How to Make "I Hate Mondays" Jokes Funny!

Garfield the comic strip is not funny. The fact that it has run for three decades (this year is its 30th anniversary!) using only four repeated jokes is mildly funny, but the strip itself is not. It has an endearingly cartoony art style and I've always enjoyed that I share a name (spelling and all) and a hairstyle with the main human character but...yeah...that's all it's got going for it.

Recently though, the absolutely wonderful Comics Curmudgeon blog, which brings me so much joy every day, has posted links to a few sites that attempt to mine real humor out of Garfield's bloated, cavernous, lasagna-reeking gut.

The first is this message board where people have taken all of Garfield's thought balloons out of the strips to create a vague surrealist comic. My favorite is definitely this one:


Even better is the blog Garfield Minus Garfield where the creater uses a similar idea but takes Garfield himself wholly out of the comic to make it just a strip about Jon Arbuckle, lonely (and possibly mentally disturbed) young man. Here's a taste:

My favorite of the group, however, has to be the absolutely brilliant Lasagna Cat. This one's kind of hard to explain and you either love it or hate it, but I'll try. Lasagna Cat films Garfield comic strips starring people in creepy costumes and set in a tone which is like a mixture of a bad sitcom and a nightmare. Then every video follows with an intrepretive music video with a song that may or may not relate in some strange way with the topic of the comic. Oh, and each video somehow incorporates a picture of Jim Davis (actual Garfield creator) at the end.
You really have to watch a couple to get the hang of it (drugs help to) but they begin to take on a deranged genius after a while. They're very existence is just so absurd. Here's a couple:

Goddamn, it's about time someone made comic strips entertaining again. Now, if only someone did the same for Mary Worth...