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No. 5011: a cat by the name of Garfield, or as I'd tell it to you my lad, I would not have known him such a fat tabby for all the lasagne he had professed to eat

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a cat by the name of Garfield, or as I'd tell it to you my lad, I would not have known him such a fat tabby for all the lasagne he had professed to eat

First | Previous | 2023-02-06 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=5011

Strip by: Linguanaut

Jon: Garfield, I decided I should read more!
{Jon is holding a brightly-coloured box of cereal}
Jon: "Fortified with essential vitamins and minerals"
Jon {visibly tired}: That's enough for today. My head hurts
Garfield {enthusiastically}: Tomorrow, we read Ulysses

The author writes:

You see, the joke here is that Ulysses is such a famously convoluted and long book by such a famously convoluted author [that being James Joyce]; Jon is clearly [or at least, probably] not ready to jump directly from reading the blurb on a box of cheerfully-deceptive-o's, into a work so impenetrable that even the author of this remix strip has not finished reading it at the time of the writing of this note.

I considered a lot of other books to reference here, by merit of text length alone - but most of those were either works of religion, politics or history; in the present clime, such things might read as being more of a statement than a simple joke about Jon's literacy and Garfield's expectations, as was intended here. Either that or they were fantasy genre epics, which might make the joke sound like it was targeted at the genre mentioned, rather than, again, being an absurd character moment.

Finnegans Wake might have been the more obvious Joyce choice, but I have never even tried to read it, personally, and referencing a difficult book on reputation alone seemed like the sort of joke that lands at least partly on the person who is telling it; so I went with the more conventional one.

Is that a long enough explanation of the joke that it comes back around from ruining it to enhancing it, by virtue of being so blatantly unnecessary? Hopefully so; otherwise the whole thing just looks pretentious. Which it is - but that was really meant to be part of the joke.

Original strip: 2021-10-05.