Summary of "What The Internet Did To Garfield"

Premise

The video traces how a simple, decades‑old newspaper strip about a lasagna‑loving cat turned into one of the internet’s strangest fandoms — ranging from wholesome fan art to surreal, cosmic horror. It asks: what is Garfield, and how did online culture remold him into something darker and weirder than his creator probably intended?

Why Garfield caught on

Garfield’s brilliance is simplicity: an instantly readable three‑panel strip with an aspirational, relatable antihero — lazy, gluttonous, unapologetic — that many people identify with.
That simplicity also makes the strip endlessly remixable. Panels, punchlines, or contexts can be swapped with little effort, producing countless memes and edits.

The narrator’s deep dive and data experiment

The host read hundreds of Garfield strips, recorded joke types, and categorized them into roughly 11 types.
Biggest surprise: the single most common joke category is “John is pathetic.” In the sample, about 18.8% of strips ridicule John Arbuckle, while Garfield rarely shows real empathy for him. This bleak pattern underpins many fan interpretations.

Key fan trends and memes

Garfield Minus Garfield: fan edits that remove Garfield, turning John’s strips into haunting portrayals of loneliness and existential despair.
Garamon / Garfield redraw projects: artists reimagining entire franchises or games in Garfield form, demonstrating how iconic Garfield’s design is.
Random panel generators and simple remix formats (e.g., Garfield flung out the window, Garfield smoking a pipe, extra‑beat panels) that fuel viral remix culture.

Lasagna Cat — internet performance art turned occult

First uploaded in 2008 and returned in 2017, Lasagna Cat remakes live‑action Garfield strips and then distorts them into surreal, high‑production short films.
The 2017 series culminates in a five‑hour piece called “Sex Survey Results”: a slow, numbing loop of human voice recordings that ends with a shocking, nightmarish sequence.
Lasagna Cat shows how mundane source material can be twisted into unsettling art.

The “I’m sorry John” phenomenon (Garfield as horror)

A large online community (r/imsorryjon and similar) reframes Garfield as a cosmic, parasitic, immortal horror and John as a tragic figure trapped by his creation.
Horror artists produced grotesque, towering or parasitic Garfields — centipede‑like forms, bloated flesh, eldritch beings — turning a comic gag into existential body‑horror and Lovecraftian material.
The video groups this horror into three types:
1. Physical: gigantic, unbeatable monsters.
2. Psychological: Garfield as a delusion or internal tormentor.
3. Cosmic: a deity‑like entity beyond human scale.

Broader cultural effects and narration moments

Garfield’s commercial saturation is enormous: newspapers, massive merchandise sales, and bizarre products (the video catalogs absurd Garfield items and recounts a story about plastic Garfield phones washing up on a shore).
Anecdote: the host experiences a “go Garfield” phenomenon — suddenly spotting Garfield everywhere — an intentionally eerie personal thread that reinforces the character’s omnipresence.
The video balances dark material with genuine appreciation, highlighting earnest, tender fan comics (for example, the sweet fan comic “John,” about John rediscovering cartooning).
It ends on a hopeful, cathartic fan piece (“The Forgiveness of John”) where John defeats the monstrous Garfield — a healing image for the fandom’s long meta‑narrative.

Big picture argument

Garfield’s design and structure made him memetic; online creators latched onto an undercurrent in the strips (John’s pathetic misery) and amplified it into an alternate Garfield mythology. In that mythology Garfield becomes a monstrous, eternal force and John becomes the tragic, tormented human. The result is a tangled, sometimes beautiful, often terrifying modern folklore spun out of a humble daily strip.

Memorable highlights and jokes

The factual reveal that “John is pathetic” is the most common comic joke — a discovery that changes how you read the strip.
The Lasagna Cat five‑hour “sex survey” endurance piece stands out for its scale and weirdness.
Offhand shocks and comedic asides in the narration (for example: “there is totally Garfield porn”) and the absurd catalogue of Garfield merch add both humor and horror.

Notable people, creators, and communities mentioned

Jim Davis (Garfield’s creator) and Paws, Inc.
Lasagna Cat (YouTube project/channel)
Will Burke (horror artist)
LumpyTouch (animator/creator; pixel animations and survival‑horror takes)
Omega_Black (artist)
Ram (artist; created “The Forgiveness of John”)
Quinton Reviews (Garfield historian who uncovered early material)
Izzy (credited contributor/researcher)
MeatCanyon (animator; made dark Garfield animations)
Garfield fan communities: Garfield Minus Garfield, r/imsorryjon (and related subreddits)

Conclusion

The arc surveyed how a simple syndicated cat became an internet alter‑myth: inspiring wholesome art, viral memes, longform weirdness, and a large body of fanwork that casts Garfield as both an emblem of lazy comfort and a symbol of cosmic, psychological horror.