A friend pointed me to Garfield Minus Garfield yesterday. Looks like it’s only been around for a few weeks, but it’s pretty brilliant. Basically, these are a bunch of Garfield strips with Garfield (and anything he says) removed. What’s left is a bizarre, surreal, and generally hilarious monologue. It’s ironic that Garfield becomes radically funnier (even funny at all is huge progress) when the main character is removed. For instance:

Or:

This reminds me of the various efforts to make Marmaduke funny, but I think this works quite a bit better. Maybe it’s my own bias, but I feel like there’s more of a public call for Garfield (really Jim Davis) to go big or go home. I wasn’t aware of Marmaduke in quite the same way I was aware of Garfield (or, say, Family Circus), and so seeing Garfield be legitimately funny is particularly striking to me.

The Garfield Minus Garfield thing is also novel (in my experience, anyhow) because it takes an existing work and makes it funnier strictly by removing material. This has, of course, been done before, but I feel like this is a particularly profound example if only because it’s so repeatable. Making things funny by taking them out of context isn’t a new idea (Stephen Colbert even issued a challenge to his viewers to make the funny by taking a perhaps too-easy interview and editing it to take things out of context. The challenge was never mentioned again on the show, a winner was never declared, and none of the edited interviews were ever shown on TV. I’m guessing it’s because they just weren’t funny. The art of Garfield Minus Garfield is that it’s taking something non-obvious, removing parts of it, and achieving something far better than the original.

I think it’s brilliant.