Was this the peak of literature?

>Charlie Brown read War and Peace from front to back in one night

No other comic book/cartoon character can compete.

Actually you'll have to start with Garfield to fully appreciate the Greeks.

lol
lol

pss nothing personnel

post more garfield strips

...

post more please, i read garfield young and in my own language so i'm afraid the translators might not have been to traduce the subtle nuanced jokes

...

what did he mean by this?

A pinnacle of human achievement

youtube.com/watch?v=NAh9oLs67Cw

I prefer this....

garfieldminusgarfield.net/

He might mean 'ethical' instead of ethnic or he might be confusing the concept of species with ethnicity, in the latter case he is rationalising eating the fish by the fact that he is feline and that cats are known for enjoying fish.

you are like a baby
mezzacotta.net/garfield/

classic garfield is the goat comic strip

My sides!

Why did the scorpion sting the frog?

that's racist

I actually watched the whole thing.

Islam is a religion of peace.

I can't fucking believe this. This is the most incredible thing I've ever seen

I lost my shit at the Fibonacci sequence.

>all this work for 12 thousand views
Sad.

it just came out today, that's a lot of views for something that just came out, for an un-established channel

The greatest thing I've seen this year.

I preferred garfield in fist of the b0rf star

It's way past funny user

>1:01:23

well here we go

Fuck I have class in five hours
Guess I'm getting four hours of sleep tonight

i am starting to see the layers

>4 hours of sleep
or you could do this

youtube.com/watch?v=KgmoMO66uPg

...

youtube.com/watch?v=t_LJtG2gXSc

youtu.be/SMqHt3WIVpI?t=111

Holy fucking shit

absolutely heroic

Got 'em.

there are SO many good webms to make of this
"I've cried. I've cried, i've cried, i've cried, 'i've cried over this piece"

>we all have to live together
>we have to be considerate of our neighbors

what did John Davis mean by this?

...

>in the latter case he is rationalising eating the fish by the fact that he is feline and that cats are known for enjoying fish

TRIGGERED

Is that dude a Manichean?

He calls Garfield the anti god opposed to John (god)

Believing in an evil god and a good god that are opposed to each other is heresy isn't it

>lasagnacat
>unestablished

Christianity has been Manichaeistic since Aquinas, man.

Garfield is not meant to be funny.

The strips aren’t funny, but the fundamental building blocks of humor are there. It’s kind of Aristotelian, actually. From the Poetics:

>Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type—not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain.

We can definitely quibble with Aristotle’s definition, but it’s the essence of Garfield. Jon is both ugly and defective, but not generally in a painful way. Aristotle’s definition of comedy relied just on our feeling superior to him.

>My dream in life is to write the one gag that makes everyone in the world laugh- jim davis

and so far he's failed to make even a single person laugh

>Hadji Murat
Christianity has been Manichaeistic since the early church imbibed Zoroastrian influence

jim davis will be accepted into the western canon by 2020

I thought this too but when I read the first Garfields in english I found out they simply aren't funny.

Garfield is such a sly, little cunt.

this shit is fucking gold

mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=2827

return.

...

return?

to reddit.

is this real life

>this virgin shaming

the laugh track plays for everyone, whether they've had hundreds of sexual experiences or none, it's completely non partisan

it really is art

Could someone explain the significance of this to me?

holy

The ending (4:33:49) was pretty good desu. That penis and the later birthing scene actually scared the fuck out of me since I seriously didn't expect anything like that on there. Truly the most """literary""" Youtube kino.

There's no way this is real, he has to be an incredibly committed satirist

when is Zizek going to comment on the post-modern Garfield phenomenon?

youtube.com/watch?v=mRmkSf-YT8o

>unable to understand the genius of Jim Davis
brainlet detected

youtube.com/watch?v=Y-ooCnZviZ8

This is some Mishima-tier symbolism.

youtube.com/watch?v=x3NLa4ebX4E

>mfw the fight video in this one was actually uploaded to youtube under that name five years ago
>mfw they spent the past nine years laying the groundwork for these videos
this must be what it felt like to be alive during the time of Kierkegaard or Gogol. To see genius as it was created, to find a new work and know instantly that it would withstand the test of time.

What I find remarkable is how committed they actually are. The level of effort that goes into some of these videos is just ridiculous.

Colin's Bear: youtube.com/watch?v=rLGmjdm3vrw

Jazz BTFO: youtube.com/watch?v=3v05PWyIaZ0

user's diary desu: youtube.com/watch?v=T9moJawinsc

I'm gonna stop now. Honestly just watch all of them.

This is all wrong.

The pipe is a reference to René Magritte's The Treachery of Images, a work of art that presaged post-modernism. But there is more here than that. This association alone should challenge us to examine the treachery of Jim Davis' images.

In the comic strip, the smoke coming from this pipe transcends the boundary of the strip, breaking the continuity of the borders of Garfield's world. This represents the ruptures in temporality and meaning that come with postmodern capitalism. The smoke is the whiteness, the gaps between the panels, and by extension the gaps between everything in the newspaper - the other comics, the words, the images, the articles. This reflects the way that the ideology of postmodern capitalism is ever-present in our lives - it is always there, underlying everything we experience, determining the way in which everything we encounter is framed.

It is no surprise then, that John is reading a newspaper. He is like the audience. Yet when he looks for his pipe, it is not there. He is reading at his newspaper, grasping at this spectre, the spectre of neoliberal capitalism, that permeates his life. Tobacco is an addictive substance, and addicts adopt these behaviors unconsciously, just as we reflexively and unknowingly adopt ideology. It also serves to further associate the image of the pipe, and all the meaning it contains, with the act of media consumption (here, reading a newspaper).

