Cats can't talk!

When in doubt, get both

2006-11-29T10:29:00.000-08:00

Jon bought an empty untitled journal and believes that it is a book of Dickinson poetry. He also plans on giving her a singing fish, which Garfield believes is his next meal.

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Swimsuit shopping

2006-11-28T10:23:00.000-08:00

Explanation 1: Jon was in a hallucination in the first two panels, and has just come out of it in the third.

Explanation 2: Jon has gone mute.

In both scenarios, Garfield is eating Jon's cereal and taunting him with it.

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WHAT did he say?!

2006-11-27T09:52:00.000-08:00

Look at the original. Seriously.

I can hardly believe that Garfield can say that in the comics. =:O

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Poor Gladys

2006-11-24T09:50:00.000-08:00

Jon does not know when to stop talking.

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Don't cook everything you see on TV

2006-11-23T09:48:00.000-08:00

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Meow-meow-meow-meow meow-meow-meow-meow...

2006-11-22T09:35:00.000-08:00

Jon is trying to get Garfield to eat human food rather than cat food. Garfield is either indifferent or rejective.

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Racism

2006-11-21T09:32:00.000-08:00

Clearly this is some sort of slam at Asian cooking.

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Opportunism

2006-11-20T09:25:00.000-08:00

Jon has come out of an episode, during which he apparently put on a chef's hat for some unknown and probably irrational purpose. Rather than taking the chef's hat off now that the episode is over, he is deciding to make the best of already wearing it by “cook[ing] something”.

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New weight loss plan

2006-11-18T09:20:00.000-08:00

Jon believes that the refrigerator is capable of locomotion. He has believed this in the past, and Garfield and Odie are looking at each other with worry over him relapsing into this delusion.

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Don't dress up your pets, or this may happen

2006-11-16T09:15:00.000-08:00

Jon dressed Garfield up in his clothes, then forgot about it when he went out on his date, and now feels bad about forgetting. Meanwhile, Lyman's dog is laughing at how stupid Garfield looks.

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Don't ask him

2006-11-13T09:08:00.000-08:00

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Pee-yew again

2006-11-11T13:17:00.000-08:00

Jon still has an abysmally bad sense of smell, not to mention burned socks.

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Pee-yew

2006-11-10T13:14:00.000-08:00

Jon has an abysmally bad sense of smell.

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We need new dishes

2006-11-09T13:10:00.000-08:00

Garfield has hidden the detergent so well that Jon has come to believe that he will never find it.

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Not a floor so clean you could eat off it

2006-11-08T13:02:00.000-08:00

Jon's “guacamole” is really a green concrete that sets in seconds.

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I'll have the pudding

2006-11-07T00:47:00.000-08:00

Jon grew up in such extreme poverty that he considers his current selection of evening meals to be luxurious by comparison. Garfield concurs.

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What's on TV?

2006-11-06T02:29:00.000-08:00

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BRAINSSSS

2006-11-04T02:01:00.000-08:00

Either Jon believes that he is a zombie (the fact that he cannot see being explained by the fact that he is (un)dead), or he simply is wearing his (poorly-made) Halloween costume three days late. Either way, in reality, he is wearing a blank Halloween mask made from a stack of blank papers.

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Introduction

2006-11-04T01:05:00.000-08:00

Awhile back, some people on a forum (now 404) figured out that if you remove Garfield's thought balloons, the Garfield comic strip changes entirely.

The official Garfield strip is about an anthromorphic perpetually-hungry lazy cat, and his owner Jon's constant survival of him. The problem with it is that Garfield and Jon will sometimes “converse”. Garfield is only using thought bubbles, of course, so any “speech” that he may make is telepathic — but Jon still responds to it, and this makes the strip less like reality and more like a comic strip.

The OP on the forum had the idea to remove Garfield's “dialogue”, and observed that the strip becomes about Jon, a pathetic man who talks to his cats. I'll take this statement one step further and claim that Jon is insane.

You see, in the real world, cats can't talk. If they are telepathic, we humans certainly don't know what they're thinking to us. Jon seems to be the only one (nobody else would have any idea), but this doesn't explain much of Jon's behavior. So I think that he's simply insane, and any thoughts he hears from Garfield in the official strip are simply a product of that insanity. Indeed, when you look at it from the Jon-is-crazy standpoint, some things that you see in the strip (e.g. Garfield wearing an oven mitt) definitely seem to be hallucinations.

You would be reasonable to ask at this point why I can leave Jon's visual hallucinations in but remove Garfield's thought balloons. I could make up something about these taking different neural pathways, or cite some artistic license. But I'll cite two much simpler reasons instead:

It's easier to simply cut out thought balloons than to remove costumes, objects being carried, etc..
It wouldn't be as funny if I did.

I won't do most strips in which all the characters involved are animals (Garfield, neighbor-dog, Arlene, Nermal, birds, mice, spiders). Since in most cases it would just be the characters standing around and moving around, it wouldn't be funny, and so I won't waste the effort. I may still do it if there's some action that makes it worth doing, though.

And so, here is Garfield with Garfield's dialogue cut out. I've done some strips before I decided to start this dedicated site for them; these have had their post timestamps back-dated to the original date of the strip, so you'll need look back in the archives for those.

One more thing: If you're wondering what Joe Mathlete Explains Today's Marmaduke is, it's a similar site wherein… Joe Mathlete explains today's Marmaduke. It's very funny. You should check it out.

And a note about copyright: What I'm doing here is a work of parody. Therefore, while I am not a lawyer, I believe that it is protected fair use under US copyright law. I do copy all official strips here rather than linking to them; I do this because while garfield.com does have a complete archive of every Garfield strip ever, you can never trust anything on the internet to stay where it is forever. This is easier than trying to repair a sudden rash of 404s. And look at it this way: I'm saving the syndicate some money on bandwidth bills. ☺

Elevators

2006-11-03T01:56:00.000-08:00

Pick one:

Jon has delusions whenever he is in an elevator.
Jon has delusions whenever he is in a crowded elevator.
(The benefit-of-the-doubt scenario.) Jon had a bad dream that took place in an elevator.

This also continues Jon's problems with cell-phones.

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Please read the manual

2006-11-02T01:54:00.000-08:00

Jon does not understand the concept of a telephone, and therefore thinks that he can answer text messages by yelling to the sender.

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Commercial saturation

2006-11-01T01:50:00.000-08:00

Jon has watched one too many Meow Mix commercials and heard one too many annoying cell-phone ringtones, and as such has come to believe that his cat has a cell-phone with the Meow Mix jingle as a ringtone.

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Oven mitt

2006-10-26T01:47:00.000-07:00

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Mexican restaurant

2006-10-25T01:42:00.000-07:00

Jon believes that he is in a Mexican restaurant (that serves coffee), and that his cat is the waiter.

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The baloney is yodeling

2006-08-17T01:29:00.000-07:00

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