Pondering Garfield

I often like to make improvements to Garfield strips, a task made fairly easy by the fact that the art is so simple, the backgrounds are generally flat colours and the only direction it's possible to take the joke is up, but honestly, Garfield isn't that bad.

No no, hear me out. Look at this strip for example:

Garfield, 2013-05-06.

It's true, it could certainly be better, but there's the seed of a decent joke there. The biggest problem is simply the need to give Garfield some dialogue. The punchline is clearly Jon's third-panel dialogue, but at that stage Garfield hasn't said anything, so the strip ends on the weaker joke of Garfield insulting Jon. So let's get rid of that.

That's better, but I think we can still get some improvement.

Now what we've got is the actual essence of the joke. Jon tied his shoelaces together, but rather than simply retying them like a normal person he is just taking small steps and complaining about it to his cat. That was the original joke, but it was padded out with unnecessary dialogue and weakened by being carried on past the actual punchline.

There's no reason Garfield can't be a funny strip. I like to think I've made it funny on numerous occasions, as have several others. The actual hard bit is done, the joke has been written, it's just buried underneath a pile of extraneous dialogue that has no business being there.