Remove the titular character and what you have left is often poignant and frequently funnier than the original. I would love to see this done with movies. Sixth Sense with out Bruce Willis’s character for example.

Frank: A Markov chain isn’t difficult to understand. Start by taking some source text, in this case, a collection of Garfield comic strips. Then have a computer scan through them, noting how often each word comes after each other word. Once done, you then start off with a seed word, and choose the word to come after it according to those probabilities. Then do the same with that word, and the next, and the next, until you decide you’re done. If greater coherence is desired, then treat each “word” as a word pair, triple, or longer.

So, If “pepperoni” comes after “oranges” 9 times out of 10, then if pepperoni came up in a chain, oranges would again follow it 9 times out of 10. This often makes for text that kind of makes sense in small doses, but in which longer chains change subject unexpectedly, confuses word sense for each other, and just meanders meaninglessly.

Frank, take comfort: even if you do get the Markov principle (and it’s not too tricky, really, honest!), they’re still mostly bizarre non sequiturs.