocayo” Membrila thinks roasts are more fun, “than a good old fashioned public stoning. But since sticks and stones can break your bones it’s far better to let words hurt you.”

In 1966 I was in the classroom of another fine educator from Myers Elementary School, young Mr. Elder, when I raised my hand, and wagged it at him, desperate to answer his question, “Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?” Young Mr. Elder wheeled around from the blackboard, winked at the room and called on me. “Well, if it isn’t the smartest knothead in the entire fifth grade.” His gift for zingers suited to a sober, drowsy fifth grade audience, voiced with affection, kept us awake and humble.

Young Mr. Elder taught this wicked cartoonist how to roast.

It was Mr. Burke who taught us to lift up the underdogs who just might hit a grand slam.