The Secret to Appreciating Garfield
For well over 40 years, a fat orange cat has been a linchpin of American culture. It’s time to accept that.
It’s late August, and I am cracking up as I read a brand-new Garfield comic. Panel one: Garfield, lying belly-down in his cat bed and wrapped up in a blanket, wears a bored expression as he thinks, Time to get up and start another day. Panel two: Garfield, in the same position but now smiling to himself, thinks, Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Panel three: Garfield has fallen back asleep, a tell-tale Z suspended above his head. My appreciation for the comic partly stems from the elegance of the cartooning, the way Garfield creator Jim Davis and his team manage to convey three distinct cat moods (apathy, private joy, sleepiness) in just a few ink strokes. It also has to do with the way I can immediately connect Garfield’s face to that of my wife’s tabby, Helen, whom I have observed for thousands of hours during our cohabitation.
And although the strip is not really “funny,” its lack of traditional humor is what gives me the giggles: There’s no punch line, no gag, only a dead-on depiction of a lazy cat. (A lazy cat is inherently funny because … well, have you ever lived with one?) It even pinpoints the way they’ll feint toward taking action before dozing off again. Davis’s genius lies in his ability to make these specific and recognizable observations in such a way that cat owners around the world can immediately see their own cat in the strip. Just as the reader observes Garfield, they can imagine his owner, Jon Arbuckle, standing somewhere out of the frame, watching his pet as he cycles through these states of being—an experience shared by all those responsible for a little kitty, who do the same thing multiple times a day.
I don’t know where I acquired the idea that Garfield, which became widely popular not long after its 1978 national debut, was lame. But I suspect it didn’t take much convincing. I came of age in the ’90s, a decade when The Simpsons reigned supreme, and when popular newspaper strips were heavy on rhetorical and visual irony. Comics such as Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, The Boondocks, and Zits offered sharp, clever observations about modern life and the peculiarities of human behavior. And though Dilbert and Doonesbury, with their shrewd takes on office culture and politics, weren’t to my juvenile tastes, I still understood that they were sophisticated choices for the adult reader. Garfield, in contrast, seemed to be a bottomless pool of tepid non-jokes about its titular character’s hatred of Mondays and his owner’s general cluelessness.
As I got older, Garfield seemed to remain the same. It was never surprisingly good, and it was never obviously bad. It was just … there. That reliability was easy to reject. At one point in the early aughts, the online provocateur George “Maddox” Ouzounian published a screed against Garfield—something I absolutely would have read in high school—in which he complained, “The cat eats food. Alright, WE GET IT. Move on.” Any anti-Garfield sentiment I ever picked up tapped into the same idea, that it represents everything dull and formulaic about what mainstream audiences like.
Garfield’s blandness was by design, however: In a 2004 Slate article, pegged to the release of a film adaptation of the strip, the writer Chris Suellentrop dug into how Davis refined Garfield’s formula so that its protagonist would feel as reliable and evergreen as Mickey Mouse. According to Suellentrop, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts was an inspiration—but only the “sunny, humorless monotony” of its later years, when it had become a reliable institution. That quality helps explain a particular aspect of Garfield’s charm: He’s hard to get too upset at. I suspect this is why even Maddox, whose entire shtick was to get absurdly angry about stuff, couldn’t totally work up his trademark ire when ranting about him. Whether a cartoon or not, a cat is just sort of impervious to human input. Maybe that’s the reason I never cared much about Garfield either way—there always seemed to be worthier targets of my disdain.
But after living with my wife and her cat for several years, I’m finding that all of that casual nonchalance has melted away. My reengagement with Garfield began on TikTok, when I came across an account going by “garfposting” on my For You page, which posts Garfield strips set to The Mamas & the Papas’ 1968 hit “Monday, Monday.” The account, which tends to update multiple times a week, pulls from all periods of Garfield; there are many accounts like it across other social-media platforms. In this online context, where you can easily access strips new and old, jumping across eras without much work, the enduring appeal of the comic is much easier to observe. In particular, you can really grasp how ably and consistently Davis has nailed the rhythms of domesticated feline life, across Garfield’s decades-long run.
This is, in the end, the simple secret to understanding the charms of Garfield: The comic is about what it’s like to live with a cat, because Garfield is a cat. Sure, he is a cat who thinks in English, a cat who often walks on his hind legs, a cat who can occasionally pretend to be a waiter, a cat with a digestive system that can process lasagna. But he sleeps all the time. He’s obsessive about food. His moods are not consistent. He hates Jon’s dog, Odie, until he doesn’t; he hates Jon, until he doesn’t. In my recently discovered favorite Garfield strip, from 1982, Garfield is sitting with his back turned to Jon, looking very annoyed, thinking to himself, Leave me alone. I want to be depressed. But after Jon starts tickling him, Garfield can’t resist laughing; the final panel shows him being swaddled by his owner, thinking, I’ll get you for this, Jon, with a contented smile on his face.
I go through this experience with Helen almost every day; she’ll bury her face in my side, then recoil when I aggressively scratch her head, then forget about it 30 seconds later and beg for treats. This is what cats do: They’re mad, until they’re not. They’re happy, until they’re not. And throughout these comics, Davis is especially attuned to the micro-expressions of cats—the way a tucked ear signals discomfort, how cats go wide-eyed when they’re paying particularly close attention to something in front of them. It’s something you can’t quite grasp until you yourself live with a cat, and in this sense, Garfield functions as an in-joke for its millions of readers. That’s a remarkable achievement for such a popular piece of art. Some strips are better than others, but it has remained about the same throughout its life—just like a cat, such as the one I am looking at now, as sweet and as sleepy as she’s ever been. And that’s all I can really ask for.