June 17, 2025 • 47 mins
What on Earth is a "palooka"? In today's episode, Ben, Noel and Max embark on a bizarre journey -- inspired by a single, fascinating word, they discover one of the weirdest, life-long beefs between two cartoonist legends of yesteryear. We don't want to spoil it, so please tune in! Also, the guys once again crack on James Joyce.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. This is a Pollukaville episode. A
big thanks to our super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Remember Pellucaville. It wasn't that fancy at all. It was
like a burger hot dog kind of joint, very like
kind of monster themed. They were like, yeah, like I
don't know, like sci fi horror. It was this place
in the Avondale, State's neighborhood of Atlanta that Ben and
I both loved, like you know, chili suck aspe as
you stuck on a chili dog.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah. They had great pork burgers.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
They had way too many versions of milk shapes and
fruity drinks. That is none other than the legendary mister
Noel Brown.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
And that's my friend Ben, who is not a Pelukah
I know.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Oh, we're gonna have fun with this one. We got
We've got big Friday energy thanks to our research associate Andrea,
who not too long ago was rewatching pulp fiction and
fell in love with a word. Now we're all etymology
nerds here and we've all been in that situation where
(01:41):
a word just catches you and you got to know
everything about it. Noel Andrew was telling us when she
was watching Pulp Fiction, an amazing film, there was a
one liner, a throwaway line where someone says you looking
at something, friends, and the response is.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
You wait, my friend Poluca. Yeah, it's Vence talking to
Butch whose last name escapes me, played by John Travolta
and Bruce Willis, respectively. Bruce Willis is sort of a
(02:21):
a shamed boxer. He's meant he's known for taking dives.
Let's just say in the plot of the story, and
not to spoil a thirty year old movie at this point,
but three two to one spoiler, he doesn't take the
dive at one point, and he bets on himself. I think,
and he told I think he kills the guy actually,
if I'm not mistaken, and that leads to him being
(02:43):
on the s h I T list of one Marsalis Wallace,
who's kind of the big bad in the film. When
John Travolta's character Vence Vega encounters him at a bar
and he says, you look into some friend, that's what
the boxer guy says, and to which Travoltzay's character respond,
you ain't my friend, Peluka, referencing the fact that he
(03:04):
was a shamed, disgraced boxer who was known for having
no moral character. I think that's how I always took it.
He even follows it up with calling him punchee, which
is another fun old timey term that we use a lot,
referring to being kind of having big Friday energy.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Right right exactly now. Immediately r pal Andrea says, what
the heck is a pelluca? And we're paraphrasing you there, Andrea, because.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
It's a family show.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
But she said something like that, and she realized she
had seen this word before in a comic strip, Brenda Starr.
And this is where in this comic strip, specifically, someone
calls a bank Robert who's using her as a hostage,
a big polluca.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, something you could hear set in almost like a
Jersey admitted atlantic y. Yeah, big yeah, big Polluka cocking
out something like that, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Oh. And let me correct that Brenda Starr was a
we're talking specifically about the film adaptation.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Starrin Broke Shields.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Of the original comic strip. And so now we learn
that the literal definition of polluka is synonymous with lout. However,
learning the origin of the word takes us on a
strange and unexpected journey, NOL. How would we set this up?
(04:31):
I guess we got to mention Joe Pluka comics.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Joe Pluca comics not to be confused with Bazooka Joe,
which is a bubblegum brand that contained a comic right
considered to be very low quality comics within those bubblegum rappers.
But Joe Pluka is a comic strip that debuted in
newspaper syndication I believe in nineteen thirty, while Brenda Starr
(04:55):
came out a decade later in June of nineteen forty.
So it made a sense that Star be jumping off
of that popularized term. I'm considering that the forties setting
of the strip. It also makes sense that Vince Vega
in pulp fiction would use that term as an insult
to Butch, Like I said, who was a disgraced boxer,
(05:16):
Because there's history there.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Yeah, Joe Peluka, just like Butch is a pugilist.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
The words it's new for me a boxer, really, that's
what that but isn't pugilism also like a concept that's
more referring to being overly aggressive perhaps.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah, Yeah, pugilist is anyone who fights with their hands,
got it?
Speaker 2 (05:40):
And pugilistic is an adjective that can refer to someone
who is can be more generalized as someone who is
like by nature aggressively belligerent and prone to fighting. Guard
dog to.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Jump in here real quick, because I want to see
if this is hot. Why Ben knows this one as well?
I only know that because of elder strolls.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Oh, that's interesting.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
There's there's like a there's I think it's a scar
on it, but it might be oblivion where there's there's
a there's a some like gonale that improved like on
on armed like damage or something like that.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yeah, like a buff, Yeah, boxer's buff. And if you
do type in pugilistic and pugilism, it really does come
directly up as boxing. So you're one hundred percent never
heard that term used to refer to the actual sport.
So I learned something new today in addition to everything
else that we learned for today's least.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Oh and sadly you know the reason. Maybe pugilist is
not as well known, even though it's a great word.
Is possibly because after a certain amount of traumatic brain injury,
it's going to be tough for the boxers to remember
specific words.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
And again the next insult that Vincent Lobbs is punchy,
which does refer to that condition that you're describing. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
So let's go to a pre interesting conversation about this.
From an exchange on Reddit, someone asked, is it possible
that Peluka just meant a tough guy? But after the
creation of the character Joe Pluka, it took on the
meaning bad boxer. It seems that even even for pretty
(07:21):
determined researchers, the origin of peluka was mysterious.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
That's right. The term did start appearing in print in
the early nineteen twenties and came to be used as
a stand in for a clumsy or unskilled boxer. Now,
Butcher and pulp Fiction isn't necessarily unskilled, but he is
one who has compromised his integrity as a sportsman in
favor of taking dives for organized criminals. And it's an
(07:46):
interesting kind of character arc because what sets off his
storyline in the film is him failing to do that
thing and in fact maybe being sick of it and
just you know, sick of being laying down, let's just say,
and he actually goes a bit too far and does
kill the guy, leading to one of the intersecting plot
lines of pulp fiction.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Like I was saying, mm hmm, yeah, and it's it's
always uh, I guess, heart wrenching to see someone whose
career is in decline.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
And our guy.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Was always and also ran he was never going to
be Muhammad Ali. Again, pulp Fiction is a great film
if you somehow have not seen it. Not all of
it aged super well, but there's there's high art to it.
So the idea of Joe Peluka in the comic strip
is that he is a champion boxer. He's really good.
