A Kookoolele for Krazy Kat

In honor of the great cartoonist George Herriman and his immortal creation Krazy Kat, I have made a crude musical instrument, embellishing it with a haiku I composed, an illustration of Krazy playing the banjo and singing, and an emblem indicating that bricks are forbidden.  My reproduction of Krazy was adopted directly from the last strip Herriman was working on before he became too ill to work - he died soon after.  The brick of course refers to Ignatz Mouse’s weapon of abuse.  The back and the outer edges of this “kookoolele” are inscribed with a dedication to Herriman, Krazy, and the great American singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie.  

A composite of the top and side edges of the kookoolele.

The back of the instrument, with dedication.

Tuning pegs, reinvented.

Actually I built the instrument 20 or 30 years ago - I don’t remember whether I was still living in New York or if by then I had moved to Torino, Italy, which was in 1996.  It’s made with a wooden cigar box, a few wine corks, scrap wood, and guitar strings.  The strings are attached to the neck with eye screws, so the instrument is actually tunable - although it doesn’t retain its tuning for more than a few seconds, since the eye screws are a bit loose.  But I didn’t really make it to be playable.  (For no reason that I can recall, I strung it for a lefty, even though I’m right-handed, as is Krazy.)   I only finished it in the past few months of late 2022 with the haiku and all the rest.

The haiku reads, “This kookoolele drives fascists to suicide - when I play it - TWANG!”  Seventeen syllables, count ‘em.  I’ll play and I guarantee you’ll beg me to stop.  And I will, unless you’re a fascist.  It’s a nod to the note Woody Guthrie famously attached to the front of his guitar:  “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS”. 

The painting is all done with black latex paint.  I wanted to do the lettering following George Herriman’s distinct style as closely as possible.  (The language as well, other than the haiku itself, follows Krazy’s manner of speaking.)  There is a font called “Krazy Kat”, and I printed out an alphabet to serve as a guide for both the style and the placement of the lettering on the front and on the sides of the instrument.  But I found that several letters in the font weren’t much like Herriman’s actual lettering, so I enlarged a frame from a Herriman strip, his very amusing “Stumble Inn”, and imitated that. 

As I said, the drawing of Krazy that I copied was the last thing Herriman was working on.  He had done most of the inking - Krazy is there, and Ignatz, a little worm, and the landscaping, but he hadn’t yet erased his pencil sketching.  You can see very faintly the dialogue he had in mind, with only the vaguest balloons so far.  I darkened the drawing drastically and boosted the contrast to bring out the penciling, and saw that Krazy was singing, “How deep is the ocean, how high is the sky…”, the Irving Berlin standard.  In the next frame Ignatz, with no imagination or sense of romance, interrupts Krazy and comments, “Many, many miles I’d say”.  Krazy returns to the song, while Ignatz walks out of the frame saying “Silly”.  Then Krazy changes the song, and starts singing “Gitta long l’il doggie gitta long” as a worm (or caterpillar) approaches, who seems alarmed at the song.   Krazy turns to the worm saying “Hey?”  Then the worm asks “Hot doggie?”, then panics and races away, screaming “AH-H”.  These are numbered at the right as strips eleven and twelve.  I don’t quite understand the action here, as of the moment when the worm appears.  Perhaps the previous frames would have helped, or perhaps the following frames would have tied it up. 

Why should I take a comic strip character and turn it into a polemic?  Well, Krazy Kat always was a polemic, usually a very subtle one.  I used to see Krazy Kat strips occasionally when I was a kid, reprinted here and there - it was a favorite of the generation before mine, and was considered a classic by many.  One needed a certain taste or sense of humor, but not necessarily great sophistication.  I loved the crazy, surreal, ever-changing backgrounds of Coconino County.  The action of the strip didn’t grab me, however - the constant gag of the mouse beaning the cat with a brick seemed to me to be mere slapstick, and rather cruel at that.  The fact that the cat-and-mouse roles were reversed wasn’t a big deal in itself - after all, in cartoons like Tom and Jerry we always saw the clever mouse getting the better of the big, stupid cat.  And this was long before I was acquainted with Samuel Beckett’s existential tragicomedy. 

