Stripper's Guide

My father escaped from behind the Iron Curtain after World War II and immigrated, a teenager all by himself, to Canada. He stepped off the ship hardly knowing a word of English but, out of necessity, learned it at breakneck speed in order to get a job and make a living.  In hardly any time at all he had all but mastered the language, a small miracle. Yet no matter how he tried, he could not seem to rid himself of his accent, and it remained through the rest of his life. It wasn't anything much by the time I came on the scene, just a pronunciation of 'V's as if they were 'W's -- a Volvo was a Wolwo in my dad's world. 

After the war it was not exactly an asset to have a German accent, and I can only imagine how tough it was for him in this war-weary country (Canada suffered over 100,000 dead and wounded in World War II). That was brought home to me when at a very young age, fancying myself a budding comedian, I stupidly tried to poke fun at him for his accent. It wasn't ever a subject of discussion in our home, and I was too young to realize that it could be a sore point for him. Well, my father didn't have much of a sense of humour on his best days, but you would have thought I had stuck a knife in his chest and twisted. He was always quick to anger, but in this case he didn't get mad. He just gave me a withering look, a look of intense disappointment and betrayal that I can still see in my mind's eye to this day, and walked away. Although it was never spoken of again, it was a moment that changed our relationship irrevocably. He no longer could completely trust that I was on his side; even his own son was no exception in a world that mocked him openly for where he had the misfortune to be born.

Of course it wasn't fair to expect a mere child to understand all that, or to blame him for your own emotional scars. But imagine what my father must have been put through, that he couldn't  brush off a stupidly tone-deaf remark from his own kid. Imagine how much pain he must have been put through because of that accent, that he could not find perspective enough to ever completely forgive his child for a stupid attempt to be funny. It took me many years to come to that understanding, and by then it was far too late to repair the damage; my father went to his grave never believing beyond a shadow of a doubt that his son was his unconditional and absolute ally and defender.

So I said all that because today's subject is Dinglehoofer und his Dog, a topper strip to The Katzenjammer Kids. A good portion of the humour to be derived from this long-running topper series is the ridicule of the characters' German accents, just like in the main strip. As you might imagine, that source of humour  falls on deaf ears in these quarters. I can barely make myself read strips like The Katzenjammer Kids, so I'm really not someone equipped to discuss them in anything close to an equitable manner. But, lucky cuss that I am, Mark Johnson in his old Ask The Archivist feature on the Comics Kingdom website, covered the strip so well I that I don't feel I have anything of value I could add even if I wanted to. So take a trip over to this Ask The Archivist post and learn everything you need to know about Dinglehoofer und his Dog.

Labels: Topper Features

# posted by Allan Holtz @ 6:00 AM