(08:39):
Maybe the author thought it would be funny or cute
satirical to name a great to give a great boxer
a bad name, essentially Joe Klamzibasa, But maybe the word
had some other earlier meaning and it got transformed by
the popularity of this comic strip.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
And just really quickly to add, speaking of clumsy boxers,
this is a story that I wasn't super familiar with
and maybe one for another day. But there was a
former boxer by the name of it so aptly named
Eric Crumble, who is an American boxer former boxer who
is notable for his absolute horrific performance. He was considered,
(09:26):
at least in this bio that I'm reading, the most
prolific of American boxers in terms of consistent losses since
his debut in nineteen ninety. I love that his name
is Crumble. He just comes apart, right.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
What a backhanded way to describe that he's prolific losses.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
That's right. Yeah, And there's some good info on this
dude out there if you want to read more, So
that would be a quintessential Peluca is mister Eric Crumble.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
And Peluka gets further, He gets further embedded in the
zeitgeist with the creation of Popeye the sale Man.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Do check out our previous episode ONOS. We had a
good time and some big Friday energy on that one too.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Yeah, and this has the cartoon when it comes out,
adapting from the comic strip, has a theme song we
all know.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
The oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
The theme song has this line, I'm one tough gun
gush who hates shawsh.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
He's pop by the sailor man. I think it's funny
that line. It kind of changes if I'm not mistake
is you know, of course I fights through the finish
because I eats finished. And then there's different ones. But
this is one that I did not recall. But boy,
has this been living rent free in my head. I'm
one tough Kazukas who hates all pe Lucas. It's kind
of poetically brilliant rhyme scheme if you ask me, Gazukas
(10:46):
and Pelucas. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Also, we tried to figure out what a gazukas is.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
It is an unspecified.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Term like dad zooks, right, Like, it's sort of like
a non since word that gets its own kind of
various uses, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
In the nineteen twenties, apparently Gazuka's slangly meant an unspecified item,
a thingy or a gadget. So he's like, I'm one
tough do dad. Yeah, that hates Pelucas. Yeah that makes sense.
I get that as a stand in. Also, you know
what word is coming to mind from this era too
is galute.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah yeah, big galutes. That's say, right, a clumsy, foolish
or silly person. There's also a sense of also a galute,
perhaps being a bit borish and.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Large, Yeah, a bit brutish, maybe not the brightest crayon
in the box. This also taps into a long standing,
hopefully friendly rivalry that existed back then and exists in
the modern day. Popeye is a navy guy. He's a sailorman,
and of course he would hate Joe Peluca, who is
(11:56):
an army dude, an army boxer.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Okay, okay, So it did make our researcher, Andrea wonder
if the word had only become a term for an
apt boxer in response to people that didn't like the
way Joe was represented in the comic strip. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Yeah, because Joe, like so many other comic strip characters,
reflected the era. He looked more and more like the
current heavyweight champ every time the comic strip was published,
and there was another heavyweight champ until Joe Lewis starts
to rise in the boxing ranks, the pugilism ranks, and
(12:37):
the artist of Joe Peluka said, oh, well, we have
to keep our pattern. We may need to turn Joe
Poluca into a black character white. It gets into a
little bit of cultural analysis, because white heavyweight champions represent
to a lot of people white male dominance at the time.
(12:59):
Peluca therefore a fictional representation of that. But then if
the world and culture recognizes there may soon be a
black heavyweight champ, they made the decision not to draw
Joe Poluca, not to transform him into a black character,
and so instead, maybe this is a speculation, the word
(13:22):
Peluca then became synonymous with not a champion boxer, but
a guy's not as.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Good because wait, just as backtrack real quick, because the
character of Joe Peluca was a badass, right originally Yeah,
see okay, So it wouldn't necessarily have been something that
was intended at that point, right to use it as
a negative, Like he was presented sort of as like
a champion.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Yeah, and Joe Lewis is so good at what he
does in the ring that people started referring to his
opponents as the quote bum of the month. Everybody knew
they were going to get their bell rung. So the
simplest likelihood of Joe Poluka's effect on the word Poluka
as a phrase, which we're obviously all in love with
(14:08):
and bringing back it may have just been something where
new boxers entered the ring and people were trash talking, like,
look at this guy, who's he think he is the
next Joe Peluka.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Look at him in his goose suits. That's for another day.
It can't be you. You know why it can't be you?
You know why? For sure? Sure, So this leads us
to the perhaps simplest explanation, it's only a matter of
time before we get to our pals at the Oxford
English Dictionary, which references a book from nineteen twenty called
(14:42):
Character Glimpses by Australian Albert Oris Cooper. It's use in
there is unrelated to boxing, and instead just refers to
a more generally idiotic, stupid, buffoonish, clumsy, perhaps the worst
thing of all, mediocre person.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
A stupid, clumsy, mediocre person. As you said, the specific
line you know we're referring to here is the following.
Alger just pen a ticket on that Peluca for parking again.
That fire plug that guy got increasingly southern in the south.
The quote right, so yeah, that's the quote that that
we're referencing. That first appears in prints, right Poluca, So
(15:28):
it also may have appeared in boxing publications in nineteen
twenty three. As far as we know. Uh, there's a
quote we'd love to give you about boxing from Pennsylvania's
Altuna Tribune.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Boy oh boy. Peluca is a new word, much used
lately to describe what was formerly called a hit out,
a setup, a sucker, a bowhunk, a pushover. All of
these words mean a very poor fighter. The origin of poluca, however,
is unknown unknown.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Uh so, okay, the author of that first attestation, that's
what we call it, the first time a word emerges
in print. The Australian guy that you mentioned earlier, Noel
Albert Horace Cooper, was a military man who was in
the service from nineteen sixteen to nineteen twenty. He came
(16:19):
back at the end of his service in London and
he was stationed in Bonn as part of the first
Infantry Division for about two years at the end of
the war. There may therefore be a military origin to
the use of poluca. So we know it had a
prior meaning, but it did not have necessarily the meaning
(16:42):
tough guy, so much as it had the meaning of
this guy thinks he's you know, hot hot potatoes, exactly
fresh beans.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
He thinks he's.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Fresh beans this guy, so it was probably used in
boxing before the creator of the character Joe Peluca.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Well, that would make sense. Yeah, I mean, it's not like,
you know, the dude that created that character just summoned
it from thin air. Comic strips, to your point, Ben,
were always meant to be a reflection of the zeitgeist
and of you know, what was going on at the time,
So he would have pulled from what he knew, I
would conjecture, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Yeah, So Vincent Vega, therefore, is not not just pulling
dumb insults out of thin air. He is referring directly
to pugilism, because Vega is that there's always this like
subtext in pulp fiction that Vega is smarter than he presents.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
And also he's he drives a classic car. He addresses
of that era. He you know, obviously this is Quentin
Tarantino writing, and this dude's into all this stuff. But
Vincent Vega's character, in particular, his use of this word
kind of represents that old timey sensibility that he yes.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
If I could jump in here real quick. Actually, my
counter will always be what happens to Vincent Vega later
in the movie when he interacts with Bruce Willis, which
is probably the dumbest thing he could possibly do. And
I'll leave it at that, so I don't spoil it.
