My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad exists for one reason only: to find out who would win in a fight. What fight? ANY fight. Like today’s:
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Fight submitted by Middle Daughter. Submit your own fight and maybe get a t-shirt; you can submit two fighters and I’ll write it up, or write up your own whole fight, and email it to me at “thetroublewithroy[at] yahoo.com“.
This did not seem to be a fair matchup at first. Think about it. Garfield is that cat that just sits around and eats lasagna. Garfield, to my recollection, rarely gets out of his box-bed, although maybe he’s more active now. I can’t say because I don’t read Garfield every day. 
I used to read every comic in the paper except the “serious” ones featuring old ladies and except “Prince Valiant” because it looked boring. But with more and more of my time being taken up by things that are not reading the comics, things like Babies!, I have to be more judicious in what I read because those are precious seconds in the morning, plus if you read a bad comic, it can wreck your otherwise great breakfast (consisting of a cup of coffee and a mixture of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch.) So I skip comics like Garfield where I know what the punchline is going to be (“I hate Mondays!“) and I skip comics that are boring me more and more, like “Get Fuzzy” which used to be funny but which lately has gone to the well of “Stupid Puns as Jokes” once too often; lately, the cat in that strip is making Russian puns. Why? I don’t know, or care. (For some reason, I still read Blondie even though it shames me. )
So I don’t really know what Garfield is up to. I checked it out today as part of the extensive research process I decided to go through. (Okay, reading the comic strip today was the extensive research process.) I didn’t get it, really. Jon told Garfield that his birthday was in three days, and Garfield glared at the calendar and said says you or something like that. Or he thought it. I don’t think Garfield can talk. He eats lasagna and he mopes and he thinks to calendars.
Bugs Bunny, by contrast, is like a force of nature, a dynamo. I am so familiar with Bugs Bunny that I might as well have a Ph.D. in Bugs Bunny. I watched Bugs Bunny cartoons every Saturday morning for most of my childhood; to this day, hearing the theme song for the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner hour makes me happy and excited because that means it’s Saturday morning.
Despite how often I watched it, I have to confess that I was always a little confused about the beginning of the theme song. All my life, all my life until about two years ago, I thought the theme song began Oh, m’sieur, hit the lights. I could never understand why Bugs Bunny would use a shortened French word at the beginning of his song. Eventually I decided that it was a theater thing.
Then, two years ago, I happened to hear the song. (Okay, I was watching the cartoons.) I realized, clear out of the blue, that they were saying Overture, hit the lights. Which is also a theater thing and makes a lot more sense. So I can add “Oh m’sieur/Overture” to the lengthy list of things I never q
uite understood while growing up.
Bugs Bunny, I figured, would mop up the floor with Garfield. After all, this was a bunny that has gone to Mars, and fixed the space program, and invented “Fiddler Crab Season” and taught a generation of kids what the music to “The Barber of Seville” sounds like and survived Elmer Fudd’s Ride of the Valkyries as Fudd tried to Kill The Wabbit! Nobody ever beats Bugs Bunny, right?
How The Fight Would Go: The only people Garfield ever fights with are Odie the dog and that kitten, Nermal. (No, I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t know who Nermal was. I hate when people do that. I hate when people try to convince you that they’re better than they are by claiming they don’t watch TV or they like broccoli or something, and a subset of people who do that are those people who you just know watch every celebrity gossip show there is, but then, when you talk about the celebrity gossip at lunch, those people act like they don’t and they say Oh, right, like… what’s her name again, the person I barely know and pay no attention to and certainly don’t know well enough to know her name, you know, she was the girl whose Dad was a professional wrestler not that I watch that kind of thing, but she’s kind of a singer and she wore those pants without the butt in them… Brooke something. I hate those people. Just admit that you’re no better than the rest of us. I know who “Nermal” is and you know who “Brooke Hogan” is.)
It would have to be, then, that Odie got Bugs Bunny to help him. Say, Garfield kicks Odie off the table in some totally original gag, and Odie flies out the window and lands near a perfectly round hole in the ground, from which Bugs Bunny comes up, chewing his carrot and says something clever like “Ehhh, what’s up… dog?” Odie explains that Garfield’s always picking on him, so Bugs decided to even the score, rolling up his sleeves and marching into the house.
Even Odie expects, being familiar with Bugs Bunny, that Garfield won’t last long. It’ll be just a few minutes until Garfield drives a car over the cliff, looks at the audience, then calmly opens the car door, steps out, and stands there, then watches as the car drops out of sight, and then Garfield drops out of sight, too, ending in a poof! of a cloud of dust at the bottom of the canyon. Or in a few seconds, Garfield will chase Bugs up a tree and they’ll keep climbing and climbing and climbing until Garfield looks around and finds out that the tree ended about a mile below them, at which point Bugs will whip out two parachutes, and Garfield will put his on, and they’ll both pull the ripcord, and Bugs’ parachute will open up, while an anvil pops out of Garfield’s, and he drops to the ground.
But… it’s a little too quiet in the house, so Odie peeks in through the window and sees, to his surprise, that Bugs is losing it, and losing the fight.
Bugs has, stacked around the room, TNT and dynamite and barrels of nitroglycerin, and he’s got rockets and firecrackers and the Plutonium P38 explosive space modulator. He’s got a drawing table on which he could paint weird adventures for Garfield. He’s got an entire construction crew and a wrecking ball and girders. He’s even got that little singing frog that kept making everyone crazy.
But Bugs is slumped over in defeat, because Garfield won’t get out of his bed. Odie realizes, as Bugs and the construction crew and frog have just realized, that Bugs wins because his enemies go nuts trying to fight him — they try to beat him at his own game, trying to trick Elmer into shooting Bugs because it’s water buffalo season, or trying to beat him to win the Million Box, only to get so caught up in their schemes that they lose sight of Bugs and suddenly are following ink-stamped tracks through a log into thin air.
Garfield doesn’t fight back that way. Garfield doesn’t get excited about anything. The overwhelming lull of Garfield’s mere presence, the deadening effect that Garfield has on people, has enveloped Bugs and Bugs Bunny is sitting, head down, in defeat, having met the one thing he can’t possibly defeat — having learned a lesson that Robin Williams has not yet grasped: it doesn’t matter how “wacky” you are if people don’t pay attention to you — and Bugs is about to pack up and head back to the Wabbit Hole, when Garfield whacks him with a newspaper and goes back to sleep — saying “I hate Mondays.“
The Verdict: Garfield, you’ve done it again!
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It's not written by a jock or jock-wanna-be; it's written by a guy (me) whose sole athletic experience amounts to a season of flag football in 8th grade, and being terrible at golf. And yet it's the best sports column around.
