Everybody hates Monday, but who couldn't love surrealist Garfield parody Lasagna Cat?

When I was a kid, I loved Garfield. This surly cat was one of many comic strips I simply couldn’t get enough of. Heck, trying to uncover vintage Garfield books led me to visit Half-Price Books for the very first time! But, as the saying goes, when I became an adult, I put away childish things…and became fixated on Lasagna Cat instead. What is a Lasagna Cat? Well, allow me to take you down a pop culture oddity more enjoyable than Pooky or getting fries with your haunted hamburger...

It is a YouTube video series that first began airing on January 14, 2008. These shorts all (save for one unforgettable exception) follow a specific structure. First, a Garfield comic strip is realized in live-action (complete with people in Garfield and Odie costumes) with no extra flourishes. After the initial comic flashes on-screen, another more radicalized version of the comic plays. This segment is paired with a very famous recognizable needle drop. It also employs extremely heightened visuals that extrapolate grand backdrops and greater contexts (like a baseball game or a Final Fantasy level) out of offhand lines from the original comic strip.

For instance, a Christmas-themed Garfield comic concluding with Garfield bellowing “Thanks for nothing!” transitions into a Garfield-themed parody of the viral video. Another comic involving Garfield sneezing so hard that Jon's breakfast ends up on his face. This gets reinterpreted as a partial stop-motion entity where a Kaiju-esque Garfield's allergies lead to sausage-oriented carnage. To say it’s all ludicrous is an understatement. The jokes range from an intricately detailed parody of the Miami Vice pilot to simple sources of giggles like Garfield quickly turning his head to stare at the viewer.

Having watched the Lasagna Cat shorts countless times, what's especially impressive about these endeavors is their palpable personality despite working with so much pre-existing pop culture. After all, Lasagna Cat hinges entirely on people’s pre-existing familiarity with Garfield, Jon Arbuckle, and Odie. Meanwhile, these shorts don’t use parodies of recognizable radio hits. They use the original incarnations of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” to Tom Jones’ “She’s a Lady.” In the wrong hands, this could’ve all become Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg nonsense. A bunch of callbacks to other art masquerading as punchlines.

Rather than echoing Disaster Movie, though, the Lasagna Cat shorts live up to one of Emmett’s best climactic LEGO Movie lines to Lord Business: "People [are] taking what you did and making something new out of it." Juxtaposing the Nine Inch Nails track “Head Like a Hole” with a screaming Jon Arbuckle (not to mention shots of gothic Garfield and Jon staring straight into the camera) is a hysterical sight. Even if you didn’t know this song, visual gags like inexplicable darting screeching crows or Jon Arbuckle with a grimy back tattoo are still terrific. Meanwhile, Kenny G's "Songbird" doesn't have to be your most-played Spotify song of 2023 to make the sight of a Garfield butterfly as giggle-inducing as it is disturbing.

The visual variety of these shorts also has a much more interesting relationship to Garfield than other adult interpretations of kid-friendly characters, such as Winnie the Pooh horror movies. Early Garfield outings (namely ones where the titular feline was exceedingly chunky and less human-looking) had their share of inspired images. However, Garfield never had the artistry of Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbies, or Krazy Kat. Even in its creative heyday, audiences latched onto Garfield’s phrases (“I hate Mondays”, “Big fat hair deal”, “I never met a lasagna I didn’t like”, etc.). The character designs or backgrounds weren't especially noteworthy. As the comic went on, the character movements and backdrops became even more limited. A typical 2004 Garfield daily comic strip, for instance, may not see Garfield moving from his chair beyond lifting his arm once to operate a TV remote.

Lasagna Cat doesn’t just unexpectedly pair Garfield with sexually active lyrics or violent imagery. It also humorously juxtaposes this feline with varied visual sensibilities completely M.I.A. from the original comic. Now, Garfield can occupy grainy dial-up internet-era imagery, the monochromatic world of silent comedy cinema, a ramshackle late 2000s YouTube action video, and more. A single short reimagining a 1987 comic strip even features Garfield as a newborn cryptid and a Jesus Christ stand-in within less than 60 seconds. As a character, Garfield has been shackled to a limited visual scheme for decades. Lasagna Cat shorts wring humor out of propelling this feline to anywhere this program’s creators can imagine. A decidedly finite comic strip icon is now the source of infinite surrealist comedy possibilities.