But I do also want to point at the whole
fact that I compared Pull Fiction to Finnigan's Wake just
to watch.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Ben get angry. I haven't read finnigans Wake.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
Wake infamously starts out in the same place.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Right, That's excellent an observation, Max. But we'll let me
save you some time.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
I remember you got a bone to pick with the shit.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
I don't think Jeans Joyce read Finnigan's way. That's fair
if we're being honest, all right, Sorry James.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Anyway, some of the guy that was really into farting, yes, yeah,
took out that episode on James Joyce. That one's PG. Eighteen.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
I mean, you know, we're very friendly, inclusive people in
real life. We don't joy keep shaming, but boy he
was on one.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Yeah, I know, king shaming, but like just the letters, boy,
oh boy, and make a sailor blush.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
We beaped every profanity in that episode, but we have
an internal like rating that we use here. iHeart our service.
That just kind of says like you know, flag stuff
like you know, when we talk about like wars and
stuff like that will flag like you know, meetings like that.
Sexual content was like highest level possible for that episode.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
We may have set a deep record for that one. Anyway,
we just want to we just want to do the
one line while we're here because we have such.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
A bone to pick. Give it to us.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Okay, we're back. We took some time, all fair just
to find this. We're not going to give you the
whole thing. You're gonna have to listen to the episode.
But he does say things like, and he's talking to
the love of his life.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
He says, you.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and
I have fed them out of you. Big fat fellows,
long windy ones, quick little Mary cracks, a lot of tidy,
naughty little fartings. Indeed, in a long gush from your hole.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
You've made this episode. Our race is now now the
children can't enjoy. It's for literal I know it.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
It is from literagure, come from the Peluka, get tricked
into the farts.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Uh, it's crazy though, what we're saying, what we're talking
about now again, I love falling for one specific word.
Why are people familiar with some comic characters of Yesteryear
but not Joe Peluca. Apparently it comes down to a
feud between two creators. The creator of Joe Peluka is
(20:33):
a guy. I know you love this name. No Hammond, ham.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Fisher, ham Fisher, ham Fisher. It's good. I think I
said off area. That was one of the most like
thirties forties names. Ever. It's me ham Fisher. I can
just imagine them like roasting a bean the train yard.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
I'm picturing, yeah, I love it, with a stick and bindle.
I'm also picturing, like the the weirdest job in a
foregone age.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
I'm a Fisherman of Ham, Fisher of Ham. Yes, this
was my.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Father, my father's father before him.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Weather rivers overflow with steamed hams.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yes, steamed hams. Al Cap is the guy who beefs
up with ham Fisher. Al Cap created the comic strip
Oh beefs Up? I didn't.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Yeah, al Cap beats up with Ham beating up with Ham.
That should be the name of the book about There
should be a book.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Al Cap is the creator of another comic strip called
Lil Abner.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
You've heard of that one. I mean that is a
lot of times used as a general stand in. What's
that term ben for old timey comic strip?
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like metotomy for it. Right. Yeah,
So we we know that at the peak of their
careers in the nineteen fifties, these guys are legit superstars.
Ol cap is read by ninety million reader. He makes
five hundred thousand US dollars a year. Can we do
(22:04):
an inflation calculator on that?
Speaker 2 (22:07):
We must. That's a b preak there and boob dude.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
So five hundred thousand dollars in the nineteen fifties is
equivalent to four million US dollars today. Inflation is just crazy, man,
This guy is a serious artist. He is known as
is his work at least is known. This may not
well have been the age of like celebrity creators quite
as much. You know, he probably wasn't as known, but
(22:36):
his characters certainly were. Yeah, now, help out our buddy
the hemman. Yes, ham Fisher, that's right. Well, you know what,
let's just hear from an expert R. C. Harvey of
the Comics Journal, who tells the delightful meet cute story
one version of it anyway, we're going to get to
that here. How the two matt was a story they
(22:56):
both agreed on.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Caps swung his left leg out sideways, almost dragging it
forward for each step, and his stride had a practiced rhythm,
a rolling gait punctuated by a profound dip every time
he transferred his weight to his left leg, the wooden one.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
This just got interesting, by the way.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
That's all right. Yeah, it is a little bit of
a pimpwalk, and you want to keep on, keep it,
keep it wrong. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
But it wasn't the lurch that attracted the attention of
the man in the limousines so much as it was
the sheaf of paper in a blue wrapper that the
tottering stroller had tucked under his arm.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Good stuff. The man in his limousine was a cartoonist,
and he thought he recognized the blue wrapping paper it was,
he believed, the paper his syndicate used to wrap rejected
artwork in when returning it to hapless supplicants.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Pull up alongside that fellow, the man said to his chauffeur,
And he turned to the woman seated next to him
and said, I bet that guy is a cartoonist.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
The subject of this wager. The young man rolling along
the sidewalk on Eighth Avenue near Columbus Circle was a
somewhat shabby specimen who, despite the chill of the spring day,
was hatless and nearly coatless. But he didn't need a hat.
He had a shaggy mop of thick black hair. He
had only been in New York for a few weeks,
(24:14):
and the six dollars he'd arrived with had long since evaporated.
If it had not been for the kindness of his landlady,
who's boundless faith in her tenant's artistic skill prompted her
to stake him to his assault on the citadels of
the mass media, he would have been back in his
native Boston. Basically paraphrasing, his landlord let him stay in
(24:37):
her attic without paying rent, and sometimes she would give
him some pocket money so he could eat one hundred percent.
And this is such beautiful language, but it goes on
a bit, So why don't we just kind of sum
up what happened? This is essentially a somewhat hyperbolic kind
of myth making kind of stuff. In this particular version
(24:57):
of the story, ham Fisher is kind of painted as
the saviors of young al Cap and offers him a job.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Yeah yeah, yeah, not known as al Cap yet.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
This kid is Alfred G. Kaplan.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
And when this fancy pants dude says hey like a guy,
stops his limousine and says, I bet my sister, you're
a cartoonist?
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Are you hell? What day is in Christmas Day? Set? Exactly?
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Fish me the finest time in all of Harlem. So
he had sold a few cartoons our buddy Alfred in
New York and Boston, but he wasn't doing it full time.
