Hah, Garfield. Easily the blandest, safest, most tedious of the (ostensible) funnies and thus a perfect replacement for anything making a good but awkward point.
Maybe Rat got choked before he finished, but he (and Pastis) missed out a key element of corporate greed: while increasing profit beyond costs, and while claiming that they can’t hire enough workers, they are paying less: inflation-adjusted wages have gone down from pre-pandemic levels, just the opposite of what you’d expect given a labor shortage.
It has long been my hypothesis that Garfield has never actually been funny, and its success is almost entirely due to people not daring admit they don’t get the joke for fear of ridicule. After all, if the cartoonist could be bothered to draw it, and the editor commissioned it, it must be their own fault that they can’t find the humour in it. They don’t realise the joke is actually on them, as they buy the merchandise out of a misplaced sense of duty and Jim Davis laughs all the way to the bank …..
I considered Garfield funny for about the first month or so, when jokes about cats were relatively new in the funnies. After that it got boring and silly, it was never that attractively drawn, and now we have “Mutts” doing far better and more interesting stuff.
Oh, and all the Garfield swag they’re selling these days? Ug. Ly. Who needs any of that when there’s Pokemon and Totoro stuff that’s so much cuter? Who needs that bland generic cat when you can get a Catbus?
OverlappingMagisteriasays
Is Odie giving the finger in the “Garfield” strip? It’s cropped to make it just ambiguous enough to get past the censors…
Hah, Garfield. Easily the blandest, safest, most tedious of the (ostensible) funnies and thus a perfect replacement for anything making a good but awkward point.
Holms, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/its-not-just-you-garfield-is-not-meant-to-be-funny-6199556/
Maybe Rat got choked before he finished, but he (and Pastis) missed out a key element of corporate greed: while increasing profit beyond costs, and while claiming that they can’t hire enough workers, they are paying less: inflation-adjusted wages have gone down from pre-pandemic levels, just the opposite of what you’d expect given a labor shortage.
It has long been my hypothesis that Garfield has never actually been funny, and its success is almost entirely due to people not daring admit they don’t get the joke for fear of ridicule. After all, if the cartoonist could be bothered to draw it, and the editor commissioned it, it must be their own fault that they can’t find the humour in it. They don’t realise the joke is actually on them, as they buy the merchandise out of a misplaced sense of duty and Jim Davis laughs all the way to the bank …..
I considered Garfield funny for about the first month or so, when jokes about cats were relatively new in the funnies. After that it got boring and silly, it was never that attractively drawn, and now we have “Mutts” doing far better and more interesting stuff.
Oh, and all the Garfield swag they’re selling these days? Ug. Ly. Who needs any of that when there’s Pokemon and Totoro stuff that’s so much cuter? Who needs that bland generic cat when you can get a Catbus?
Is Odie giving the finger in the “Garfield” strip? It’s cropped to make it just ambiguous enough to get past the censors…