Jim Davis’ Favorite Comedy Sketch Perfectly Captures Garfield’s Sense of Humor

Garfield has been entertaining audiences for almost 50 years through comics, television, and movies. Not just popular in his home country of the United States, Jim Davis’s snarky orange cat has been an international hit, too, especially in the United Kingdom. And he might have Monty Python to thank for that.

In an interview with The Independent, Davis reveals how Monty Python, one of his favorite comedy groups, might inform Garfield’s British popularity. A group of five British comedians and one American animator, Monty Python’s surreal, stream-of-consciousness sense of humor began on the BBC in the early 1970s, and took the world by storm in the following decades. Between their four-season TV series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and their many films, including Monty Python and the Holy Grail, almost everyone has at least one sketch, line, or reference they know by heart that cracks them up.

Davis revealed his favorite comedy sketch of all time is a classic: “I mean, the Ministry of Silly Walks…it doesn’t get any funnier than that.”

Monty Python Inspired Layers of Comedy in Garfield

Garfield Has Taken His Own Share of Silly Walks

The Pythons were formed when a few groups of fresh-out-of-college comedians united together to create a late-night adult comedy show. Some of the members were more slapstick-oriented, while others were bigger fans of wordplay, and those two aspects combined in one of their most famous sketches, The Ministry of Silly Walks. While the script lampoons ridiculous government bureaucracy, the words can barely be heard over the riotous audience laughter at the perfect physical performance by the lanky John Cleese. The Ministry of Silly Walks sketch is a satire, but it also works as a straightforward silly bit – perfect for the humor Jim Davis developed while writing Garfield.

The Garfield comic strip is often a combination of a couple levels of humor. In many ways, Garfield does behave like a normal cat – he sleeps a lot, does what he wants, and is most interested in his owner as a provider of food. However, this is all juxtaposed with Garfield as a very human character – he walks on two legs, hates Mondays, needs his coffee, and can speak (at least for the reader’s eyes). Fans identify with Garfield’s gripes about real life, but also get a laugh from the physical comedy of him kicking Odie off the table or similar slapstick.

Garfield Is A Hit In Almost Every Country In The World

Comedy can often be a hard sell internationally – cultures find different things funny at different times and in different formats. For example, in the same interview, Jim Davis notes that Garfield has never struck it big in Japan, and his comics that start as quick gags in English morph into long explanations once translated. Given Japan’s love for four-panel comedy manga (“4-Koma”), it’s not that the Japanese don’t like the format, but that Davis’s humor just doesn’t hit the same way there. Luckily, Garfield possesses the same combination of slapstick and dry humor as Monty Python, which has helped make him a hit almost everywhere else in the world.

Source: The Independent