BOOKS FOR A HAPPY NEW YEAR: HAPPY HOOLIGAN

We are reminded, by NBM’s publication of Frederick Burr Opper’s Happy Hooligan (112 8x11-inch pages in color; hardcover, $24.95), of Opper’s sundry historic achievements in cartooning. Opper was in many respects the greatest cartoonist of his generation, the only one to achieve success in all three forms of the art being practiced during his lifetime:  magazine panel cartoon, editorial cartoon, and comic strip. It is in the latter that Happy Hooligan looms prominently. Opper’s strip was the first to deploy the medium’s basic ingredients from its very birth: a narrative sequence of pictures in which speech balloons are included in the drawings. By the turn of the century, the form had taken a rough shape. The Sunday comics in color were a reality. The funnies had assimilated facets of cartooning in other media and had emerged in a form now distinctly different from that of their brethren in humor magazines. But the first cartoonist to begin drawing a comic strip in its definitive form was Opper. And in the NBM volume at hand, the second in the series, Forever Nuts: Classic Screwball Strips, we have a healthy sampling from the first 13 years of the strip’s 32-year run, beginning March 11, 1900.  Throughout its run, Happy Hooligan was  a Sunday comic strip about a pathetic but ludicrous Irish hobo with a tin can for a hat, who could be relied upon to lose at every opportunity.

Opper created many cartoon features thereafter (including And Her Name Was Maud! about a trouble-making mule and Alphonse and Gaston, whose title characters were so excessively polite as to become a national catch-phrase). Of the miscellaneous lot, Happy lasted by far the longest, ending in 1932, when Opper was forced by failing eyesight to lay down his pen; he died five years later.

The comedic flywheel of Happy Hooligan was starkly simple: Happy, an incurably non-calculating good-hearted soul, would try to lend a helping hand in some innocuous enterprise he encounters — retrieving someone’s errant hat, say, or rescuing a cat or delivering a messag — and his action would misfire in some minor way, which, in turn, would lead to retribution by the personages whom he had initially set out to help. Typically, they’d pounce on the hapless Happy and beat him up. Or his bumbling would attract the attention of nearby officers of the law, who, before too long, could spot their trouble-prone victim from afar, yelling, “It’s the Holligans!” The strip’s charm, if that’s the word, arose from the variety of ways Happy would be brutalized by his betters in the last two panels of the strip—and in the ingenuity of Opper’s traps for his character: what new good deed will Happy attempt that will go awry enough to precipitate a cascade of calamity, culminating in the tramp’s being clobbered or clapped in jail?

Like many early comic strips, Happy Hooligan was essentially a one-note joke: Opper repeated his formula — no good deed going unpunished — endlessly, or at least for 32 years. The crude physicality of the strip’s ritual doubtless appealed to readers in big cities in the first couple decades of the century: many of them were newly arrived from other countries and were illiterate in English, but they could enjoy the visual mayhem taking place over Opper’s signature without being able to read a single syllable. (I don’t mean to slight foreign-language speakers: English-speaking movie-goers a few decades later doted on the same sort of physical humor in the raucous films of the Three Stooges. We didn’t progress much in the first forty years of the 20^th Century.)