What is Truth? Paper or Plastic?

Panel 1: What is Jon doing?

Jon is dressed up in a typically pattern-blind checkered suit and polka dot bow-tie combo, and standing around by his table, staring off into space.

Panel 2: What is Garfield doing?

Garfield has inverted a paper bag over his head as a sort of improvised mask. Two tiny holes have been cut in the bag to facilitate Garfield's vision. These holes are not nearly large enough to accommodate the Garfield's bulbous eyes, currently estimated at four to six inches in height.

Panel 3: Mysteries of meaning.

An ensemble like this usually signals that Jon is going on a date, and thus leaving the house. Garfield may be implying that Jon's attire will cause pointing and stares when the man eventually goes out, but at present they are just standing around at the table where there is no one to see either one of them. Jon takes Garfield's meaning well enough, but refuses to listen, despite decades of criticism of similar outfits and from sources independent of Garfield's skewed opinions.

Garfield makes the complicated assertion that "the bag doesn't lie." In one possible sense, this means that as one creature on this planet is disguising his identity lest he suffer humiliation due to association with Jon's clothing, then Jon is, indeed, embarrassing to be seen with. The very presence of Garfield's point of view negates Jon's emphatic statement of self-worth.

The stranger innuendo is that the bag speaks The Truth, chooses its wearer because it must be worn. Between the warring forces of Jon's clashing fabrics and The Bag, Garfield is powerless. His paw is forced, and he is crowned with The Bag through necessity, not to editorialize. Thus Garfield insinuates that his personal taste is equivalent to an objective fact.

Which is more embarrassing, a badly dressed man or a cat walking around with a bag on its head? Which is more endearing?

Eye of the Tabby

So outsized is Garfield's self-regard that he does not differentiate between the sort of feelings Jon has for his girlfriend and the feelings he has for his pet. Garfield may or may not be half-joking in his eyelash batting and the flirty pose he strikes, ignoring the gulf of aesthetic standards and nature of the relationships. But whether Garfield equates, conflates, confuses, ignores or blurs these separate concepts of beauty, he does so because he cannot conceive that they co-exist, that Jon could appreciate both kitty and woman in different ways. All Garfield sees is that someone else is occupying some of Jon's brainspace, usurping the center of attention, he is not being treated as special and perfect, and in his last line shifts his shame onto someone else.

Here is a case where Garfield's enormous vanity works at odds with his propensity to sloth and gluttony. Garfield does nothing whatsoever to "keep [himself] up," unless we mean that he rigorously maintains a body shape like several water balloons in a fur backpack. These contradictions run deep in Garfield, tentacles rising out of a bottomless pool of aggressive narcissism.

The third joke is that Jon's experience of this conversation is his cat making a weird face at him — possibly he even understands that the cat is flirting with him — which he thinks is "strange." And even if Garfield actually were expressing sexual feelings for his owner, the reality is far stranger than Jon knows, as Garfield seems to be using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist as a lifestyle guide and has gotten halfway through.