A Mid-Pleistocene Night's Dream

Jon wistfully recounts an erotic dream to his cat, who mocks him in return. Before we get to the nature of what Garfield is up to, consider that we cannot understand, or at least confirm, that Garfield is being a wise-ass until the punchline. The strip is built so that the strange possibility exists that Garfield is actually recounting a parallel dream that reveals his hitherto unspoken feelings about Liz. Because we know Garfield better than that, it is fairly plain that he is taunting Jon. Though the human cannot hear the cat's thoughts, were Jon to glance behind him and observe Garfield's perfect mimicry of his posture and expressions, he would likely get the gist.

Jon's moony account centers around a dream. From his speech, Jon understands dreams in the Disneyland/Martin Luther King, Jr. mode, as a sort of fond fancy which is not yet manifest in reality, and/or a shimmering goal toward which one might aspire. Whether Jon considers the dream might have any psychoanalytic weight — Freudian, Jungian, or pop psycho-spirituality — is harder to discern. He likely understands the dream as a basic wish-fulfillment scenario, but he so starry-eyed that he fails to connect the dots and read the darker implications for his waking life. Enter Garfield.

Garfield, too, claims to have had a dream. (To head off Comment section wiseacres it doesn't particularly matter if Garfield actually had this dream or not; either way, his purpose is to submarine Jon.) Garfield's dream account begins identical to Jon's, but concludes differently.

Jon finds his dream "romantic," while Garfield does not. The cat's first point is that the dream is potentially entirely meaningless. With equal possibility, we may all dream of our waking-life lovers, movie stars, nonexistent people, and mortal enemies. Garfield does not have feelings for Liz, yet had a similar dream. Dream-Liz expressing her love is not the same thing as Jon's girlfriend saying she loves him in waking life.

Garfield both denies and and supports the argument for the wish-fulfillment dream (he is a cat toying with his prey, after all). We know it is unlikely that Garfield yearns for Liz's love, because we have deep knowledge of Garfield's character: his stunted empathy, displacement of libidinal energy onto food, a sadistic streak, etc... And, informed by that jumbled pathology, that is exactly how Garfield's dream plays out. Garfield's gluttony, pride, predatory instinct, hedonism and showboating converge in a dream of excess, power and consumption of another life. By placing his own fantasy next to Jon's, Garfield parodies Jon's desires, and also implies that he dreams bigger and better than his owner.

Dozens of mammoth carcasses in various states of preservation have been discovered over the last several centuries; the flesh has always been far too decayed, reeking and foul for consumption. Should a housecat attempt to eat of these specimens, he would likely become seriously ill. Other than these museum-case sources, Mammuthus primigenius is long extinct and unavailable for hunting or meat harvest.

Finally and most importantly, Garfield is illustrating to Jon that we dream of those things that are simply, completely, utterly, forever impossible in the real world. Among those things, says Garfield, is human love.

Video-Watching Dog

Title Panel: In the spirit of radical, twisted Garfield self-referentiality, investigate the obnoxious/ funny Bean Me! non-game on the official website. Yours truly chugs enough coffee every day to kill a tabby several times over, and few graphical representations of the queasy ecstasy of caffeine jitters have achieved the subjective accuracy as Garfield.

Since You Asked: A lot of readers left comments or e-mailed, specifically asking for either explanation of the joke or... well, mostly people are just baffled by the joke. Not to boast (as I regularly misread or can't figure out Garfield gags), but I thought it was pretty clear, though that is bolstered by familiarity with Garfield gag techniques. It's a patented Inexplicable Behavior Explained by Last Panel Reveal strip.

The Plot: Jon and Garfield look increasingly anxious. Eventually their frenzy peaks, and they run screaming from the room. Odie sleeps calmly through the outburst, and in the end, reveals the TV remote control, secreted under his body. It seems Jon and Garfield were driven to the brink of madness because they could not find the remote. With his newfound power to choose stations, Odie selects a program about a dog waving at the camera.

The question of when a mini-TV was put on The Table remains unanswered.

Man and His Machines: Odie dupes his intellectual superiors by striking at their cultural Achilles heel. The readership may find it fair or unfair, but television in Garfield is always depicted as idiotic and intellectually corrupting. Today, being deprived of this commodity of idiocy causes panic and eventual degeneration into helpless, preverbal animalistic frenzy. There are any number of icons of sustenance Odie could withhold from the Garfield cast, to cause such a meltdown. Garfield without coffee, Pooky or lasagna or Jon with a locked sock drawer might react the same way, but it is telling that the stupidest character achieves power over the others by mastery over their stupidest addiction.