There was a running gag that went on for a few years, that of “Tiger Tea” (nominally catnip), for which Krazy had a weakness, but from which she derived a great strength.  At least she really let her fur down when under the influence.  I think, with no great stretch of the imagination, that Tiger Tea was a stand-in for marijuana.  Of the partial strips below, the one with Ignatz and Pupp, both astounded at Krazy’s behavior, and both getting conked, was one of the rare occasions when Krazy wasn’t on the receiving end of the hurled missile.  In the first frame, Krazy is taking her tea and singing ”I’m a ten-toed tiger - I’m a polo bear in a skwoil kage - tunda in a tea-potz - wah-woooooooo”.

Krazy highly kat-nipped, June 24, 1936.

Krazy under the influence of Tiger Tea, November 15, 1939..

Eventually I came to appreciate better the strip’s originality, and the artwork.  Lest anyone suppose that Herriman’s style was limited to the scratchy, abbreviated strokes of Krazy Kat, I include below a few samples of  his other strips and occasional single drawings.  The first, a singe cartoon from 1901, showing an actress being engaged by a theatrical manager, is caricatural, but not so much as in other strips.  The head of the manager suggests the style of Thomas Nast (as do some other early Herriman cartoons).  The second, from 1903, shows an elaborately detailed interior setting; the young lady has a bit of the Gibson Girl in her, especially with that marvelous coiffure.  In the third, from “Grandma’s Girl” of 1906, don’t miss the background, a precursor to the landscapes of Coconino County, and especially not the weeping willow which is actually shedding tears along with the sad boy.  Finally, a frame from “Stumble Inn” of 1923, in which a guest has used the bathtub to test a diving suit.

But the real key to understanding Krazy Kat came when I heard of George Herriman’s personal story.  Most of this I owe to Michael Tisserand’s book “Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White”.  He’d been born in New Orleans to a Creole family in 1880.  They were middle-class, and belonged to a tightly-knit community in Tremé, with many relatives living close by.  They were New Orleans people for generations, free people of color, as the term was.  But conditions were worsening quickly in the period after the Civil War.  When the future cartoonist was only ten, the family moved to California.  Young George was light-skinned enough to pass for white, and he lived as such for the rest of his life.  He married a white woman, had children, and became a big success.  He bought a house in a neighborhood that would have excluded him had his origins been evident.  He said he came from a French background, and that he had grown up in California.  His newspaper pals and colleagues called him “the Greek” because they didn’t know what he was.  Although lightly-complected, his hair was wavy - he wore it very short, and nearly always wore a hat.  A very handsome man he was. 

George Herriman, 1902, age 22.

George Herriman, ca. 1922.

George Herriman in a studio portrait, ca. 1940.

So Herriman was hiding in plain sight.  But once you know his true origins, Krazy Kat starts to make a much deeper sense.  Numerous strips point out, none too subtly, the race hypocrisy of our society.  A white cartoonist of modern outlook could have invented similar situations to draw attention to these hypocrisies, and any mature reader would have well understood the point of Herriman’s gags.  But it must have given George’s close friends and colleagues pause at times about just where George was coming from.  I suspect that some may have been on to him, but out of love and loyalty, never challenged him, even privately.  If his cover had been blown, it would have meant disaster for his career. 

What had seemed the mere slapstick gag of Ignatz beaning Krazy with the brick, repeated ad infinitum, becomes heavy with significance once you know its probable origins.  In 1866, there was a major riot in New Orleans in which many black people were killed.  George’s father was most likely present, and even if not, the incident was historic, drawing national attention, and young George surely heard the story many times over, and it must have left a powerful impression.  Michael Tisserand tells the story better than I can, so here’s a page from his Krazy: A Life in Black and White

The brick speaks for itself.  One element of this awful, shameful story could explain the role of Offissa Pupp - although a dog, and as such not traditionally an ally of cats (whether in life or in comics):  the real-life police officer attempted to restrain the white boy from throwing the brick that provoked the tragic slaughter that followed.  So Offissa Pupp represents the ideal role of police in society - for justice, and to protect public safety.  The strips that end with Ignatz in jail for his crime are a trope second in frequency only to the brick.  If only the police were really this upstanding and effective in protecting good folks from bad folks! 

That’s quite enough for now on George Herriman, as here I wanted mainly to show the “kookoolele” and put it in context.  I will be creating another blog article which will go further in examining Herriman’s art, highlighting the backstory of race and racism that was crucial to his work, but also showing that “Garge” was a man with a heart as big as Coconino County.  Stay tuned! 

Allen Schill, January 2023

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