This was an essay I wrote for a class. I came up with the thesis as a joke (comparing Garfield to the United States Presidential election), and just kind of ran with it until I made what is almost a point. My (fantastic) professor recommended I try to get it published through one of my university's literary magazines, but it ended up getting rejected for reasons that I'm probably too conceded to understand.
I still think the piece is funny and I had a lot of fun writing it, even if it's kind of tailored to fit my university's perception of a "good essay" (not that it's worse than my other shitty blog posts, it's just more clearly an assignment). At the very least, I hope it's a fun read.
Even though Biden dropped out of the race, I do believe my remarks about the upcoming election are at the very least applicable in relation to how some (certainly not all) younger people are promoting Harris ironically (coconut tree, etc.). And yes, this kind of aims to deconstruct the phenomenon in a way that is emotional and takes some of the fun out of it (like how physics does to throwing a frisbee). It may very well be completely wrong and will certainly become dated a lot sooner than I think. I've moved on from some of the takes I had in this piece; I currently think this type of thing might be easier to look at in hindsight.
On that note, it's also not meant to endorse either side of the American political spectrum. I was 19 when I wrote it and I'm still not at the age where I can trust my opinions about these kinds of things.
And yes, I am afraid of cats.
November 16th, 2023
When confronted with the question of what I fear, I usually respond with a number of absurd objects – cats, Sylvester Stallone, et cetera. What I’m not prompted to reference is my fear of change – one that only grows as both the world and my life get more and more chaotic. The foundations we abide by are revealed to be subject to change at a moment’s notice. You’d think I’d be used to it by now. My generation, colloquially known as “Zoomers,” has been brought up in a world of consistent, monumental cultural shifts from the rapid evolution and expansion of the Internet in the 2010s to the growing unrest from all sides of the political spectrum spawned by the COVID-19 lockdowns in the early 2020s. But when monumental changes of the like occur, their direction of influence, positive or negative, sets a precedent for the world to come.
I was 16 years old when the COVID-19 lockdowns first took effect in my Northern Virginia community. As an outlet for the onset overthinking, I thought it my best avenue of security to understand as much as possible about the world around me – specifically its contemporary foundation in the Internet. My theory was that the Internet’s usage was akin to Robert Nozik’s “Experience Machine” – a device curated to create escapism through hedonistic artificial emotion. Yet, my feeble younger self discounted the significance of the Internet’s ability to spread information and affect culture. In more recent years, I have found that the Internet is not inherently an avenue of escapism, but an outlet for understanding an absurd world. As rapid communication has allowed Americans to grow more aware of absurd systems and doomsday patterns both political and social, so too has our sense of humor grown more self-aware and bonkers.
The prime example of this humor shift is born out of none other than Jim Davis’s famous Garfield strip – first published in 1978 as a groundbreaking comedic work. The premise was uncomplicated: a fat cartoon cat does fat cartoon cat things. Also he eats lasagna and hates Mondays for some reason. The comedy of the strip followed this pattern – the punchline usually revolving around Garfield’s desire to eat or sleep. But this simplicity placed in an era of similarly simple modern humor, combined with the marketability of a bright orange cat, led to Garfield becoming one of the most popular franchises of the 20th century – spawning several movies and television shows in its wake. Garfield the cat became an icon beyond the strips – representing food and sleep lovers everywhere. In other words, just about everyone. Similarly, the franchise's merchandise infected just about everything, from landline telephones to aprons to, yes, tea kettles. This growth, however, hasn’t coincided with a deepening of the material. In fact, Garfield has only grown more formulaic.
