I love the Simon’s Ccat videos. They validate the existance of having a cat companion - they are delightful animals that provide hours of absurd entertainment, along with comforting affection.
Example? I’ve never seen any Garfield strips where Garfield didn’t seem to be indistinguishable from a coffee-swilling office drone. Even Catbert has more cat-like qualities. I look at a Garfield strip and I get the impression that Jim Davis has never had a cat in him home.
But that is thirty-four years old.
Much more brilliant and hilarious is simply removing Garfield’s dialogue. http://www.truthandbeautybombs.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=4997
Unfortunately, a great many of the images at the link no longer exist. 
ETA: more variants, including more (very good) garfield-minus-dialogue examples.
And more, with discussion of recontextualization in general, and an analysis of exactly why Garfield as published in the newspapers isn’t funny. (Basically, Jim Davis has a bad habit of overkilling the punchline, in a way, “explaining” the joke to the reader so it’s no longer funny.)
http://wondermark.com/the-comic-strip-doctor-recontextualization/
I wonder if Jim Davis now accounts for Garfield minus Garfield. In other words, writes and draws Garfield comic strips that will be funny also as Garfield minus Garfield comic strips.
That may be because, once the strip became popular for the cat-like Garfield, Jim Davis stopped doing the strip in 1981 and turned over writing and drawing responsibilities to his “creative studio”/Garfield licensing company Paws Inc. 57 artists all working on “product,” attempting to maximize business revenue. Whenever you’re reading a Garfield now, you’re reading a committee-created “product” designed to be inoffensive and maintain the licensability (new word!) of the character.
That said, there are some talented comics artists in the studio–some even make the rounds of comic book conventions–and even if the cat-ness of Garfield has been minimized, the writers do occasionally push through other creative or strip-changing ideas. And Jim is a pretty nice guy, both in personal and business life, whatever one may feel of the product.
I thought it used to used to be funny way back when, and then used to think it was terrible, but in the past three or so years it’s gotten better. Not as good as it was, but not, say, Marmaduke bad, the way it was in the 90’s.
There’s actually an aggregator of unusual takes on Garfield that’s it’s own strip called Square Root of Minus Garfield. Ironically, it also has declined in quality over time as all the really cool ideas were used, but it’s still funny and/or thought-provoking on a regular basis.
Funny, but I actually had past experience with Paws, Inc. I was the demo artist/support tech for a couple of 3D animation programs, TDI Explore and Digital Arts DGS. I can’t remember which one Paws had (probably DGS) and I traveled to Fort Wayne to train a Paws artist.
I remember really getting a kick out of Garfield. Then I turned 10.
Seriously, as a young kid, I loved Garfield, thought the strip was great, etc.
I still remember very vividly - I was born in 1981, so you know my age - in fourth grade, our teacher liked to put up comic strips she liked, or thought were clever. Often we’d be given short essay assignments on our interpretations of a particular strip. She used a lot of Calvin and Hobbes, so though I didn’t recognize its genius at the time, good on her.
One time, a fellow student and friend of mine asked her, “Why don’t you ever use Garfield?”
She blinked, then said, “Well, Garfield is always the same. He likes to eat and he’s lazy. Every strip is some variation on that. There’s nothing interesting in the same joke told over and over.”
I remember this shocking me. “Teacher doesn’t like Garfield? Teacher criticizes Garfield? But EVERYONE loves Garfield! …wait, but yeah, she has a point.”
/I do still love the Garfield Halloween TV Special, but the strip can DIAF
Hey, neat! Did you get any kind of feel for what the studio’s culture was like?
I remember enjoying Garfield and I wondered if the reason why I stopped liking was because the quality declined. A quick trip to the archive was in order and I read a bunch of random strips and maybe 15 or so from the early 80s.
No, looks like it was always crap that I would inevitably grow out of, just like most of the stuff I liked from my childhood. The recent comics were about the same as the old ones. The only one I found amusing was from 1995. (Cat sheds on man, man complains he’s covered in cat hair, cat thinks “join the club.”)
I like how there’s a keyword search for the comics so you can quantify the lameness and repetiton. Gee, wonder how many strips are devoted to fat jokes? 329. Lasagna? 98. Coffee? A surprising 552. None, however, have all three.
I used to love Garfield comics and the cartoons. I think I just grew out of it when I was about 12 or 13 maybe. I used to even have Garfield comic strip wall paper. The only problem with it was that it had only three strips repeated over and over.
And thus does decoration mimic art.
Haven’t looked at it in years but isn’t Garfield just a poor man’s version of Heathcliff?
Garfield did have the full power of 1980s cross-promotional marketing behind it, so it got brainwashed into everyone’s subconscious right along with Pac-Man and WWF Wrestling.
No, because all the training was done at the artist’s home. It was just two days, and I though I was supposed to be put up in a hotel, I wound up sleeping in the guys spare bedroom. So “cheap” seemed to be the operative phrase.
Looks like my friend was right, then. I’m one of a very few who find Garfield funny.
I always thought it was one of the more popular comics. I guess I need to rethink all I thought I knew!
It probably is. There are a lot of people in the world who find comfort in the familiar, and are frightened by anything new and strange. When people like this open their comics section, they expect to see Garfield and BC and the Wizard of Id and the like, not because they’re funny, but because that’s what they’ve always seen in the comics.
Exactly so. There are a lot of older people who read comics, as well as people who don’t like edgy humor, and those who see the comics they grew up with as a sort of comic-strip “comfort food”. I’d wager that most newspapers still keep a couple of well-past-their-prime strips on their comics pages specifically to appeal to those readers.