It's extra impressive that Lasagna Cat conjured up such thoughtful reinterpretations of pre-existing media considering it launched in YouTube's nascent era. This epoch of YouTube's history had its share of other memorable artists, like Neil Cicierega and Jason Steele, making their way to the site from Newgrounds. However, the earliest manifestations of "YouTube celebrities" were Smosh and Fred. YouTube’s erratic quality track record (to put it gently) was there from the start. Thankfully, creations like the Lasagna Cat channel showed that gems could flourish in this landscape. Reaffirming that reality so early into YouTube’s existence is one of Lasagna Cat’s greatest accomplishments.

What bizarre minds are behind Lasagna Cat and its various "tributes" to Garfield creator Jim Davis? Why, Fatal Farm, of course. This duo consists of Zachary Johnson and Jeffrey Max. This pair of filmmakers is most famous for their works on absurdist commercials. Their dedication to Lasagna Cat didn't just extend to directing each installment of this series. Max played Jon in each short, while Johnson inhabited the critical part of Odie.

In the years following Lasagna Cat’s second (and, as of this writing, final) season, the pair worked as directors on the Tim Robinson sketch show I Think You Should Leave. Their contributions here (both as solo artists and working as a directorial duo) showed how much they honed their craft on Lasagna Cat. Johnson’s work helming the sketch Detective Crashmore excelled because it captured the tiniest visual intricacies of vintage action movies. Juxtaposing that level of authenticity with a lead character who keeps saying nonchalant things (“Did he really say that?”) echoes all the laughs he and Max wrung out of pairing Garfield with inexplicable imagery and pop tunes.

Meanwhile, a season three sketch involving “monsters on the world” benefits mightily from Fatal Farm’s extensive experience working with costumed actors on Lasagna Cat. Across their sketches (including Max’s iconic Spectrum and Funerals piece), masterful comic timing emerges from their Lasagna Cat days. All those dead bodies flopping to the ground in Spectrum and Funerals sketch wouldn’t be nearly as hilarious if they weren’t executed with such precise timing. That element informed the greatest Lasagna Cat episodes. Just look at when Garfield movie posters become visible in this video set to the Jurassic Park theme. Over 40 short Lasagna Cat episodes, Fatal Farm developed terrific comedy filmmaking skills that now reverberate across wider culture.

These skills even extended to keeping the Lasagna Cat juice going after a nearly-decade-long hiatus. Granted, Fatal Farm kept filming videos in secret sporadically between 2008 and 2017. It would take until February 2017 for 13 new Lasagna Cat episodes to finally grace the world. This second Lasagna Cat season had an impressively expanded scope from the first season. These included lengthier episodes (including two that ran for over 60 minutes) and even darker styles of humor. Death especially was more apparent than ever in Lasagna Cat's latest outings. Odie even took a trip to Hell after one grim episode. As the Garfield comic kept going on eternally, Lasagna Cat milked bleak laughs out of injecting mortality into these newspaper fixtures.

Returning to this series resulted not in rehashed gags, but an exciting commitment to the new. The “finale” event concluded with a lengthy surrealist sequence that would make David Lynch proud concerning Jon Arbuckle, a real cat, maggots, and somebody giving birth in a public bathroom stall. Lazy pop culture parodies, like those Seltzer and Friedberg movies, reek of cheap choices. Not Lasagna Cat. What other Garfield parody would go as wild as the Phone Sex Survey finale? Would other YouTube parodies of familiar pop culture characters concoct secret additional YouTube channels to flesh out the world of one episode? There's severe artistic dedication within all this bizarreness.

Heck, it’s doubtful most other “not your grandma’s famous cartoon character!” parodies would have the confidence to stick with just simple animal costumes to represent Odie and Garfield. Like with Hundreds of Beavers, the static faces of costumed critters aid rather than creatively deter Lasagna Cat. Committing to such restricted costumes would likely terrify other creators of similar material. But not the Fatal Farm crew. Going gung-ho in those outfits epitomizes the bold creativity underlining these hysterical shorts. Garfield as a comic often goes for the expected punchlines and illustrations. Not so with Lasagna Cat, which just radiates exciting comedic unpredictability.