The first impulse is to laugh, because it's easy to equate a Madden-the-pig sketch with merciless "Saturday Night Live" parodies of President Bush or Elizabeth Taylor.
He sketched a pig on the front page".
One night, though, in about 92 or 93, I saw Corky and the Juice Pigs, and their sketches seemed quite wild and alien and had great music.
(He tried to sketch his dog, Pig, on a jumper but it looked like a horse, so he got his friends to have a go and used the best one).
He hands me a sketch of a pig that has half its head missing, and then produces two robins copied from a Christmas card - the robin on the right is full of rich detail, but the one on the left remains unfinished.
Whitmire also assumed the roles of Link Hogthrob, from the "Pigs in Space" "Muppet Show" sketch, starting with the video game "Muppets Racemania" from 2000, as well as The Muppet Newsman, starting in 2008, with Muppet.com viral online videos.
On April 11 Sotheby's in New York will auction about 200 pieces from the couple's collection, including a Beatrix Potter scene of guinea pigs gardening ($40,000 to $60,000) and a Maurice Sendak sketch of Little Bear ($1,500 to $2,000).
For instance, Rhymefest describes a sketch in which a literal pig is touted as the next big thing in rap, but nobody notices that he's just a pig "except for smart people".
As gleefully as a pig after truffles, he dug out, in his daily sketches and his long-running Saturday column, unthinking cliche.
(A charming period sketch shows the goddess keeping amiable company with a pig in the stable where she was stored for a time before being removed to a new home in the Louvre).
