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Performing ‘Jiggs’: Irish Caricature and Comedic Ambivalence toward Assimilation and the American Dream in George McManus's Bringing Up Father

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Kerry Soper
Kerry Soper
Affiliation:
Brigham Young University
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Extract

Many fans and scholars of newspaper comics have observed that an excellent way to chart a social history of American culture in the twentieth century is to look at the mainstream comic strip page. This may be especially true of the first half of the twentieth century when comic strips were avidly followed by readers from almost all age, class, and ethnic demographics. Because of this breadth of popularity, the comics page was a fairly accurate reflector (and occasionally, shaper) of fashions, fads, humor, politics, and racial prejudices. Early cartoonists' ability to place their fingers on the American pulse can largely be attributed to the industry's eagerness to please readers: as a lowbrow entertainment that targeted broad audiences through street corner sales, and later, national syndication, it tried to anticipate the characters, comedy, and ideological content that would attract and retain devoted readers. A few iconoclastic cartoonists such as Al Capp (Li'l Abner) and George Herriman (Krazy Kat) challenged readers with topical satire or appealed to niche audiences with quirky humor and aesthetics; but even the most innovative work in the medium relied on a sort of call and response between core readers, syndicates, editors, and artists—a back and forth that insured that the cartoonist's work resonated with, or spoke for, its fans.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , April 2005 , pp. 173 - 213
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2005

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References

1 Scholarship on comic strips is largely devoted to three intertwining objectives: a celebration of the medium as a rich but underappreciated American art form; discussions of the significance of the medium as a shaper and reflector of values, fads, and social history; and analyses of the unique aesthetic and narrative conventions of the medium. A few works, such as those by Kunzle and Gordon, also look at the impact of economics on the shape and content of the medium. Significant works in the field include: Aldridge, Alan, The Penguin Book of Comics (New York, 1967)Google Scholar;Becker, Stephen, Comic Art in America (New York, 1959)Google Scholar;Berger, Arthur Asa, The Comic-Stripped American (Baltimore, 1974)Google Scholar;Coupiere, Pierre, ed., A History of the Comic Strip (New York, 1968)Google Scholar;Gordon, Ian, Comic Strips and Consumer Culture: 1890-1945 (Washington, DC, 2002)Google Scholar;Harvey, R. C., The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History (Jackson, MS, 1991)Google Scholar;Inge, Thomas, Comics as Culture (Jackson, MS, 1990)Google Scholar;Kunzle, David, History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1990)Google Scholar;Marschall, Richard, America's Great Comic Strip Artists (New York, 1989)Google Scholar;O'Sullivan, Judith, The Great American Comic Strip: One Hundred Years of Cartoon Art (Boston, 1990)Google Scholar;Perry, George, Reitberger, Reinhold, and Fuchs, Wolfgang, Comics: Anatomy of a Mass Medium (Boston, 1972)Google Scholar;Robinson, Jerry, The Comics: An Illustrated History (New York, 1974)Google Scholar;Sheridan, Martin, Comics and Their Creators (New York, 1942)Google Scholar;Waugh, Colton, The Comics (orig. pub. 1947Google Scholar, repr. Jackson, MS, 1990); and White, David Manning and Abel, Robert H., eds., The Funnies, An American Idiom (London, 1963)Google Scholar.

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20 “Publisher's Press Promotionals,” Editor & Publisher, April 29, 1911: 16Google Scholar; and April 30, 1910: 19. In subsequent decades these efforts at containment were never entirely successful for a number of reasons: the medium retained residual rowdy elements from its early days—the use of exaggerated caricature, slapstick, and the continued popularity of characters that were wise fools from the margins of the culture; readers regularly embraced—often to the dismay of squeamish editors—strips that reveled in bathroom humor or controversial satire; and the inherendy subversive nature of many comedic and satiric tools (exaggeration, caricature, distortion, hyperbole, irony, parody, etc.) made the medium difficult to completely tame.

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35 Two books that chart the cultural transition from “swarthiness” to “whiteness” for the Irish are Roediger, David R., The Wages of Whiteness (New York, 1991)Google Scholar. and Ignatiev, Noel, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.

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37 Cahan, Abraham, Yekl and The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York (orig. pub. 1895Google Scholar, repr. New York, 1970). Yekl is perhaps the best known example of Cahan's mature treatment of complexities of assimilation.

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55 Jiggs did, in fact, change his physical appearance slowly over the course of the strip's fifty year run—gradually shrinking in size, losing some of the typical Irish markers like the chin beard, and generally becoming more refined, but these changes were so gradual that only an observant fan of the strip who took an extremely long view could see this as evidence of a slow domestication or Americanization of the character. At any moment in Jiggs's life he still had the stereotypical Irish outward markers in his physical form.

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69 Ibid., 10, 67. As the stereotype of male Irishness gradually took on more positive connotations in the 1930s and 1940s, McManus used the stereotypical qualities of Irishness such as laziness, garrulity, and love of physical pleasures, to poke fun at Andrew Carngeie-style ambition, glad-handing corporate culture, or platitudes about the virtues of hard work. For example, McManus joked that he avoided stress, work, and exercise at all costs. Quoting a favorite Irish doctor, he said exercise is “unnatural and unhealthy. ‘Never rush lad,’ he [the doctor] said. ‘Never hurry. Never run. Nature didn't intend it. It'll kill you in the end.’ I agree.” He also mocked the world of high pressure sales and ambition by poking fun at corporate glad handers: “When a high-pressure boy begins a spiel at me these days, I cup both ears and yell: ‘HOW'S THAT AGAIN?’ It's very discouraging.”

70 Williams, William H. A., “From Lost Land to Emerald Isle: Ireland and the Irish in American Sheet Music, 1800-1920,” Eire-Ireland 26 (Spring 1991): 45Google Scholar.

71 , McManus, “But Jiggs and Maggie Are in Love,” 31Google Scholar.

72 Kimmel, Michael, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 1996), 182, 186Google Scholar.

73 The fact that Jiggs did gradually become more “refined” over the course of the strip's history might suggest that he loses these battles, but at any given moment he still remained an incorrigible lout in his wife's eyes.

74 McManus, George, “Just Put It In The Hall,” Bringing Up Father, December 9, 1923Google Scholar.