"Garfield" Is Not Funny

And now for the lighter side of things . . .

Like any ailurophile, I started out liking Jim Davis' strip "Garfield."  After "Peanuts" had popularized dogs with Snoopy, it was refreshing to see a cat in the funnies, especially a cat as the title character in a strip.  But, after reading "Garfield" for so long, I realized something - the strip isn't very funny.  In fact, once you've read it long enough, you realize it's not really funny at all.

The humor of "Garfield" - if it can be called that - centers on not-so-humorous character traits, depicting Garfield as a cynical, gluttonous, oversized and somewhat nasty cat.  This is in stark contrast to Charles Schulz's "Peanuts,"  which used gentle humor and light philosophical musings to make us laugh or smile. "Garfield" barely elicits a humor-based reaction at all, because there's nothing funny as a pet you'd never want to own.  A lot of people would love to have a dog like Snoopy; who would want to have a cat like Garfield?    

"Garfield"'s "humor" is more mean-spirited than anything else, as evidenced by the strip below.

It's also inane . . .

 . . . and flat-out dumb.

Jim Davis didn't really start his strip to entertain comic-strip readers.  He wanted to create a cartoon character that could make him lots of money through merchandising, in the form of Garfield plush toys, Garfield radios, Garfield calendars, Garfield pencils, and so on and so on and so on.  Davis doesn't even draw the strip anymore; he farms it out to hired artists, which is why Garfield's appearance has changed over the years.  When Davis started the strip in 1978, this is what Garfield looked like.  

Not exactly an adorable kitty.

Charles Schulz gave Davis pointers on how to draw better when Davis first started, but Davis paid little attention to Schulz's advice. Schulz grew to resent "Garfield"'s success, as he saw the strip as inferior and was annoyed by all of the merchandising.  "Peanuts" was (and still is) merchandised too, of course, but for Schulz, merchandising came second behind the quality of the strip, his top concern. 

Meanwhile, Patrick McDonnell, who created the pet-centered comic strip "Mutts," took an approach more similar to Schulz's than Davis'.  He uses the same simple, gentle humor that "Peanuts" is known for, and while his drawing is much less sophisticated than Schulz's was, his two main characters - an adopted dog named Earl and an adopted cat named Mooch - are quite cute.  McDonnell's art work is not unlike the drawings in classic early-twentieth-century strips like George Herriman's "Krazy Kat," a strip Schulz idolized. ("I always thought if I could do something as good as 'Krazy Kat,' I would be happy," Schulz said in 1967. "'Krazy Kat' was always my goal.")  Schulz would call "Mutts" one of the best strips ever, saying that it was "exactly what a comic strip should be."

Also, McDonnell uses his strip to promote animal welfare and pet adoptions from animal shelters, believing there are few greater loves one can give than to a domestic animal who needs a home. "Garfield," by contrast, stands as an argument against pet adoption.

"Garfield" will likely continue for the next few years, but I don't think it will be remembered so well once the strip is retired.  And it will not likely be rerun like "Peanuts" has been since Schulz died in 2000.  But it serves as a reminder of the biggest thing wrong with the American dream - some people just fake it 'til they make it.

It makes sense that "Garfield" thus took off in the 1980s, the decade that gave us Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, two of America's biggest fakers.

*

I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was a kid.  I drew a comic strip - mainly for my own amusement - patterned after "Peanuts."  It was lousy. The jokes were stupid, the characters were one-dimensional, and the drawings were little more than sophisticated stick figures.  One lesson I learned from drawing my own cartoon is that just because you love doing something doesn't mean you're good at it.  A friend of mine, incidentally, draws a serial superhero cartoon for a local paper.  And it's gosh darn awful.  I don't have the heart to tell her that, as a cartoonist, she's even worse than Jim Davis.