It was kind of catches catch can where you still
have to have a day job.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Ben Can I just say you got pretty close Nail
in the neighborhood. We're in the Upper West Side, which
is you know, the little past Harlem. Thank you, sir,
we know that.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
A year prior to this, I love what you said
about it being a meek you. A year prior to
this moment, al had been in New York and he
was he got one of the golden geese of a
cartoonist at the time, a syndicated cartoon feature There's about
a pompous young jerk, a blowhard. But he didn't love it.
(26:13):
A real galute, a real poluca, a real peluca.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
So he gave it up and he went back to Boston.
And it's a good thing he did, because he had
just gotten married and that's not the ideal long distance relationship.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Visit, that's right. So six months later he gets back
to the Big Apple to give it another go. At
this point, we are squarely in the midst of the
Great Depression. They didn't call it that at the time.
As you point out Off and Ben, fourteen million folks
were out of work in New York City. There were breadlines,
nearly a million jobless, with twenty nine New Yorkers potentially
(26:49):
dying of starvation every single year. But this fancy pants,
this high falutin character, riding around isolated from the horrors
of of New York City life behind the you know,
the protective glass of his limo, offered this hapless young
fellow ten dollars to do some drawings for him and
(27:11):
Kaplan or al CAPPIs he would later sign himself. Agreed,
of course.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Yeah, I mean that's such a flex Hello from my limousine,
you pull cartoonist, here's a tetta.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
It was a big deal when he realized who it
was because this is a guy that was known, Like
to my point, earlier, the average comic strip reader might
not have known who this guy was. But this dude
is a comic writer artist. He knows who the big
players are, and when he realizes this, it's a big
revelation for him.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
One hundred percent. Yeah. So, initially they have a pretty
good relationship, you could even say mentor mentee. But by
the nineteen fifties they have been feuding for quite some time.
They had their own versions of the meeting story, and
(28:02):
these two versions began to increasingly diverge. McLean's magazine was
very interested in this, and on April first, nineteen fifty
they published both cartoonist version of the story.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Yeah, they sure knew. The version that we ever counted
as far is a little bit of a combo deal, right, Yeah,
so Ham says from his account, Ham Fisher says exactly
what we had described earlier.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
He agrees with the loose order of operations, but he
also says he also embellishes a bit on his own behalf.
He says, Look, I invited him for lunch in my limo.
I didn't tell him my name. I asked him what's
your favorite comic strip? And he said Joe Peluka. And
(28:56):
then eventually, when they went back to his place for lunch,
Cap sees a portrait inscribed to Ham and he goes,
why it's you. You are Ham Fisher. He begged me
for a job. I had an assistant. I didn't know
if I could afford another wink, very self aggrandized.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Yeah, come give.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Us just like a few more details.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
On this guy seems to think quite highly of himself.
Let's see, I took pity on him and gave him
a job lettering and inking. Many months later, I was
going on a week's vacation. Cap came up just as
I was leaving and demanded a fifty dollars a week raise.
I sneered that I wouldn't be able to go away
if he refused to work. I blew up. I fired
him and took the work with me.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
And then he says, you know, he gets back from
vacation and he says, and Cap just kept calling me
begging for his job back. I got him a job
with the United Feature Syndicate and he started some kind
of hillbilly' strip called loel Abner. It was so similar
(29:59):
to the hill Billies I created in Joe Peluka. I
protested to the syndicate. Cap apologized and said he would
change it, and he never did.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Basically, I mean, to be fair, you can't really own
Hillbillies as a concept. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, and
you give the people what they are. If the Hillbilly
strips are doing well, you give them Hillbillies.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
And so we go to Again. It's wild that this
is published at the same time in the same magazine.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
It's confusing though, too, because like later we see another
statement from Fisher where he kind of contradicts what was
purported to be a statement from him in the first place,
Like it wasn't it him meant to have said that
he took six weeks vacation. I'm confused because then he
later has to say, I never took six weeks vacation
in my life. Yeah, it's it's like that.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Oh gosh, it's it's like that interview with Rick James
in The Chappelle Show where he says he never messed
with the couch and then he immediately he says, yeah,
messed up his couch to keep him lying. Yeah, there
is some self contradiction. Absolutely, Cap Fire's back, and he says, look,
Cam Fisher's story about picking me up in his car
(31:13):
after accosting me in New York.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Street is truthy. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. He is absolutely
galled by the implication that he was hired as a letturer,
because that was what considered I think, a more lowly position,
or like an entry level position, and he said, no,
I was hired as an artist. I was just as
skilled as anyone else, you know, working for the publication. Uh,
(31:37):
and that is what I was brought in to do.
He then gets real personal, saying that Fisher is himself
a fraud. He's not an artist at all. He's an
idea man and he cannot draw it all these except
for a few simple chalk talk So I love that tricks.
So when he says he took the drawings with him,
it's a pathetic claim. I never told him Joe Peluka
(32:01):
was my favorite strip. It's the kind of strip I deplore,
the glorification of punches and brutishness. Wow, what a they're
so bad?
Speaker 1 (32:19):
He says, I was making nineteen bucks a week, and
then later I'll set the record that too, Yeah, twenty
two bucks a week, while I was working for Fisher,
and he says, I drew all of his Sunday pages.
I created all of the characters. I wrote every line.
And that time he told you guys, he went on
a vacation. He wasn't gone for one week, he was
(32:41):
gone for six. He didn't leave me any money. We
had to live on what my wife was making, and
so I whipped up Lil Abner with my free time. Basically,
I sold the cartoon to United Features Syndicate. And that
part where he says he got me a job with
United is the part I am most bitter about. When
he found out I was with United, he threatened to
(33:03):
sue for three years. He tried everything to get me fired.
These guys hate.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Each other, they really do at this point. Yeah, it's
kind of a I mean rip by the way Brian
Wilson with the Beach Boys such of who I think
we all love and respect and meyer everything he brought
to music production, you know, songwriting, an absolute legend of
an individual who beefed openly with Mike Love of the
(33:29):
Beach Boys, who claimed that they wrote a lot of
those songs together. They suit each other. It was a
very similar rivalry with a lot of he said. He said, potential,
you know, revisionist history. There. I am team Brian Wilson
all the way. Mike Love I find to be insufferable.
Even when he was asked about Brian's passing, he made
it about him and immediately said, all these brilliant songs
(33:51):
we co created, no thanks.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
I mean, Brian Wilson just was a prophet in the world.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Music, out of the universe. I mean, I can't unbelievable,
especially with the hormone. We should do an episode on Brian.
