Happy Hooligan

Frederick Burr Opper's Happy Hooligan was one of the defining comic characters of the early funnies. Happy was a gentle, hapless tramp — instantly recognizable by the battered tin can he wore as a hat — whose good intentions unfailingly landed him in trouble, often ending with a run-in with the law he never deserved. He was a figure of pure sympathetic slapstick: the little man crushed by an indifferent world, and lovable for enduring it.

Opper was no newcomer. He had built a distinguished career as a magazine cartoonist, notably at Puck, before bringing his polished comic timing to Hearst's Sunday pages. That pedigree helped lend the young comic strip artistic credibility, showing that the funnies could attract the era's most accomplished humorists and not only unknowns.

Happy Hooligan endured for years and became a genuine popular favorite, his tin-can hat as recognizable in its day as any character's. In his hard-luck optimism you can trace a lineage that runs toward later put-upon everymen of comics and film comedy alike. He is a reminder that from the very start, the comics were not only about rascally children — they could also be tender, and quietly humane.