Best Actor in a Lasagna-Based Drama

However many people are currently aware of the actor Charles Laughton, that number is relatively small and sure to dwindle as old age take its toll. That’s simple logic: Laughton died in 1962 and his fans aren’t getting younger. Comparatively, more people are aware of the comic strip character Garfield, but I’m wagering that this number is also currently at the highest it will ever be. The march of time will also will also gradually diminish this number, but so too will dangers faced especially often by Garfield fans: obesity, depression, brain rot, accidentally eating poison under the misguided belief that it’s candy. Thus, the sliver of overlap in the Venn diagram of Charles Laughton fans and Garfield fans is a very slight one. But I believe so much in what I’m about to say that I’m posting in anyway, regardless of how small its idea audience might be.

The actor Charles Laughton is, physically speaking, the human manifestation of Garfield the cat. I feel this is undeniable.

Here, now watch the trailer for Laughton’s Witness for the Prosecution, in which he breaks the fourth wall and addresses the camera not as his movie character but as himself, Charles Laughton, Monday-hating and spider-killing Garfieldesque actor.

Struggle to repress in urge to laugh out loud when he promises to give you, the viewer, “a series of climaxes.” Indeed.

The Second-Most Important Cat

I promise I’ll not make it a habit of blogging about Garfield. If I do begin devoting undue space on this blog to Garfield or ancillary characters in the Garfield universe, please come to my house and beat my hands with my laptop until both my hands and the laptop are reduced to useless splinters. That being said, this post is superficially about a certain overweight cartoon cat. It’s also the word of the week.

In poking around online to write Wednesday’s post about why Bill Murray voiced Garfield in the live-action movie, I found that he’d also done so in a sequel, Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties. I don’t actually remember this movie hitting theaters, but it apparently did — and consequently gave everyone involved something to answer for in the afterlife. (Pam from the British Office, did you lose a bet?) The cast list includes short descriptions of what character each actor played, and the one for the one Tim Curry voiced used a word I’d never seen before.

deuteragonist (doo-tə-RAH-gə-nist) — noun: 1. the character second in importance to the protagonist in classical Greek drama. 2. a person who serves as a foil to another.

Yup. Some Wikipedia editor saw fit to link Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties with Greek drama.

Now, in college I took all but one course needed to get a classics minor — a feat that I consider all the more impressive because I did it accidentally. By the time I realized, the admins had already told me that I needed to graduate and move the hell on. I’d like to think that if I had taken that one last course, I’d have learned what deuteragonist means from a source other than Garfield. Oh well. I had at least taken enough to know what the word meant without having to look it up. The Greek deuter means “second,” while agonistes means “actor” or “combatant.”

(That first part would be easy to remember if Deuteronomy were the second book of the Bible, but it’s not. Wikipedia explains that the name Deuteronomy, “second law,” comes from a bad translation of the Hebrew phrase mishneh ha-torah ha-zot, “a copy of this law,” which appears in Deuteronomy 17:18. Misnomer or not, Deuteronomy still seems like a better title than the Hebrew name, Devarim, which just translates to “words,” which is the worst and vaguest title for a book ever.)

The Wikipedia page for deuteragonist mixes high and low culture in a way that rivals me learning about deuteragonists from Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties. (The film itself is a bastardization of The Prince and the Pauper. Ghost of Mark Twain, you have some haunting to do.) After explaining the importance of deuteragonists in Greek drama, the article goes on to cite various famous characters who have played this role. In order: Jocasta in Oedipus Rex, Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Dib in Invader Zim, Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender, some dick I’ve never heard of in an anime that plays on Adult Swim at like 4 a.m., Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars and finally Aldous Snow in Get Him to the Greek.

Once more, and certainly not for the final time: Way to go, internet.

Previous strange and wonderful words:

• adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
  
• barrack, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer
  
• catholicon, cecaelia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, cummingtonite
• deasil, decussate, dingle
  
• eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui
  
• fabiform, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, froward
  
• gallinipper, grandgore, grue, gyaru
  
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, honorificabilitudinitatibus
• itaiitai, ignivomous
  
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
  
• kaffir, kakopygian, knipperdollin
  
• leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, milt, mongo
• nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism
  
• ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
• pace, pareidolia, pavonated, petrichor, pismire, pong, puggle, purse
  
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa
  
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, shebang, sinople, stevedore, suovetaurilia
  
• tergiversate, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tyro
  
• ucalegon, ultramontane
  
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
  
• williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
  
• xenodocheionology, xyster
  
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
  
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang
  

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The Bill Murray-Lorenzo Music Cycle

Bill Murray has explained to GQ why the hell he lent his voice to the live-action Garfield movie. A quote from the interview, via Pajiba:

GQ: Well, how about Garfield? Can you explain that to me? Did you just do it for the dough?

Murray: No! I didn’t make that for the dough! Well, not completely. I thought it would be kind of fun, because doing a voice is challenging, and I’d never done that. Plus, I looked at the script, and it said, “So-and-so and Joel Coen.” And I thought: Christ, well, I love those Coens! They’re funny. So I sorta read a few pages of it and thought, Yeah, I’d like to do that.

The joke being that Garfield: The Movie wasn’t written by Joel Coen but instead Joel Cohen, whose list of credits includes not The Big Lebowski and Burn After Reading but instead the Cheaper by the Dozen remake and the upcoming film adaptation of Walter the Farting Dog. (And also an outlier in the form of this little movie called Toy Story.) I truly think Murray is joking when he says he confused one Joel for another, since he seemingly would have realized the mistake either when he read the Garfield script and realized it sucked or before he signed on to the sequel. But at least we have been given some explanation for why Murray allowed himself to be associated with something that was only slightly more necessary than a live-action Healthcliff movie.

So that’s all funny, but Bill Murray’s involvement with Garfield: The Movie is notable for one other reason. An actor known previously for voicing the doorman on Rhoda, Lorenzo Music, was cast to voice Garfield in the first animated special. Music kept the role until his death in 2001. The guy’s voice is unmistakable. Even as a kid, I can remember hearing Music’s voice — and therefore Garfield’s voice — in Gummi Bears or in those 80s-era public safety commercials that starred talking crash test dummies.

As I think it was first pointed out to me over at Ironic Sans, Music also voiced Peter Venkman in The Real Ghostbusters, which, counterintuitively, is the animated and therefore faker version of the movie Ghostbusters, in which Murray played Venkman. So you have two instances in which a character’s live-action, big screen version was played by Murray and the animated, TV version was played by Music. And though it wasn’t intentional — neither as a tribute to Music nor because Murray and Music necessarily sound all that similar — it’s still a neat little coincidence.

Had Saturday morning cartoons been made of Lost in Translation or Broken Flowers, surely it would have been Lorenzo Music who voiced the main characters.

A final note: In looking for a video of Lorenzo Music’s voiceover work, I found a “tribute” to him posted after he died that inadvertently pisses on his legacy. It’s just clips from the Ghostbusters cartoon but with the audio track replaced by an Evanescence song, thereby eliminating the one thing he contributed to show. Also, it’s a fucking Evanescence song.

Really, it’s like posting a Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire tribute video consisting of a static shot of a rotting cow carcass set to the soundtrack of the couple’s feet squeaking on the floor as they dance. And that would be equally funny. Way to go, internet!


And, of course, way to go Bill Murray. As always.

Spiders Hate Lasagna Mondays

"Garfield" isn't the most innovative comic strip. This is not news. But the Garfield Randomizer helps prove that assessment true. Evidence:

[ source: Zack Klein ]