You're absolutely right, and there is I don't typically like biopics,
but there is a film called I Believe, Love and
Mercy that is about Brian Wilson and it shows two
eras of his life. It's played by John Cusack and
the older and oh gosh, the kid who plays the
(34:21):
Preacher and there will be blood whose name is totally
escaping me. Paul Dana plays the younger Brian Wilson, and
I really love it. It's very artistically done and not
just like kind of a glaze fest like some of
these other biopics.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yeah, speaking of glaze fest and being wankish. Being wakish,
Fisher fires back and says, I've never had six weeks
vacation in my life.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
Yeah. That's the weirdest part because he the way it's
attributed in the publication, it made it sound like he
was saying while I was away on vacation, this stuff transpired.
So it may well be some creative license on the
part of the folks were counting these stories as well,
I think is getting Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Yeah, and so Hamm is saying, look, when this al
guy worked for me, I never had more than a
week of vacation. He says, I'm amazed at caps effrontry.
His entire statement is false, and he says he's grossly
exaggerating this stuff, saying that I sued him, I made
a complaint because he was spreading this lie that he
(35:26):
created some of the Joe Peluca sequences. And he says
ultimately that company apologized to him when he when he
launched that complaint. And Noel, we were talking a little
bit about this offline. There there's a lot of back
and forth. We've given you sort of the broad strokes
(35:46):
of what happens. But speaking of strokes, there's there's a
saucy that we just have to share true scandal and
I think it's a real good way to Cap to
al Cap. This one nice.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, yeah, it involves I don't know, man, it reminds
me of or at least in the conspiracy angle of
the what we're gonna get to in the discussion of
what actually happened those rogue Disney artists that like snuck
penises and the like Loyal made arts and like some
of those like you know, things that are real by
the way that they have been removed from a lot
of the reissue versions, streaming versions, But there definitely were
(36:24):
some naughty bits hidden in some Disney animations, and this
story involves some very naughty bits printed uh in the
lit l Abner cartoon.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
That Disney stuff is an excellent comparison, all right. You
need to know that these guys are taking shots at
each other in their work. They are mocking each other
through the characters that they create and through the situations
those characters find themselves in. So they are again like
(36:56):
much slightly petty stuff getting hardcore dude fish relating Fisher
gets plastic surgery, and so Cap makes fun of him
in his comic, and they're constantly just just taking shots
at the bow of each other, and Fisher will not
stop talking trash. This is where we go to an
(37:19):
excellent observation by Morris Weiss, or Weiss who was interviewed
in the Comic Journal we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Fisher won't stop going on about the potential plagiarism, the
idea that Cap stole his characters. He just got real
personal and mudslingy and raving about, according to Weiss, Caps
being a sex maniac. Right, and this notion he put
out there in the public that he was hiding pornographic
(37:51):
images and plain sight in his little Abner cartoons. And
so now we've got a full blown like censorship witch hunt, right,
I mean truly a moral panic, which wouldn't you say
to a degree one hundred percent?
Speaker 1 (38:05):
Man, this is the He is trying so hard to
come off as the wronged party, but he sounds increasingly deluded. Yeah, yeah,
he said, great things are happening to me now. The
detective that al Cap had following me to get dirt
on me, well, that detective is now working for me.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
What And there's a cover story in Time magazine that
blows the lid off of this whole thing. They said
that Fisher had certain panels of Little Labner enlarged and
zoomed in on circled graphic details in red that he
believed were hidden or believed whatever, or was just being
a crazy person pornographic subliminal messages. I'm not just the
(38:48):
Oh my god, it's just he's like, look at the nose. Really,
think about the note, Think about what else looks like
you nose, y'all. And he distributed to editors of the
newspapers that were carrying the strips like he is on
a slow and burn, scorched earth campaign against this dude.
And he is saying that there's subliminal pornography designed to
undermine the youth of the nation and urges the newspaper
(39:11):
editors to drop caps cartoon entirely.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
And keep in mind, even though he may be behaving
a bit irrationally, he is a big deal himself. He's
not just some guy writing to these papers. And in
the strip examples that he provides and disseminates, he says, quote,
this insane perverted pornography is from Little Abner. Yes, this
is what al capp has perpetrated for fifteen years. Are
(39:37):
the unsuspecting editors of American newspapers. Now normally right in
an attempt to create a moral panic, people will generally
ignore a lot of this stuff. But because we're in
the dawn of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, and because
(39:58):
comic books are increased seemly targets of criticism, and as
you said, all the safety of the children, this is assigned.
This problem is assigned to the Joint Committee on Comics.
They're the folks who decide whether or not to censor comics.
And so now the idea is that ham Fisher has
(40:21):
escalated this Poluka argument so much so that he's not
just attacking his former protegee al Capp, he may have
consequences for the entire industry of comics.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Well, I mean he he. There's a committee assembled, the
Joint Joint Committee from I believe the Cartoonist Society, that
investigates this stuff and determines that the images that were
being submitted to them had been doctored or it's implied.
It's very much. It says here in the in the
(40:53):
findings of the report from Raymond. Alex Raymond, the president
at the time of the Cartoon Society, I am convinced
after seeing the photostats reproduced in the report of the
Joint Committee, compared with the original drawings of Lil Abner
from which the photostats were made. That someone distorted, cropped, faked,
wrongfully emphasized, and twisted your material during the process of
(41:15):
reproduction to make it appear pornographic. Such machinations could cause
the work of any contemporary artist to appear erotic, but
Fisher never copped to it. So make of that what
you will. But it sure seems like this dude was
getting increasingly unhinged and bitter, and it's exactly the kind
of thing someone would do in that state, right.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Right, exactly, And this is where we see you know,
we see echoes even now today with famous celebrity beefs. Right.
And the story goes on that we know that Fisher
never admits to doctoring the illustrations, even though everybody else
thinks he did.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
He won't let it die either, He keeps bringing it
back up, and then eventually there's some consequences for the guy.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Yeah, because Kep has always denied that he had drawn
these offensive examples of what we call it subliminal pornography,
so he still became somewhat toxic in this environment. Right,
he wasn't able to work with people in his ordinarily
routine ways, and he kept appealing over and over again
(42:27):
to that thing. We just mentioned the Cartoonist Society to say, Hey,
this Fisher guy is crazy.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
He is he trying to ruin me. Please do something.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
Take it to the ethics committee, which is a real
thing the Cartoonist had there, and they said, all right,
we're going to call Fisher to account for his behavior.
