[nickvec]

> Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. It is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and depression in a quiet American suburb.

Did not think I would be relating to Jon on a Thursday morning.

[erk__]

Its also pretty interesting given that the original title for the comic that would become Garfield was simply "Jon"

There was a small YouTube documentary about finding the old comics in libraries and scanning them in. I the description of the video there is links to scans of all the ones they were able to find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxiwjaUSYJM

[gwern]

Google Docs PDF mirrored at https://gwern.net/doc/anime/2020-hoover-theevolutionofjimdav...

[system2]

I was about to bash before I read this. Now I feel depressed.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

You'll feel worse if you use tcsh

[gorjusborg]

It could be worse: csh

[flysand7]

♩ Don't cry, I am just a fish

[mrexroad]

Try zsh instead!

[foobahify]

Oh my!

[s1mplicissimus]

grml!

[m463]

Now it makes me wonder what would happen if you did something like removing all the superheroes from a movie.

or took soem movies and made all the villains super-attractive and the heroes ugly and dressed in black.

[minikomi]

One of my favorite additions by subtraction:

https://youtu.be/jKS3MGriZcs?si=RRlSVL0jwi5sDl3f

Removing the laugh track from the big bang theory

[mathgeek]

This is the first thing that came to mind for me as well. Have always loved how mean everyone seems without the canned laughter to tell us "hey, this is funny!"

[Agentlien]

I've never really enjoyed this show but I found myself liking this clean version much more.

It feels slower and more natural. It also helps because I wouldn't have laughed at any of those spots with it without laugh track.

[plorg]

You won't find me defending The Big Bang Theory, but it's worth noting a lot of actually funny television would have this kind of dead energy if you removed the laugh track, because it's both written for that environment and paced and acted for the audience reaction breaks.

[skeaker]

True, the awkward long pauses between each beat are there specifically for the laugh track and if they had gone without the track they wouldn't include the pauses either.

[dfxm12]

I don't think this came about by randomly deciding to take a character out of a strip. The creators of G-G recognized that Jon is a depressing character who has these one way discussions with Garfield. Garfield's inner monologue (that Jon is not aware of) provides all the humor, mostly at Jon's expense. Take the humor out of the comic, and you're left with the depression. It goes straight from a comedy to a tragedy.

This is what's interesting about G-G. The tragedy was always there. We kinda knew the tragedy was always there, but we'd rather laugh at Jon with Garfield than commiserate with Jon.

Taking superheroes out of a random movie would lead to silliness, yes, but nothing poignant.

[Henchman21]

I’m reminded of Star Wars minus Williams, which removes John Williams amazing soundtrack from an amazing movie! The absurdity is top notch!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9WVDvVd0E