Clothes Make the Arbuckle

Jon may not know what a dress code is (seriously?), but it probably won't matter, since he customarily wears a jacket and tie on dates anyway. There must be some note of social idiocy in Jon's voice that indicates to maitre d's that he is unfamiliar with basic rules of dining etiquette. Even better, it turns out to be true. Somewhere deep inside, I know this joke pushes Jon's social retardation a little too far: he not only doesn't know what a dress code is, but doesn't know what kind of clothes are for girls and which are for boys (seriously?).

Hey Garfield, so far as I can tell, Jon's had dates three nights in a row. And he may not know that ladies don't wear ties, but when was the last time you "got out"? And yes, Jon has a look of wonderment because a restaurant requires jackets, but still, good job sassing a guy who has a date by confirming that he needs a date. Witness the desperate lengths to which a lifelong curmudgeon must go when faced with a man making self-improvements.

The Orange Violin

Clarifications for the Curious:
-We may assume Jon is not still making his Chuck E. Cheese requests from yesterday, but making reservations at another restaurant for another date. The immediacy of placing the two strips next to each other might seem confusing, but Garfield tends to group running gags as close together as possible. This is not a technique utilized by many other strips, because it tends to draw attention to the format, and may indicate to the audience that the writer is idea-starved. Garfield, on the other hand, takes care to highlight its stock situations, which goes hand-in-hand with the strip's ongoing mission to provide variants on a narrow range of interests. This trait that does not go unappreciated by fans, as indicated by the nearly illiterate Wikipedia article (ugh) which attempts and fails to catalog these situations. The good news is that Jon is organizing another date, which means Liz wasn't put off by the robot mouse. Take that, Garfield!

-The "juice harp" Jon speaks of is chicken-speak neologism for Jew's harp. Jew's harp is not an antisemetic term, as far as etymologists know, though all the dictionaries I consulted (and followed by the presumed experts at the Jew's Harp Guild website) are unsure about the derivation. I can't fault Garfield for the editor-pleasing, nonconfrontational choice, but the uncommon terminology does confuse the gag a little. Why not just say "jaw harp", which is equally wrong, but more recognizable?

In any case, forget the poor romantic substitution of a Jew's harp for a violin, and Jon's dismay at how weird the world is: the real joke is that Jon turns to his cat to help him decide if he should accept the proposal. Garfield, either hoping to sabotage the date, or figuring it's going to be an evening of idiocy anyway, silently nudges Jon toward disaster. Leave it to Garfield to find a way to turn affirmation into a way of being negative.

Rock-afire Pizza Cats

There exists the level on which this joke is simply that Jon plans to take Liz to Chuck E. Cheese, and naturally a woman of Liz's refinement will not appreciate the child-oriented restaurant. The scenario may or may not be true, but it's why Garfield is sarcastically comparing Jon's date to A Night to Remember, the ironically-titled movie about the Titanic disaster. I've pointed out before that the kind of innocence and enthusiasm Jon displays in panel 3 is probably the reason Liz likes him. It is, naturally, the same quality Garfield frequently attacks in Jon, because he does not possess it himself.

It's dorky to take a grown woman to a kid's arcade/pizza joint (unless it's some puzzling form of slumming?), but Jon keeps doing things like this, and Liz keeps dating him. The long-term reader realizes Garfield is essentially sniping about nothing, and projecting his feelings onto Liz. One of those feelings is insecurity. Whatever, Garfield, like you don't like pizza!

Further Reading!:
In a weird reality-twisting moment, I wonder if Garfield is acknowledging a historical close-call: in the early '80s during a period when the merged (Chuck E. Cheese's) Pizza Time Theater and ShowBiz Pizza Place were struggling to unify their identity, and unable to sustain exclusive contracts with their animatronic developers, Creative Engineering, the company looked for ways to phase out the ShowBiz house robot-band, The Rock-afire Explosion. The plan was to introduce animatronic licensed characters from other media. Spider-Man was considered (?). Superman was a contender. And Garfield was in the running. Yogi Bear won. The plan failed. The Rock-afire Explosion was abandoned, the Yogis dismantled, the ShowBizzes re-converted into Chuck E. Cheese's. We missed our chance for a giant animatronic Garfield to sing doo wop while we ate crappy pizza.

Special thanks to the ShowBiz Pizza.Com archive for absolutely all the above information.