We cannot prove that he made the forgeries, but we
definitely know he circulated them. We also we think he's
(42:58):
up to something hinky because they found handwritten comments in
the borders of these alleged pornographic depictions, and it was
definitely ham Fisher's handwriting. So he gets his he gets
yelled at, essentially, right, the Cartoonist, the Society's board of Governor's.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Censures him more. There we go, Yeah, that's the right word. However, again,
maybe because he wouldn't let it go, it keeps coming
back up, and then there are more investigations that look
into it and do ultimately rule that he doctored these.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Yeah, and this doesn't have the happiest of endings. We're
on a real strange journey from just falling in love
with the word Peluka. But I would argue, knoweled that
there is a possibility of mental instability that may have
launched him on this strange crusade.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
Absolutely right, Yeah, yeah, crusade. I mean, that's a great
way of putting it. And on January twenty fourth, nineteen
fifty five, Fisher gets summoned to a special meeting of
the Society, the Cartoon Society's Board of Governors to hear
charges presented by the Ethics Committee, who charged Fisher with
doctoring the drawings and circulating the forgeries in a blatant
(44:14):
attempt to discredit and ruin CAP acts which were determined
to endanger the creative well being of not only CAP
but every cartoon. This is the stuff that has farther
reaching implications. It has to be nipped in the butt
here or else someone else could use these same tactics
to ruin others in the industry just because they have
(44:36):
a personal vendetta.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
It's kind of like deep fakes at the time. Absolutely yes,
And they're also saying, look, don't don't make us appear
to be a bunch of purved out James Joyce's that's it,
I promise it's so. Here is why we think there
may have been some sort of mental issues involved. On
(44:59):
December twenty seventh, nineteen fifty five, Ham and Ham, Fisher
purposely overdoses on pills and he dies as a result.
And this is the only time. This is how the
feud ends, because Fisher takes it to his grave. The
story of Joe Peluka continues a little bit afterwards. For
(45:21):
four years after Fisher expired, one of his assistants, mo
lef drew the strip, and he had been doing the
cartoonist version of ghost writing since the late nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Well, let's also recall that Fisher was accused right, not
really being able to draw that well in the first place.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
And that is the strange, fascinating and disturbing story behind
the Great Peluca feud.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
I really went some places, man, unexpected. Yeah, very much, Mike,
no doubt it. Really us have similar intersecting kind of
threads there. So huge thanks to research associate extraordinary Andrea
for this one. This was a real whot.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
Yeah, big, big thanks to our super producer Max Peluka Williams.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Big thanks to A. J.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
Bahamas, Jacobs and of course uh Jonathan. Strictly I was
gonna do a joke aka the Quist, but I'm not.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
I'm not in a bit of a peluca. No, No,
he's not big enough to be a pooch. There we go.
He's a Kazukas. He's a Kazukas. Definitely a gazuka.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Yeah, big, thanks to the roup. Dude's a ridiculous crime.
Thank you, folks so much for tuning in. Join us
in the future. We have, as always, some fresh baked
ridiculous history coming to you. No, Noel, can we bring
back the phrase poluca? Do you think we can just
start deploying it in like work calls and stuff.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
I think we should. We'll see a next time, folks.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. This is a Pollukaville episode. A
big thanks to our super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Remember Pellucaville. It wasn't that fancy at all. It was
like a burger hot dog kind of joint, very like
kind of monster themed. They were like, yeah, like I
don't know, like sci fi horror. It was this place
in the Avondale, State's neighborhood of Atlanta that Ben and
I both loved, like you know, chili suck aspe as
you stuck on a chili dog.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah. They had great pork burgers.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
They had way too many versions of milk shapes and
fruity drinks. That is none other than the legendary mister
Noel Brown.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
And that's my friend Ben, who is not a Pelukah
I know.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Oh, we're gonna have fun with this one. We got
We've got big Friday energy thanks to our research associate Andrea,
who not too long ago was rewatching pulp fiction and
fell in love with a word. Now we're all etymology
nerds here and we've all been in that situation where
(01:41):
a word just catches you and you got to know
everything about it. Noel Andrew was telling us when she
was watching Pulp Fiction, an amazing film, there was a
one liner, a throwaway line where someone says you looking
at something, friends, and the response is.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
You wait, my friend Poluca. Yeah, it's Vence talking to
Butch whose last name escapes me, played by John Travolta
and Bruce Willis, respectively. Bruce Willis is sort of a
(02:21):
a shamed boxer. He's meant he's known for taking dives.
Let's just say in the plot of the story, and
not to spoil a thirty year old movie at this point,
but three two to one spoiler, he doesn't take the
dive at one point, and he bets on himself. I think,
and he told I think he kills the guy actually,
if I'm not mistaken, and that leads to him being
(02:43):
on the s h I T list of one Marsalis Wallace,
who's kind of the big bad in the film. When
John Travolta's character Vence Vega encounters him at a bar
and he says, you look into some friend, that's what
the boxer guy says, and to which Travoltzay's character respond,
you ain't my friend, Peluka, referencing the fact that he
(03:04):
was a shamed, disgraced boxer who was known for having
no moral character. I think that's how I always took it.
He even follows it up with calling him punchee, which
is another fun old timey term that we use a lot,
referring to being kind of having big Friday energy.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Right right exactly now. Immediately r pal Andrea says, what
the heck is a pelluca? And we're paraphrasing you there, Andrea, because.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
It's a family show.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
But she said something like that, and she realized she
had seen this word before in a comic strip, Brenda Starr.
And this is where in this comic strip, specifically, someone
calls a bank Robert who's using her as a hostage,
a big polluca.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, something you could hear set in almost like a
Jersey admitted atlantic y. Yeah, big yeah, big Polluka cocking
out something like that, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
Oh. And let me correct that Brenda Starr was a
we're talking specifically about the film adaptation.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Starrin Broke Shields.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Of the original comic strip. And so now we learn
that the literal definition of polluka is synonymous with lout. However,
learning the origin of the word takes us on a
strange and unexpected journey, NOL. How would we set this up?
(04:31):
I guess we got to mention Joe Pluka comics.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Joe Pluca comics not to be confused with Bazooka Joe,
which is a bubblegum brand that contained a comic right
considered to be very low quality comics within those bubblegum rappers.
But Joe Pluka is a comic strip that debuted in
newspaper syndication I believe in nineteen thirty, while Brenda Starr
(04:55):
came out a decade later in June of nineteen forty.
So it made a sense that Star be jumping off
of that popularized term. I'm considering that the forties setting
of the strip. It also makes sense that Vince Vega
in pulp fiction would use that term as an insult
to Butch, Like I said, who was a disgraced boxer,
(05:16):
Because there's history there.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Yeah, Joe Peluka, just like Butch is a pugilist.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
The words it's new for me a boxer, really, that's
what that but isn't pugilism also like a concept that's
more referring to being overly aggressive perhaps.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
Yeah, Yeah, pugilist is anyone who fights with their hands,
got it?
