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No. 2418: Humor Recalibration

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Humor Recalibration

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Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=2418

Strip by: Lubaf

Jon: I think I'll do something rugged and manly
Liz: Like what?
Jon: Mow the lawn with my shirt off!
{Jon appears with his shirt partway removed; an art gag that's really hard to describe, other then with Jon's next line}
Jon: I'm stuck
Garfield: Nothing I could ever say would make this any funnier then it already is.

The author writes:

Possible alternate titles I considered: "In which I paraphrase my own reaction to the original strip into Garfield's mouth", or "Metajoke Garfield 3".

Humor can be hard to calibrate. Is the joke funnier if we reduce the strip to the last panel? How about if we expand it over 6? And then there's wording: Would the strip be funnier if I changed "mow the lawn with my shirt off" to "run naked through the street" or "shovel the snow with my shirt off" (the latter of which is actually pretty rugged and manly - and something Jon could have been doing if he lived in the Northeastern United States on the day this strip was published). I'm hoping to see other attempts to fix this particular joke, but knowing how SRoMG memes work, I probably won't, and knowing the queue size for SRoMG (I submitted this strip the day the original was published), even if I do, it'll be sometime in September or October [Ed: *cough*].

Meta question: Would this annotation be funnier if I removed the sentence that begins "I'm hoping to see..."?

Further meta question: Should I reference xkcd's "Hofstadter" strip here, or instead refer to the actual man?

Further further meta question: Would this annotation be funnier if I removed all these meta questions?

...Okay, I think I'll stop now... (Would this line be funnier if I added "I'm getting dizzy now"? Hmm....)

[[Original strip: 2015-02-20.]]

Original strip: 2015-02-20.