Get-Rich-Scheme Krushing Success

Woe is Garfield. Off the window, into the trunk. Half-in, half-out. Using up two of his nine lives at the same time.

Actually, that is not Garfield you see protruding from the closed trunk lid. It’s a Krushed Kitty, the back half of a stuffed cat whose calico markings are making Garfield the butt of an entrepreneurial joke and making a couple of Los Angeles wise guys wealthy.

The Krushed Kitty is one of three mutilated stuffed animals being distributed around the world by the less than one-year-old Krushed Kritter Kompany of Kalifornia.

“Our goal was to manufacture and sell 25,000 of the cats,” said Krushed Kritter ko-kreator Ed Jaeger. “That would have given us enough seed money to do some of the other things we wanted to do.”

Jaeger doesn’t attribute the inspiration for the Krushed Kitty to all those stuffed Garfields clinging to the insides of car windows. He said he and his partner, Tony Levine, are both cat owners and during a get-rich-quick brainstorming session, one of them came up with the question, “What if a cat tried to go along on a trip with you and didn’t quite make it as you closed the trunk?”

Last March, Jaeger and Levine took 25 Krushed Kitties to a trade show in Pomona and got writers’ cramp taking orders for it. They sold 5,000 in three days; Jaeger said they have sold “hundreds of thousands” since. They’re also writing orders for a Krushed Kow--”half ‘a heifer”--and an alligator they tout as “the original tail gator.”

All three retail for about $18, far more than half the $22 price for the sucker-footed Garfield, which helps explain how fast the 28-year-old Jaeger, who used to design automotive accessories, and the 27-year-old Levine, who had worked for a toy company, are getting rich.

“I just bought a three-bedroom house and Tony has his eyes on a new convertible,” Jaeger said.

OK, pet rock stories are always fun. Nice to see enterprise rewarded; it keeps the wheels of capitalism rolling along. The question is, what does the Krushed Kitty boom tell us about the mood of American consumers?

The What’s Up novelty shop in Grossmont Center, where we bought our Krushed Kitty, also had on display a basketful of flattened fur objects called “Earl the Dead Cat.” It has X’s for eyes, its red tongue hangs out in tasteless repose, and the certificate dangling from its collar cites the cause of death as “catatonia caused by catting around.” You can lighten up your decor with this gray wafer for just $16.98.

On the shelves elsewhere, the shop clerk assured me, was a cup bearing the image of a man strangling his cat.

Dogs are fair targets, too. The greatest audience guffaws in the hit movie “A Fish Called Wanda” are launched by the violent deaths of three poodles--one in the jaws of a Doberman pinscher, one under the wheels of a runaway car, the third by the weight of a falling safe.

Is this sick, or are we just having a good time?

“It’s all very healthy,” said Dr. Mark Kalish, a Mission Valley psychiatrist. “Everybody, whether they admit it or not, has a dark side . . . This product allows healthy ways of expressing that dark side.”

Sick humor is really healthy humor, according to Kalish. The Krushed Kitty and other aggressive kitsch promote laughter that releases tension. Remember those terrible jokes you hated to repeat but just couldn’t help yourself in the wake of the space shuttle disaster?

“Tragedy humor is basically a human response against dealing with negative emotion,” Kalish said. “It’s very common to see people laugh so hard they cry. That portion of the brain that deals with emotion is the same whether the emotion is positive or negative. It’s a very primitive part of the brain.”

In any event, few San Diegans are amused.

“Up in L.A., they sell like crazy,” said Tom Reese, the local rep for Krushed Kritter Ko. “I hate to say it, but we just don’t have the same sense of humor down here.”