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“Did you eat all the lasagna again?”
By briantologist | February 21, 2007
So after I read this post of Sarah’s, I started thinking about Garfield — specifically how obsessive I was about him as a kid, and how I’d read book after book from cover to cover, over and over, even spending hours drawing every character with different expressions, in different poses. What’s strange, though, is that it wasn’t just me: A whole lot of people I know were really into Garfield as kids in the ’80s. E was, Sarah was, and if I’m remembering this right, about 80 percent of my elementary school classmates were. I’m projecting it on the memory, I’m sure, but I seem to remember a minor fervor erupting whenever a new Garfield book would come out, which happened roughly every nine days, and I remember scanning my fellow students’ desks to see who already had Garfield Gets Wormed, who didn’t have it but wanted it, and who was way back on book 3, Garfield: Sprayin’ Large.
The thing is, as any person with even the most basic brain-stem functions intact can tell you, that Garfield isn’t funny. Or at least, your nearly comatose friend will add, it hasn’t been since the Reagan years. This, though, implies that way back then, it was in fact riotously funny, and while I haven’t actually gone back to the tape and checked, I can almost guarantee you this is patently untrue. I’ll allow that the strip probably had more frequent funny moments back then, but dude, seriously, it could not have been that funny.
No, I’m pretty sure what happened was that A) we were young and didn’t know funny from a hole in the ground, and B) the people marketing Garfield did an excellent job of helping ensure that every grade-school kid in the United States clamored for every book and watched every TV special and bought every plush toy the Garfield Conglomerate cranked out. Even so, though, there had to have been some combination of basic elements of the strip that appealed to kids; after all, there’s only so much you can do with raw marketing power. I just can’t figure out what it was, other than extremely basic, predictable, character-based gags and a tacit approval of gluttonous, self-serving behavior. (It was the ’80s, after all.)
I certainly won’t go so far as to say Garfield has gotten funny as of late, but ever since I’ve resumed reading the comics every day (mostly to keep up with Josh, whose site is the best thing to happen to blogging since the invention of the navel), the strip has shown occasional amusing flashes of surrealism. It’s like Jim Davis, or whichever humor algorithm is writing the strip these days, has clued into the fact that there is absolutely no way in hell his syndicate will ever drop the strip, and that since he’s got the equivalent of tenure, he can pretty much do what he wants. As such, we now get absurdism and fart jokes from time to time, and if it comes down to that or “I took five naps today!” the fart jokes still technically win. I hope at the very least that he’ll keep writing the strip far into his dotage and eventual senility, and we’ll get entire weeks wherein Jon reminisces about the nuclear attack drills of his boyhood as Garfield drones on and on in Turkish about Odie’s desperate need to have his anal glands expressed. A guy can dream, I guess.
Topics: Thinkin'., Unnatural History | 17 Comments »
February 21st, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Sounds like you have a new career, or rather, a new comic strip to fornicate.
February 21st, 2007 at 3:29 pm
I used to have all of the Garfield bedding. Weird rainbow stripes with randomly placed Garfields. I thought it was the best thing ever.
February 21st, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Garfield’s birthday is in the same week as mine, and I remember that a local McDonald’s would have a birthday party with prizes and shit… I took home the stuffed Garfield from one. We had Arlene and Odie as well, and a Pookie, but not the sheets.
I can’t remember who it was, but someone said that if you take out Garfield’s thought bubble the strip is still as funny, or possibly more so. I find this to be pretty true.
February 21st, 2007 at 6:31 pm
My sister borrowed 6 Garfield books on my library card and never returned them. The next year, I figured I was in too deep to the library to attempt checking out books, I didn’t want them to check the card and tell me I owed them $1,000,000 or something, so I got a library card using a fake name and fake parents’ signatures.
February 21st, 2007 at 7:22 pm
What’s the deal with Jon getting some girly action these days? That’s a fundamental joke change. I think if they’re going to do that, then I want to see Garfield doing some pilates.
February 22nd, 2007 at 8:19 am
I was always all about Nermal…yeah I know. What can I say? I was a weird kid. I actually found my old stack of books in a box not too long ago and flipped through one and yep, not funny at all.
February 22nd, 2007 at 8:59 am
Here’s a spot on critique of the Garfield franchise.
I still use a Garfield pillow case from time to time. It’s pretty faded; much like the humor in the strip.
February 22nd, 2007 at 9:16 am
I cried like a baby during the primetime Garfield special when Odie got stuck in the pound and they showed all the pathetic homeless animals.
And I’m just a little ashamed to admit my best friend and I used to sit around the Duluth Public Library’s kids’ section reading all the Family Circus books.
February 22nd, 2007 at 9:56 am
Oh man, Beret. I used to scrutinize the hell out of the Family Circus strips. I just knew I HAD to be missing something. “Huh, Jeffy spilled the milk again, eh?” I just kept wondering, where’s the joke?
February 22nd, 2007 at 10:07 am
I remember when Odie went to the pound and I sobbed like a baby!!
February 22nd, 2007 at 1:55 pm
The joke was when the mom would ask Jeffy who spilled the milk he’d say “Not Me” or “Ida Know” and these ghost like figures named “Not me and “Ida Know” would be giggling behind him. GET IT???
But the best (worst) was how completely lazy the writing of Family Circus was on Sundays. A whole strip consisting of a black dotted line following Billy around the neighborhood. Yeah, ok.
God, I need to get over the Family Circus.
February 22nd, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Okay, two things:
1) There was a weird thing in my grade school where you were either into the Garfield books or the Heathcliff cartoon, much like the opposing factions loyal to either The Cure or Depeche Mode a few years later. I could never figure that out.
2) I can only think that perhaps Garfield was once funny, but that it just failed the test of time. Is “don’t have a cow, man!” or “ay carrumba!” still funny? No. But it was once.
Is the first Friday the 13th still scary? Hell no. Seeing Kevin Bacon get a machete through the neck is just funny now. Our stabdards have been raised. You can thank Bloom County and Calvin & Hobbes for that.
February 23rd, 2007 at 11:45 am
See, I don’t exactly remember how FUNNY it was to me back in the day (i.e., the 80s). But I DO know there was a definitive moment when it was no longer funny. Probably about two years before it became a cartoon for the first time.
February 23rd, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Oh my god, Powers’ comment up there just reminded me of the Heathcliff cartoon. I was emphatically in the Heathcliff camp as a child, and desperately wanted to grow up to be as “beautiful” as Heathcliff’s girlfriend Sonja. Which is pretty twisted, when you think about it.
February 23rd, 2007 at 12:56 pm
I checked out the Garfield books from the library religiously when I was young. I don’t even remember really being infatuated with Garfield product, though I did enjoy the cartoon, but the books were solid gold entertainment. But then, I also watched a lot of the Little Prince cartoon and David the Gnome, so there’s no real accounting for taste.
February 23rd, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Family Circus! So true! I think I read it because it was the biggest printing. My sisters and I fought for these disappointing comic pages every week. It may as well have been Parade magazine. Then again, most comics in newspapers are/were never funny to me. I really wanted to love/understand Zippy the Pinhead .. hmmn. Matt Groening and Lynda Barry yes. Lynda maybe a little too real and sad but great sense of humor. Most of the others, no. Thankfully, I’m too old for Garfield:)
March 7th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Did you ever see the “Death of Garfield” series that ran the week before Halloween, 1989? According to Wikipedia, Davis said it was an experiment in scaring people with having Garfield go through what people fear most: loneliness. Pretty freaky stuff.