The advent of the Internet has led to a public realization of these contrasting facts, as well as diverse expressions and identifications with it. This is specifically depicted in Dan Brooks’s New York Times article, “How Garfield Helped Me Make Peace With a Culture in Decline,” where the author attributes his interaction with recent Garfield culture to an affectation of the United States’s reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic and his fear in the wake of it. The country’s scary lockdowns forced people to interact with the world in a virtual space and to find comfort within the “https://” walls of the World Wide Web. The Internet, often honed in the social media space of X (née Twitter), served as an outlet for the fear surrounding the 2020 catastrophe – including in the form of Garfield. Brooks, in his government-encouraged Internet surf, discovered and reported on several depictions of Garfield strips that toyed with its formula. Whether it be edited Garfield-less Garfield strips – primarily featuring Jon Arbuckle (Jim Davis’s self-insert) talking to himself, or AI-organized randomization of Garfield panels, to Brooks, “These algorithmically modified reruns of decades-old cartoons sharpen the skills we will need to find meaning in a potentially more disordered future.” As the United States found itself in a world with a clearly uncertain future with current institutions being rapidly recognized nation-wide as inherently flawed, a sort of “neo-Absurdism” found its way into the Internet’s art. Some sense of commonality between Garfield’s illogical success in the face of mediocrity and the contrasting nature of claimed institutional purpose versus results was fused together. Comfort was found in both creation and consumption of these expressions.
My similar pandemic-induced fears brought me further down the litterbox of Garfield’s web-side reflections than the New York Times typically has room for. The COVID-19 pandemic was, of course, not the beginning of Garfield’s internetual critique. Garfield’s place in culture has been morphing into its now-absurd position since the dawn of social media. In the earlier days of YouTube, Fatal Farm, a production company now known for bizarre advertisements, put together a series of short videos under the channel Lasagna Cat to mock Garfield at its core. Each episode, labeled as “tribute” to Jim Davis’s multi-decade comic run, parodies the strip to the point of excess. The format is simple: the episodes open with a live-action depiction of a singular Garfield strip, are followed by an excessive laugh track at the punchline, then concluded by random Internet shenanigans that take the joke to an extreme – usually revolving around making fun of Jim Davis or Jon Arbuckle in one way or another. If the punchline in the strip of choice is Garfield screaming in fear because he was fooled into thinking he was a dog, Lasagna Cat’s shenanigans revolve around Garfield having a deep Miami Vice-esque existential crisis set to Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” If the punchline is Garfield getting caught with the fact that he wants to murder Odie, his dog counterpart, Lasagna Cat’s shenanigans devolve into a Final Fantasy-themed battle between the protagonists that ends with the tag “Told 1 Hilarious Joke, Found 4 Licensing Deals” (Johnson et al).
While each video is unique in its content and reference, the overarching “joke” of Lasagna Cat is its own existence. The fact that a group of trained filmmakers made a 43-episode high-quality live-action Garfield depiction is de facto funny. This joke serves as an echo to what makes the very concept of Garfield absurd – Jim Davis sat in front of a piece of paper almost every week for the past 45 years writing the same jokes about a fat cartoon cat doing fat cartoon cat things. And he continues to succeed.
Thus, interaction with Garfield becomes inherently funny. The fact that the New York Times published an article about Garfield’s absurd transformations is funny. Even ownership of Garfield merchandise becomes part of the joke. My Garfield phone is the only reason why I use a landline. A Garfield lamp illuminates my nightly reads. Even a Garfield Calendar charts my daily life. My understanding of Garfield’s nonsensicality is expressed in the humor of its success. Something so valueless and devoid of any real meaning shouldn’t be so successful. Especially when art – real art – is tossed to the sidelines of the expressive economy to make room for it. Yet this re-vomited joke is successful. Yet meaningful art is sacrificed for the success of this fat cartoon cat to continue. And, yes, in many ways, that is funny.
Garfield’s evolution within our culture just scratches the surface. Broader examples of this sphere of thought can be found in the Internet’s “Meme Culture.” In Lauren Michele Jackson’s 2017 essay, “A Unified Theory of Meme Death,” the culture critic makes an effort to diagnose why Internet memes tend to “die” or fade in captivation. Because of the essay’s time of release, it’s framed in the context of the 2016 United States election cycle. Specifically citing Pepe, an internet meme turned alt-right hate symbol, Jackson contemplates that meme “life” is dictated by cultural relevance:
[Pepe] was on the decline until he got a new context when the alt-right reappropriated him leading into the [2016] election. Pepe was resurrected from obscurity when internet culture found a new need for the cartoon’s special brand of male millennial grotesquerie. (6)
To Jackson, what a meme says in relation to the culture climate in which it is birthed directly correlates with its popularity. Pepe was a meme sensation popularized by forums such as 4Chan and Reddit but, as far-right echo chambers grew in similar avenues of the Internet, familiar symbols derived from memes were used as points of unity. As their voices grew, so did the presence of Pepe. This comic cartoon spoke to an uglier destabilizing idea; its impact grew as it was applied in satirical ways, highlighting their alt-right ideas as sensical.
