At garfieldminusgarfield.net you will find Garfield strips with the eponymous cat photoshopped out. The results are utterly plausible. To my taste they are funnier and more moving than the originals. But the effect of exorcising Garfield himself is to excavate a new space around Jon, space that would otherwise be filled by his feline ego-projection. Alone with just the empty echoes of his own mind, Jon is set suddenly and terrifyingly adrift.
Garfield without Garfield is 'non-canon', but a sort of Calvin without Hobbes occurs deliberately in Watterson's strips. When somebody else enter's Calvin's space to share the frame with him, Hobbes' personality and form momentarily dissolve. The effect of seeing the stuffed toy, with its mournful expression and inanimate posture, is somewhere between bathos and pathos. But like the stand-up comic's pause, it is so fleeting that you might miss it. Reality is just too much to take for longer than a moment.
The gap between imaginary, fantasy, ideal - and real, the sadness and sometimes the hope that fills that gap is what good comic-strips (and good stand-up comedians) express. There is a painful, yearning sort of pleasure in confusing our realities. That is the essence of the joke. It makes us laugh to have the whole construction brought down by a punchline, to be free for a moment from the tension of imagination.
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