Take for example, the vile cartoon Dilbert. Here we have a modern worker, a stand-in for the reader, who can relate to Dilbert's alienation and cynicism. Yet Dilbert never throws off his restraints, or rises up against his oppressors. In this sense, Dilbert is nothing but pacifying propaganda, a cartoon so permeated by the ideology of capitalism that he, as well as the reader, will never escape their situation. We are invited to laugh at our misery, to find solace that this experience of alienation is shared by others, but just as Dilbert remains perpetually an office drone, always wearing the same tie, always working in the same lifeless cubicles, we too are doomed to this same existence, a static, sterile, unchanging capitalist world, sucked of all life, where acts of resistance have been reduced to comic strips written by reactionaries, adorning cubicle worlds.

Ideology permeates Dilbert. Just as, surely, ideology permeates Garfield. But in this strip, Jim Davis startles us, challenges us, throws us off, hopes to dislodge our sense of what a normal comic strip is supposed to be. We are asked to see the spaces in between, to contemplate the treachery of these images, just as John contemplates the treachery of Garfield.

...

This is art. Great art.

Reading this after watching the video doesn't make me laugh, it just seems like legitimate analysis.
Fuck, it is legitimate analysis, but until now I never would have taken cartoon analysis seriously.
I think the newspaper as neoliberal capitalism is a bit of a stretch. Remember that John holds the newspaper with an aristocratic grip. I think this points toward the control of the elites over media and our perception of the world beyond our senses, which certainly is a part of the capitalist dynamic, but is not all. The newspaper is more focused.

I'd also like to note that when this strip was published, newspapers were highly relevant, but at the time of this analysis, print is dead.

this is the kind of shit you can get away with in an English department

Not really.

This comic also foreshadows the rise of Trump.

When John has his moment of realization, he turns to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, asking for their participation. At this moment, the boundary between the comic strip and the rest of the newspaper disappears - the middle pane has no outline. In the third panel the outline returns, but here we see the generator of the empty spaces that organize Garfield's comic strip reality, the pipe, in action.

John, the stand-in for the audience, likely reading this strip in a newspaper themselves, is not the one smoking the pipe. As such, he is not the one in control of the forces of neoliberal capitalism. Instead, it is Garfield, the absurd, vulgar, entertaining, and gluttonous character, who is the one in control, billowing the smoke of ideology that organizes his reality and ours.

The smoke is the whiteness not just behind Garfield's comic strip, but the entire newspaper. Here, it is suggested that the lines between entertainment and reality are blurred, or rather that they are all organized and framed by the same thing.

Trump is a character much like Garfield. He existed in media, a cartoonish caricature of a businessman. Like Garfield, he was always the center of attention, always the foil to more reasonable characters. But it is not the reasonable characters that our reality revolves around. Just as John's fate is tethered to Garfield, ours is now hopelessly entangled with Trump's - the boundary between news and entertainment has broken down. By breaking down space, by utilizing the white that extends to the entire newspaper, here Garfield is doing much the same thing. In an age saturated by media (don't forget, that is exactly what John is trying to do here, the catalyst of the whole strip), it is this media that shapes our lives and perceptions of reality, moreso then reality shapes our media- and inevitably, this puts gluttonous and absurd spectacles like Garfield at the center of not just entertainment, but of our entire world.

This is what happens when you ignore the dragon in the house (or in this case a lion). John, the absolute average of man in the developed world, looks into himself and is horrified at what he finds. We can only imagine John has entered the underworld.

ludicrous display

Excellent analysis, but you missed some crucial color symbolism. Garfield is orange, Trump is orange, there are parallels here. But look closer. Is Garfield -actually- orange? He is a cat, and cats can be orange. But Garfield is of a vivid color not usually found in nature; he is exaggerated. Similarly, Trump's "orangeness" is a false image (a spray tan) put on for the sake of his appearance in media. Both characters are colored orange artificially, with an eye towards how they will appear in the media. Both concern themselves more with appearance, especially through journalism, rather than reality. And look, too, at the word orange: it is unique. Unrhyming, originally from ancient Persian, there is an almost fey mysticism about it. Garfield is inscrutable. Deviously so, since we think we are given a glance into his thoughts. And yet, his motives remain opaque: why does he take the pipe? Why does he turn his back to Jon? We cannot peel away the skin to reveal the fleshy wedges of Garfield's soul. Neither can we pierce through Trump's erratic behavior to understand his mind. He often speaks the first things he thinks, or tweets them, much like Garfield's thought bubbles. And yet he remains a political enigma.

Consider, too, the pipe: wood, yes, but purple. Purple is the color of royalty, a theme Trump is obsessed with. The gold plating, the clean logo, everything Trump does is an echo of aristocracy. Garfield does not own the purple pipe, but takes it from Jon. Trump likewise began his life as something of a social outcast among the New York elite. He has adopted finery and the trappings of royalty in an attempt to fit in, however, they are not his originally. He is just as much a thief of status as Garfield.

shit there's a whole bunch of bonus content on that channel

youtube.com/user/lazycat619/videos

i wonder how much deeper things thing goes

Why do based professors always dress like absolute shit, Sadler is another example.

Jordan makes at least 15.000 from Patreon alone, he should just get a fresh wardrobe and be done with it.

Stop doing drugs.

I thought Heathcliff was the patrician choice tho

Don't tell me what to do with my drugs, user.

garfield homie odie nigga im a dog

Stop doing drugs.

The greatest comedy of all

short temper throwin fists like im heathcliff

the birth of comedy is when the cat starts smoking your pipe

that's it