So pervasive is Odie's conquest that he summons programs that do not seem to otherwise exist, and he has made Jon and Garfield forget that the main, full-size television is still available for use in the living room, and probably uses an entirely different remote control.

Bunniculfield

Choose which joke you like more:

1) There was a rabbit in this yard, and whether ironic or not, the passers-by were alerted to the pet by a "Beware Of Bunny" sign. Then a huge dog ate the bunny. Then Garfield came by, wondered where the rabbit was, and was horrified when the dog revealed his massacre by loudly belching.

2) The purple-gray Madame Mim-esque animal sitting in the yard is supposed to be a grotesquely outsized man-weight rabbit. Garfield is aghast that such a monstrosity could be called "bunny".

3) Some unfathomable conflation of #1 & #2.

Kitty in the Water

Title panel: This dire possible-Phantom Menace-reference image sort of summates an idea intrinsic to Garfield, unlike most Sunday title panels, which normally have nothing to do with anything. Garfield confidently moves in on his prey with a combination of cat-like hunting skill, human-learned traits, both of which he is abusing: snorklers are not supposed to murder the fish they observe. While he takes visible satisfaction in this, the cosmos are going to collect a hefty fine from the meek and the mean alike. The idea actually plays out in today's strip, too.

Panel 1: Cats have little narrow tongues. While I appreciate Mr. Davis' ongoing effort to demolish standards of feline anatomy at every turn, his depiction of Garfield's tongue always grosses me out a little.

Panel 5: The Garfieldian version of cause and effect has little to do with karma, or swift justice, or even a universal morality meting out punishment and reward in a pattern the characters can understand. But perhaps we can discern a kind of fatalistic irony anyway. What has Garfield done "wrong" today? He fails to look before leaping, literally not checking the wading pool for water. He seeks to sully a neighbor's property -- in Judeo-Christian terms, we might say he is "stealing" -- without second thought. Overcome with excitement, he showboats with an overzealous leap, boastful and prideful. But those are normal, petty sins that in the laws of Garfield's universe are not as funny to punish as the self-satisfaction of someone who thinks they have it all figured out.

Buster Keaton's physics often worked on a similar principle: dumb luck will save your life, but any plans will be demolished in the process. Garfield supposes you might also smash your face into a tree. The difference between this lesson and a Chuck Jones Roadrunner cartoon, is that there is nothing harebrained or elaborate about jumping into a swimming pool. The margin for error is small enough, the scene mundane enough, that only Garfield would see it as an opportunity for punishing a character so harshly.

Panel 6: Here was a chance to reward Odie by having him splashed with a pool full of water, or indicating that he is granted some relief by the shade of the pool on his head. No: he just gets a pool on his head.

Also: Garfield jumped into the pool so hard he reversed the color scheme? Bravo.

The Checkers Speech

Oh boy! What a mess!

Panel One a: What are they looking at?

Panel One b: Garfield's legs have mutated and/or atrophied such that I'm not sure he can walk on all fours even if he wants to.

Panel Two a: If Garfield doesn't know that he ate checkers -- clearly he has no visual recognition of checkers-- then why would the word "checkers" trigger his moment of clarity? I would hazard to suggest the strip would work better with no reaction from the cat until Jon asks where the checkers have disappeared to.

Panel Two b: It is one thing to talk to a pet, despite getting no reaction for better than 25 years, because we all do it, and Garfield is more reactive than most. It is another thing to realize you will be sitting at home with your kitty on Saturday night. It is another thing entirely to ask your cat to play checkers with you.

Panel Three a: Woah, jump cut, settle down! I guess Jon went and got the checkers box, set up the board, and returned to precisely the same position, but it's disorienting. I cannot, however, explain why he is consulting the front of the game box to determine the location of his missing playing pieces.

Panel Three b: Somehow this checkerboard measures six squares on the long sides, four squares on one side... and three squares on the parallel side. It's his professionalism that I respect.

Panel Three c: If Jim Davis ever draws Garfield's tongue like that again, I'm gonna barf.

For Lasagna or Money

Come again?

I think I "don't get this."

Does Garfield mean "If 'money can't buy happiness,' then do you, Jon, rent happiness? Because you are clearly a happy man." Or does Garfield mean "If money can't buy happiness, then do humans in general rent happiness, because I see an obvious link between money and happiness."

Either way, I am not sure why Garfield is acting like he's never heard this platitude before, and even less sure if the panic in his eyes is the proper reaction.

I like to think Jon gave Ellen this speech with no prompting but his own insecurity. This strip also raises questions about Jon's income level and professional success as a cartoonist which are better left un-pondered. Believe me. I've pondered them.