The funny pages, the great displays of American strip-cartooning, are an unsurprising source of slang. Of late I’ve been looking at something from 1914: Abie the Agent. Not of stars but of cars. It was branded the first adult cartoon in print. It was also the first to feature a Jew.
Or one who spoke (mainly) in English. For an earlier Jewish strip one needs look to the Yiddish newspaper Di Kibetser (Yiddish for ‘the meddler’ and originally one who looks over a card-player’s shoulder, advising and interfering with the game.) Here, from 1912-14, the political cartoonist Samuel Zagat created ‘Gimpel Beynish der Shadchen (Matchmaker)’, an all-Yiddish strip. And in a touch of intertextuality, ‘he meets a famous person, but doesn’t have any luck thereby’:
I don’t know. Could anyone put him into the daily bladders today. And pretty much every day for the best part of three decades thereafter. Or for that matter on line. This derby-hatted, short-arsed, moustachioed, pop-eyed, stripe-suited, spatted and, check that nozzik not to mention his (kosher) butchery of the ‘lengwitch’, unmistakably Jewish creation: Abraham ‘Abie’ Kabibble, best-known by his job and his creator’s naming: Abie the Agent.
Dose were diff’rent days. Especially on the drawing boards of the great American strip cartoonists and the funny pages of the syndicated rags they adorned. But America, with its history of mid-late 19th century immigration - Irish, Germans, Italians, central Europeans, Scandinavians, Jews - was never worried by a little race-based piss-taking. Which meant stereotypes, clothes and of course dialect. Not that Britain hadn’t set the pattern: Paddy, Jocky, Taffy and who’d forget John Bull, had all been stumbling (feet, words, whatever) or in John’s case self-aggrandisingly strutting their stuff through ballads and slang glossaries for some time already.
America did it too: Yankees, Southerners, mid-Westerners and frontiersmen were strong on dialect, not to mention slang. As ever, linguistic quirks added authenticity to the text. Frontiersmen, typically Davy Crockett (real-life not just a song), offered their adventures (in Crockett’s case via William T. Porter’s Spirit of the Times, the US equivalent to Bell’s Life in London); Charles Henry Smith’s ‘Bill Arp’ offered a Southern point of view; the Ohio journalist David R. Locke used ‘Petroleum V. Nasby’ to comment on politics and was read by Abraham Lincoln. Mortimer Thompson wrote as ‘Philander Q. Doesticks’. Female characters included B.P. Shillaber’s ‘Mrs Partington’, whose Life and Sayings were published in 1854, and Frances Miriam Witcher's ‘Widow Bedott’ whose Papers appeared in 1856. There are too many to name, but the last was Bill Nye (1850-96).
Of course if the non-standard speech of the natives was funny, then that of the Irish, the Germans and in time Italians (though not, seemingly, in cartoon strips) and Jews, was funnier still. Two notable exponents were Charles G. Leland, who would join Albert Barrère in the writing of A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant (1889-90), and Finley Peter Dunne.
Leland’s Hans Breitmann appeared in 1857 in the poem ‘Hans Breitmann’s Barty’. It was the first time an entire work had been composed in a non-native dialect. His hero was by no means despicable or stupid – the stereotype of German immigrants was far more positive than that of Jew or Irishman – and Hans was widely popular. Still, the primary joke was his heavily accented German English. Thus Breitmann’s use of ‘cook one’s goose’ came out as ‘Denn ofer all de shapel [i.e. a print trade union chapel] / Vierce war vas ragin loose; / Fool many a vighten brinter / Got well ge-cooked his goose’ and ‘not give a damn’ as ‘Away down Sout’ in Tixey dey’ll split you like a clam’ — / ‘For dat,’ spoke out der Breitmann, ‘I doos not gare one tam’.
Finley Peter’s Dunne’s ‘Mr Dooley’ a philosophical bartender plying his trade in a predominantly Irish area of Chicago, began life as a newspaper column and first appeared in book form in Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War (1898). He was, according to his creator, a ‘traveller, archaeologist, historian, social observer, saloon- keeper, economist, and philosopher.’ Dooley was Irish as Breitmann had been German. he pontificated on matters of the time, both great and small, but stood throughout behind the outward persona of the comic Irishman, heavily en-brogued, and not above a good amount of slang. As Dunne explained in an interview in 1899, his intent had always been ‘to make Dooley talk as an Irishman would talk who has lived thirty or forty years in America, and whose natural pronunciation had been more or less affected by the slang of the streets.’