Speaker 2 (05:40):
And pugilistic is an adjective that can refer to someone
who is can be more generalized as someone who is
like by nature aggressively belligerent and prone to fighting. Guard
dog to.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Jump in here real quick, because I want to see
if this is hot. Why Ben knows this one as well?
I only know that because of elder strolls.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Oh, that's interesting.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
There's there's like a there's I think it's a scar
on it, but it might be oblivion where there's there's
a there's a some like gonale that improved like on
on armed like damage or something like that.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Yeah, like a buff, Yeah, boxer's buff. And if you
do type in pugilistic and pugilism, it really does come
directly up as boxing. So you're one hundred percent never
heard that term used to refer to the actual sport.
So I learned something new today in addition to everything
else that we learned for today's least.
Speaker 1 (06:32):
Oh and sadly you know the reason. Maybe pugilist is
not as well known, even though it's a great word.
Is possibly because after a certain amount of traumatic brain injury,
it's going to be tough for the boxers to remember
specific words.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
And again the next insult that Vincent Lobbs is punchy,
which does refer to that condition that you're describing. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
So let's go to a pre interesting conversation about this.
From an exchange on Reddit, someone asked, is it possible
that Peluka just meant a tough guy? But after the
creation of the character Joe Pluka, it took on the
meaning bad boxer. It seems that even even for pretty
(07:21):
determined researchers, the origin of peluka was mysterious.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
That's right. The term did start appearing in print in
the early nineteen twenties and came to be used as
a stand in for a clumsy or unskilled boxer. Now,
Butcher and pulp Fiction isn't necessarily unskilled, but he is
one who has compromised his integrity as a sportsman in
favor of taking dives for organized criminals. And it's an
(07:46):
interesting kind of character arc because what sets off his
storyline in the film is him failing to do that
thing and in fact maybe being sick of it and
just you know, sick of being laying down, let's just say,
and he actually goes a bit too far and does
kill the guy, leading to one of the intersecting plot
lines of pulp fiction.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Like I was saying, mm hmm, yeah, and it's it's
always uh, I guess, heart wrenching to see someone whose
career is in decline.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
And our guy.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Was always and also ran he was never going to
be Muhammad Ali. Again, pulp Fiction is a great film
if you somehow have not seen it. Not all of
it aged super well, but there's there's high art to it.
So the idea of Joe Peluka in the comic strip
is that he is a champion boxer. He's really good.
(08:39):
Maybe the author thought it would be funny or cute
satirical to name a great to give a great boxer
a bad name, essentially Joe Klamzibasa, But maybe the word
had some other earlier meaning and it got transformed by
the popularity of this comic strip.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
And just really quickly to add, speaking of clumsy boxers,
this is a story that I wasn't super familiar with
and maybe one for another day. But there was a
former boxer by the name of it so aptly named
Eric Crumble, who is an American boxer former boxer who
is notable for his absolute horrific performance. He was considered,
(09:26):
at least in this bio that I'm reading, the most
prolific of American boxers in terms of consistent losses since
his debut in nineteen ninety. I love that his name
is Crumble. He just comes apart, right.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
What a backhanded way to describe that he's prolific losses.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
That's right. Yeah, And there's some good info on this
dude out there if you want to read more, So
that would be a quintessential Peluca is mister Eric Crumble.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
And Peluka gets further, He gets further embedded in the
zeitgeist with the creation of Popeye the sale Man.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Do check out our previous episode ONOS. We had a
good time and some big Friday energy on that one too.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Yeah, and this has the cartoon when it comes out,
adapting from the comic strip, has a theme song we
all know.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
The oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
The theme song has this line, I'm one tough gun
gush who hates shawsh.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
He's pop by the sailor man. I think it's funny
that line. It kind of changes if I'm not mistake
is you know, of course I fights through the finish
because I eats finished. And then there's different ones. But
this is one that I did not recall. But boy,
has this been living rent free in my head. I'm
one tough Kazukas who hates all pe Lucas. It's kind
of poetically brilliant rhyme scheme if you ask me, Gazukas
(10:46):
and Pelucas. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Also, we tried to figure out what a gazukas is.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
It is an unspecified.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Term like dad zooks, right, Like, it's sort of like
a non since word that gets its own kind of
various uses, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
In the nineteen twenties, apparently Gazuka's slangly meant an unspecified item,
a thingy or a gadget. So he's like, I'm one
tough do dad. Yeah, that hates Pelucas. Yeah that makes sense.
I get that as a stand in. Also, you know
what word is coming to mind from this era too
is galute.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Yeah yeah, big galutes. That's say, right, a clumsy, foolish
or silly person. There's also a sense of also a galute,
perhaps being a bit borish and.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Large, Yeah, a bit brutish, maybe not the brightest crayon
in the box. This also taps into a long standing,
hopefully friendly rivalry that existed back then and exists in
the modern day. Popeye is a navy guy. He's a sailorman,
and of course he would hate Joe Peluca, who is
(11:56):
an army dude, an army boxer.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Okay, okay, So it did make our researcher, Andrea wonder
if the word had only become a term for an
apt boxer in response to people that didn't like the
way Joe was represented in the comic strip. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Yeah, because Joe, like so many other comic strip characters,
reflected the era. He looked more and more like the
current heavyweight champ every time the comic strip was published,
and there was another heavyweight champ until Joe Lewis starts
to rise in the boxing ranks, the pugilism ranks, and
(12:37):
the artist of Joe Peluka said, oh, well, we have
to keep our pattern. We may need to turn Joe
Poluca into a black character white. It gets into a
little bit of cultural analysis, because white heavyweight champions represent
to a lot of people white male dominance at the time.
(12:59):
Peluca therefore a fictional representation of that. But then if
the world and culture recognizes there may soon be a
black heavyweight champ, they made the decision not to draw
Joe Poluca, not to transform him into a black character,
and so instead, maybe this is a speculation, the word
(13:22):
Peluca then became synonymous with not a champion boxer, but
a guy's not as.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
Good because wait, just as backtrack real quick, because the
character of Joe Peluca was a badass, right originally Yeah,
see okay, So it wouldn't necessarily have been something that
was intended at that point, right to use it as
a negative, Like he was presented sort of as like
a champion.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Yeah, and Joe Lewis is so good at what he
does in the ring that people started referring to his
opponents as the quote bum of the month. Everybody knew
they were going to get their bell rung. So the
simplest likelihood of Joe Poluka's effect on the word Poluka
as a phrase, which we're obviously all in love with
(14:08):
and bringing back it may have just been something where
new boxers entered the ring and people were trash talking, like,
look at this guy, who's he think he is the
next Joe Peluka.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
Look at him in his goose suits. That's for another day.