In contrast, Jackson references the death of the “Crying Jordan” meme taking place shortly after the results of said election: “the idea of loss suddenly became too poignant, too meaningful for the disembodied head of a crying black figure to read as playful” (6). In the face of new executive leadership that, for many Americans, seemed to put in danger recent social movements for racial equality, the laughability of certain memes became rather difficult to conjure. Thus, limitations of a meme’s ability to comment on contemporary social climates became apparent.
Of course, there is a limit case to Jackson’s thesis. While the critic suggests success as a direct relation to more explicit public sentiment, the memes that don’t reference contemporary society, such as Doge or more recent depictions of Pepe, fail to decease. Like Garfield, they have joined the ranks of the Internet’s immortal nonsensicality wing. In years since, correlating with populatory unrest sparked by the then-President and, later, COVID-19, memes in and of themselves became the meme. Progressively, the idea of a top-text bottom-text silly image being the most contemporary avenue of humor was in itself recognized as absurd. Nowadays Pepe, Doge, and the like are viewed as funny not because the memes are humorous, but because the concept of people dedicating a huge part of themselves to a cartoon frog or a singular picture of a now-dead Shiba Inu is absurd. Making memes that utilize these characters now serve an ironic joke. The humor derives simply from the fact that they exist. In other words, meme culture gained self-awareness.
This pattern has only grown since the pandemic. The Internet’s ability to house a rapid spread of information has allowed the American public to see the absurdity of the establishments that govern them to the point where presidents themselves, regardless of party, are becoming seen as laughable figures. Recent Internet trends such as Gamer Presidents – where AI generated voices of political figureheads parody YouTube “Let's Plays” – function as layered iterations of the growing phenomenon. Importantly, it serves to mock the figureheads of promised, but never fulfilled, stability – figureheads that only get less reliable as years progress. And they continue to succeed.
Perhaps therein the core of my fear of change becomes apparent. This desire for sensicality in an evolving space without any. Finally, I have discovered a point of Internet culture that makes sense. I discovered a truth. That it exists as a reflection of a world that makes even less sense. That terrifies me. That change doesn’t seem to be for the purposes that I buy in for. That I get the unrest without the results. That’s unfair. Stuff like that just hurts.
In an effort to unplug myself from this anxiety, I recently visited my grandparents’ house in Southern Tennessee and they assigned me my father’s old room to reside in. Of course, with many fathers of his age, and sons of mine, our interactions are usually reserved for life lessons and logistical college details. What I’m still growing accustomed to is viewing him as a real human being – which made it all the more strange when I saw his desk. Mind-blowing yearbooks here and there, sure, but what stuck out to me was the sticky note pad he had. A Garfield sticky note pad. My Dad unironically went out and purchased a Garfield sticky note pad because he thought it was fun. And I guess that’s why we all buy it. And isn’t that fun? That we all buy into silly lampshades and desk toys. That we know who Garfield is. We know that he loves lasagna. That nothing will make him like Mondays.
Like the future, cats are always unpredictable. They’re also unreadable, clawed, and hiss in ways that send shivers down your soul. Sylvester Stallone, no matter how tied to Rocky he may be, is ever-changing. No matter how many times we see him run to “Gonna Fly Now,” it’s always different. Perhaps anxiety isn’t brought about by the world’s changing nature, but by the fact that the change is easier to pay attention to. Building life – real life – is near-impossible when your foundations seem so shaky. Exhibited here is a world that only grows more nonsensical when you squint at its glowing fine print for long enough. Maybe such fine print is worth abandoning altogether. Perhaps a form of escapism from our Internet feeds can be found in our feline friends or a montage-worthy jog. In yearbooks and sticky notes. But I guess such experience isn’t born out of a machine. Sometimes it’s just on Dad's desk.
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