The essence of the joke here is good: that perhaps the pyramids had a second use in providing entertainment for Pharaoh. Not getting the extra graft part.
The joke here is also basically clear, with that nice added pun in the lefthand corner. But why a cat?
(a) To get in the way while he’s working, as cats tend to do?
(b) An allusion to the supposed origin story of Jim Davis developing Garfield? “Davis decided to peruse current comic strips to determine what species of animal characters might be more popular. He felt that dogs were doing well, but noticed no prominent cats. Davis figured he could create a cat star, having grown up on a farm with twenty-five cats.” (Wikipedia)
(c) An inside joke that cartoonists tend to be cat people?
(d) Other ________________
Comics I Don't Understand 
(a) because that’s what cats do. Although I have a dog who thinks that my getting down on the floor to tie my shoes means it’s playtime.
Presumably the Pharaoh’s workers have to mine and shape and then load up the big rocks the Pharaoh is trying to lob onto the pyramid, and when he succeeds sticking one on the top they have to go up there and push it down so he can have another go.
It might have been better if the pyramid had a few dents and holes knocked in it from lobbing attempts that fell short… all the evidence shows that the Pharaoh lobs too far. Dents and holes and dislodged big stones would definitely have meant more graft for the workers.
presumably “graft” is meant in the British sense of hard work rather than the American one of corruption.
I’ve not heard the use of graft that Fuzzmaster mentions, but it makes sense here.
Fuzzmaster, thank-you, as I was only familiar with the gardening definition (inserting a shoot into another plant such as grafting different varieties on one tree) and the bribery definition, neither of which made any sense here. As for the cat, I suspect it’s both a&c.
Ah, being from the UK I assumed everyone took graft to be work in this context!
There’s currently a Wellcome Collection exhibition in London called “Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights”, running to 27 April 2025.
https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/hard-graft-work-health-and-rights
(Wellcome overall is a charity with a £37.6 billion investment portfolio to fund research in health issues, particularly climate change, infectious disease and mental health.)
Thanks, Fuzzmaster, for the explanation. Certainly here in Illinois, where 4 governors have gone to prison since the 1960s, “hard work” isn’t the first thing that would come to mind. “Hard time” perhaps! (although white collar criminals like former governors tend to get sent to much nicer parts of the prison system).
zbicyclist: Indeed, I vaguely remember a joke about two inmates in line at the Joliet cafeteria, and one says, “When you were Governor the food was much better”!
I in Illinois, where 4 governors have gone to prison since the 1960s
I could only remember three. I suspect that’s because I was still in Michigan when Kerner was gov.
Blagojevich, Ryan, Walker, and Kerner. A few decades earlier, the very corrupt Gov. Len Small was acquitted.
While it is about a mayor, not a governor – In the musical “Fiorello” there is a song “Little Tin Box”. He became mayor to clean up the NYS government from the politicians of the other party.
For those who have not heard of it or him – Fiorello La Guardia was mayor of NY in the 1930s. He has previously been a congressman. He was known for cleaning up the NYC government and getting the City through the Great Depression. The tin box was where money to bribe (other) politicians was collected/stored by them.
In the time that I liked musicals and had some LPs of the soundtracks (tho that is not the right term), one of them was indeed “Fiorello”. I now probably wouldn’t recognize any of the songs. The story about him that my generation heard from our parents was about him going on the radio to read the funny papers to the kids of New York during a strike that was keeping the newspapers from subscribers. (Now I don’t know if that was a newspaper strike or a truckers strike. Or if he got negative reactions for doing the reading, taken as a strikebreaking gesture.)