Analysing Marmaduke

One day when I’ve not got much to do I’ll write a nice piece fully explaining the genius that was Calvin and Hobbes. With all due respect to Far Side, Get Fuzzy, Dilbert and Sherman’s Lagoon none of them can touch Calvin and Hobbes as the best comic ever created. I own basically every book Mr. Watterson has published, and you can reread Calvin and Hobbes and still find it funny, years after you first discovered it. In fact, I get a lot more jokes in the strip seven years down the road. I seriously doubt I’ll ever read a strip as good as Calvin again.

Nowadays one could generously describe the comic pages as mediocre. Some appear to be just ongoing soap operas, others consit of middle-aged wives complaining about their suburban lives and there are always a couple Biazzaro-type comics, but they aren’t really funny, either. The only things really worth reading are Get Fuzzy, Sherman’s Lagoon and Zits, but none of them are consistently funny (or gut-wrenchingly) enough to be daily fixtures. Also, it’s rarely worth wading through the rest of the crap to get to those strips. As I’m not a 50-year old single Christian woman I’ve not found Family Circus to ever be funny and I never will.

However, one strip has always puzzled me, and that’s Marmaduke. With the strip’s main character being a dog and since the joke has to be told in a single captioned frame, I’ve always wondered how much potential for jokes existed.

So, this past week, I decided to investigate. Here are links to the comics from the past five days:

Monday, September 19^th

Tuesday, September 20^th

Wednesday, September 21th

Thursday, September 22^nd

Friday, September 23^rd

If you’ve read all the comics, you can clearly see they all contain the same joke, even if the punchline is different. The joke of every Marmaduke comic is that Marmaduke is trying to act like a human, when clearly he’s a canine.

For example, look at Wednesday’s cartoon. The car has clearly stalled and the man has to push it to get it going again, so who has assumed the wheel to steer the car once it starts? It’s crazy old Marmaduke. He’s trying to drive a car, when clearly, as a dog, he doesn’t have a driver’s licence, the knowledge about how to drive and probably even the necessary physical coordination. There may be a second joke in this strip about the fact Marmaduke can’t escape his canine nature as he sticks his head out the window, even when driving. However, the main joke is definitely Marmaduke acting like a human.

Thursday’s comic is much the same. The lady Marmaduke lives with, I don’t know her name, apologies for having interrupted a “board meeting” of the dogs round the backyard table. Silly Marmaduke doesn’t realise that dogs don’t have important issues to discuss, nor can they talk, so a board meeting is unnecessary. Marmaduke is trying to emulate humans again, much to the amusement of the reader.

I began to wonder if every Marmaduke comic had this one joke, or if there were a small series of jokes, of which this one is just the dominate one. I looked at last weekend’s comics:

Saturday, September 17^th

Sunday, September 18^th

To begin with Saturday’s strip, the problem here is that we don’t know precisely how Marmaduke injured his tail at the retirement home. I’m not even sure who he was supposed to have been visiting at the home. I can think of two possibilities concerning Marmaduke’s injuries. One, he was at the retirement home and tried to copy the elderly people there and sat on a rocking chair, only to injure his tail in the course of his rocking. The alternate is that he was hanging around some individuals in a rocking chair, one of whom rocked back and crushed his tail.

I would dismiss the first scenario off the bat, except for the fact that Marmaduke has clearly accomplished many things dogs aren’t usually capable of, including moving a refrigerator, driving a car and arranging a board meeting of dogs. The second scenario just doesn’t seem that funny. An old person injuring a dog, inadvertently or not, isn’t something particularly amusing. That doesn’t seem to the base for a very good joke. Perhaps it’s a commentary on the failure of the elderly to examine their surroundings and notice a nearby dog before they began rocking – but that joke seems to be based, again, on someone’s lack of respect for animals, which is hardly something Marmaduke’s creator would endorse. Therefore, I have to conclude Marmaduke sat on a rocking chair, accidentally injured his own tail and we have a sixth case of Marmaduke trying to act like a human.

Sunday’s strip is particularly interesting. Marmaduke is bugged by kittens and retreats to his doghouse, only to notice the master of the house is walking by, obviously on his way to perform some chore. Marmaduke gets up, carries the kittens to the doghouse and gets them out of the way before the man begins to mow the lawn.

The joke here appears to be based on Marmaduke’s parental nature, as despite the fact that he grown tired of the kittens and has tried to escape their presence, he returns to rescue them from possible danger, just like any parent would do. The man seems to unaware the kittens are about before he begins mowing the lawn, as he never checks the yard, and thus the potential danger is high. Marmaduke saves the situation by acting responsibly, like a human. Despite the fact he is in a subordinate role in the house Marmaduke acts responsibily and aids those who run the house, who are unaware of the situation they narrowly avoided.

So, in conclusion, there are at least two distinct Marmaduke jokes. The most common is Marmaduke trying to act like a human, but there are also strips where the joke is that Marmaduke is acting like a human and aiding the people he lives with. At some point later I aim to examine more Marmaduke and see what other jokes I can discover in this strip.