While there were successful Jewish comics - Weber & Fields, Gallagher and Shean and, in time, the Marx Brothers, Abie’s predecessor was perhaps Joe Hayman’s skits (first created in 1913) for his character ‘Cohen on the Telephone’. Cohen, whose portrait would have gladdened the viciously anti-semitic Nazi rag Der Sturmer, has no stated job but like Abie we can assume some form of business, which employment causes him grief. A mix of puns and the thickest of Yiddish accents made him funny.
The great Jewish trek west from Mitteleuropa came in the 1890s. Abie was the son of an original immigrant (might he have even been born en route?) and what adult Abie had, what he couldn’t have achieved in the UK, let along the old country, was strength in numbers. If around 150,000 decided that London’s East End (and its equivalent in various manufacturing and commercial centres) was far enough, and hadn’t been tossed off the boat at, say, Hull, with a reassurance that yes, this really was New York City, then they carried on to the States, then some 2.8 million made their way through the great immigrant choke-points such as Ellis Island. This was, should we forget, one of the biggest urban agglomerations of heebs, kikes and Christ-killers the world had known. That spared them nothing. As the wayward son of one of their number, one Leonard Schneider, aka Lenny Bruce, would note, when it comes to the sacred cow, to sepulchres whited or otherwise, which certainly included the sensibility of the newly-arrived greenie. Immigrant, schimmigrant: ‘Everybody’s ass is up for grabs. Rabbis, priests, they all go.’ Little Jewish car salesmen, among whom stood Abie, with his stock of ‘Climax’ motors and the infinite angst that business that brought on a daily basis, were certainly no exception.
I am wholly open to correction, and I’m only talking daily strips, but not every minority seemed to qualify. The Chinese, imported for rail building and staying on to cook or launder, may have walked on, but failed to top the bill.1 The Italians and the Scandinavians never made it to top banana. It may be that there was an Italian kid in Us Boys, a 2D version of the Our Gang movies, which followed Abie on the funny page, but neither he nor his pals had accents other than the general deformations (dropped final letters, etc) that carried no racial indication.
‘Abie the Agent’ appeared in February 1914. His creator was a real-life mockie, Harry Hershfield, in time crowned ‘dean of cartoonists’ and ‘the Jewish Will Rogers’.2 Hershfield had already hit paydirt when he used Yiddish as the lingua franca of a cannibal chief named Gomgatz appearing in his Desperate Desmond strip, now he took the logical step: a Jewish lead. He would become the most famous, and beyond his own world of immigrant Jews, one of the most beloved.
As for his name, Abraham is Jewish, of course, but Kabibble, while seeming very Yiddish, is absent from any glossary. It is more likely to have taken its inspiration from the US Yiddish ish kabibble, who cares, don’t worry and beyond that the pre-emigration synonym, nish gefidlt. (When Hershfield scripted Abie into a couple of shorts in 1917, one was called Iska Worreh, a garbled form of ‘I should worry’ and neither Yiddish nor American.) The word was further popularized by the swing trumpeter Merwyn Bogue (d.1994), who took the name ‘Ish Kabibble’ and started performing as a comic. In Animal Crackers (stage 1928, movie 1930) the Marx Brothers (or their scriptwriters Kaufman and Ryskind), name-checked him when Chico reveals the real name of self-proclaimed ‘art mogul’ Roscoe W. Chandler: ‘Sure, [he’s] Abie Kabiddle [sic], the fish peddler from Czecho-Slovakia.’ By then he was a slang generic in his own right.
Today, when everyone vies to exhibit a skin more flayed and bloodied and a consciousness more hyper-sensitive to aggressions real and fancied, a cartoon figure, with his attendant world as limited to a single stereotyped identity would be the hardest of sells. Punching down, for Abie does not run with the great ones of the world, would be the least of it. Jews may not count in the taxonomy of acceptable modern victimhood, but they knew (at least were given) their place in the early 20th century.
