“Cartoon” Style and Slapstick in <i>Bringing Up Father</i> in the 1910s

Miura Kazushi

doi:10.24577/seia.54.0_91

Much research has represented George McManus’s newspaper comic strip Bringing Up Father as containing pejorative representations of Irish peoples in the early strips, but McManus soon ended such portrayals and in narrative terms, the main character of the strip, Jiggs, is not simply a character to be laughed at, but rather presents an alternative image of the American people that contributed to the formation of a more acceptable Irish-American identity. In addition to the points made by other researchers, this paper endeavors to clarify other important changes in the strip such as how characters became more visually “cartoony” and how from around 1915, the level of slapstick humor in the narrative increased. This paper will argue that Bringing Up Father was not just a strip that represented the Irish-American figure, but also entertained readers on a purely visual level that was to some extent removed from reality and that as we can evaluate the strip in contexts other than from an ethnic perspective helps explain why it was widely accepted outside the US.

“Cartoon” Style and Slapstick in <i>Bringing Up Father</i> in the 1910s

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