His accent is mocked, his vocabulary with it, his clothing is surely seen as vulgar (though it is his trade rival Benny Sparkbaum, roughly ‘jewel tree’ and promoter of the oddly-named ‘Collapsible’, who is the ring-bedecked, fashion-following dandy), his style - business and personal - driven by Jewish clichés. Though if that means Abie is looking to prosper - nu, that’s by you a problem? - it is as much to demonstrate generosity (no light-obscuring bushels at 127 Benjamin Street, home of the agency: call Yontiff 4316) as to hoard his gold. Indeed, whether or not it’s always wholly visible, his heart has far more glitter than his bank balance, at least in these early episodes when he sees more struggle than success.3
As I say: strength in numbers. Abie became less ‘typically’ Jewish as the years passed, but these early strips are uncompromising. Not that he has a choice. His, whether within New York City or, as one streetcar destination board suggests, Chicago, is an all-semitic world. Butcher, baker, rich, poor... everyone he meets. The cop who sometimes tangles with Abie’s driving is Irish, but what else could he have been in 1914? Diversity wasn’t a word in the force’s vocabulary but nor, in Abie-world, are reality’s anti-Jewish sneers. There are African-Americans, inevitably working in some form of service industry (e.g. pushing bath chairs bearing Abie with or without his fiancée Reba - invariably ‘mine Golden’ and a willowy, sophisticated figure who towers over her beloved - along the Atlantic City boardwalk) but they are never demeaned and their ‘black talk’ is no more accentuated than are Abie’s Yiddishisms (which most of his readers would still have understood and even have used.) The only minstrelsy is when Abie, performing at his Lodge, blacks up as the tambourine-wielding End Man ‘Mr Tambo’ and even then he and his friends have the grace to look uncomfortable.
Leopold Bloom he wasn’t, but Joyce’s Dublin ad canvasser and Hershfield’s New York automobile salesman walked not dissimilar paths. He is hyper-Jew, but also, as his being enriches the wider world around him, hyper-American. One might even say Everymensch. Though unlike Rogers, ‘Breitman’ or ‘Mr Dooley’, other than by accident, Abie was a salesman, not a homespun phlosopher. If he had a school it was life and his college was that of hard knocks. He spoke accordingly.
As David Manning White described him in The Funnies (1964), he ‘is as Jewish as the Katzenjammers are German: in him the ethnic minority enriches the American scene by the peculiarity of its speech, mentality, and group character. Abie is a shlemiel and a realist, outrageously sentimental and stubbornly matter-of-fact, the wandering Jew taking a short rest in the suburbs of the world.’
Mazel tov.
Thanks to Early Sports 'n' Pop Culture History Blog I have been alerted to the syndicated cartoon: ‘Little Ah Sid the Chinese Kid’, written in very stereotyped ‘American-Chinese dialect’ (‘l’ for ‘r’ etc). It appears in 1904. Its origins seem to be in a similarly titled poem, later song, which was again syndicated in the US press in 1883:
Rogers worked strictly folksy, peddling softcore criticisms of the world around him. The mid-West adored him. Or as film critic David Thompson noted in 1976: ‘Rogers’ philosophy was reactionary, dispiriting and provincial, despite every affectation of bonhomie and tolerance. It scorned ideas and the people who held them […] its fixed smile concealed rigidity of opinion that middle America need not be disturbed from its own prejudices and limitations.’ If Hershfield shared anything with the embryonic MAGA fan Rogers it was a taste for that echt-Jewish ingredient, schmaltz.
Abie may kvetch, can an immigrant ever elude built-in worry?, but he invariably enjoys such material pleasures as he needs and indeed desires. Meals, usually in restaurants, are unmissed, come the holiday season he can afford a seaside rental on what looks like Long Island, his wardrobe is constantly renewed (like Bertie Wooster he’s a sucker for ephemeral novelty), and there are the regular games of poker or pinochle, the great Jewish favourite. If he bets foolishly, if trade seems ‘sleck’, there is always more gelt. Not invariably perhaps, but he is usually the schnorrer’s friend.