It can't be you. You know why it can't be you?
You know why? For sure? Sure, So this leads us
to the perhaps simplest explanation, it's only a matter of
time before we get to our pals at the Oxford
English Dictionary, which references a book from nineteen twenty called
(14:42):
Character Glimpses by Australian Albert Oris Cooper. It's use in
there is unrelated to boxing, and instead just refers to
a more generally idiotic, stupid, buffoonish, clumsy, perhaps the worst
thing of all, mediocre person.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
A stupid, clumsy, mediocre person. As you said, the specific
line you know we're referring to here is the following.
Alger just pen a ticket on that Peluca for parking again.
That fire plug that guy got increasingly southern in the south.
The quote right, so yeah, that's the quote that that
we're referencing. That first appears in prints, right Poluca, So
(15:28):
it also may have appeared in boxing publications in nineteen
twenty three. As far as we know. Uh, there's a
quote we'd love to give you about boxing from Pennsylvania's
Altuna Tribune.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Boy oh boy. Peluca is a new word, much used
lately to describe what was formerly called a hit out,
a setup, a sucker, a bowhunk, a pushover. All of
these words mean a very poor fighter. The origin of poluca, however,
is unknown unknown.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Uh so, okay, the author of that first attestation, that's
what we call it, the first time a word emerges
in print. The Australian guy that you mentioned earlier, Noel
Albert Horace Cooper, was a military man who was in
the service from nineteen sixteen to nineteen twenty. He came
(16:19):
back at the end of his service in London and
he was stationed in Bonn as part of the first
Infantry Division for about two years at the end of
the war. There may therefore be a military origin to
the use of poluca. So we know it had a
prior meaning, but it did not have necessarily the meaning
(16:42):
tough guy, so much as it had the meaning of
this guy thinks he's you know, hot hot potatoes, exactly
fresh beans.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
He thinks he's.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Fresh beans this guy, so it was probably used in
boxing before the creator of the character Joe Peluca.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Well, that would make sense. Yeah, I mean, it's not like,
you know, the dude that created that character just summoned
it from thin air. Comic strips, to your point, Ben,
were always meant to be a reflection of the zeitgeist
and of you know, what was going on at the time,
So he would have pulled from what he knew, I
would conjecture, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
Yeah, So Vincent Vega, therefore, is not not just pulling
dumb insults out of thin air. He is referring directly
to pugilism, because Vega is that there's always this like
subtext in pulp fiction that Vega is smarter than he presents.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
And also he's he drives a classic car. He addresses
of that era. He you know, obviously this is Quentin
Tarantino writing, and this dude's into all this stuff. But
Vincent Vega's character, in particular, his use of this word
kind of represents that old timey sensibility that he yes.
Speaker 3 (18:00):
If I could jump in here real quick. Actually, my
counter will always be what happens to Vincent Vega later
in the movie when he interacts with Bruce Willis, which
is probably the dumbest thing he could possibly do. And
I'll leave it at that, so I don't spoil it.
But I do also want to point at the whole
fact that I compared Pull Fiction to Finnigan's Wake just
to watch.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Ben get angry. I haven't read finnigans Wake.
Speaker 3 (18:21):
Wake infamously starts out in the same place.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Right, That's excellent an observation, Max. But we'll let me
save you some time.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
I remember you got a bone to pick with the shit.
Speaker 1 (18:31):
I don't think Jeans Joyce read Finnigan's way. That's fair
if we're being honest, all right, Sorry James.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Anyway, some of the guy that was really into farting, yes, yeah,
took out that episode on James Joyce. That one's PG. Eighteen.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
I mean, you know, we're very friendly, inclusive people in
real life. We don't joy keep shaming, but boy he
was on one.
Speaker 2 (18:55):
Yeah, I know, king shaming, but like just the letters, boy,
oh boy, and make a sailor blush.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
We beaped every profanity in that episode, but we have
an internal like rating that we use here. iHeart our service.
That just kind of says like you know, flag stuff
like you know, when we talk about like wars and
stuff like that will flag like you know, meetings like that.
Sexual content was like highest level possible for that episode.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
We may have set a deep record for that one. Anyway,
we just want to we just want to do the
one line while we're here because we have such.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
A bone to pick. Give it to us.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
Okay, we're back. We took some time, all fair just
to find this. We're not going to give you the
whole thing. You're gonna have to listen to the episode.
But he does say things like, and he's talking to
the love of his life.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
He says, you.
Speaker 1 (19:40):
Had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and
I have fed them out of you. Big fat fellows,
long windy ones, quick little Mary cracks, a lot of tidy,
naughty little fartings. Indeed, in a long gush from your hole.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
You've made this episode. Our race is now now the
children can't enjoy. It's for literal I know it.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
It is from literagure, come from the Peluka, get tricked
into the farts.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Uh, it's crazy though, what we're saying, what we're talking
about now again, I love falling for one specific word.
Why are people familiar with some comic characters of Yesteryear
but not Joe Peluca. Apparently it comes down to a
feud between two creators. The creator of Joe Peluka is
(20:33):
a guy. I know you love this name. No Hammond, ham.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Fisher, ham Fisher, ham Fisher. It's good. I think I
said off area. That was one of the most like
thirties forties names. Ever. It's me ham Fisher. I can
just imagine them like roasting a bean the train yard.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
I'm picturing, yeah, I love it, with a stick and bindle.
I'm also picturing, like the the weirdest job in a
foregone age.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
I'm a Fisherman of Ham, Fisher of Ham. Yes, this
was my.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Father, my father's father before him.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Weather rivers overflow with steamed hams.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yes, steamed hams. Al Cap is the guy who beefs
up with ham Fisher. Al Cap created the comic strip
Oh beefs Up? I didn't.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
Yeah, al Cap beats up with Ham beating up with Ham.
That should be the name of the book about There
should be a book.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Al Cap is the creator of another comic strip called
Lil Abner.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
You've heard of that one. I mean that is a
lot of times used as a general stand in. What's
that term ben for old timey comic strip?
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like metotomy for it. Right. Yeah,
So we we know that at the peak of their
careers in the nineteen fifties, these guys are legit superstars.
Ol cap is read by ninety million reader. He makes
five hundred thousand US dollars a year. Can we do
(22:04):
an inflation calculator on that?
Speaker 2 (22:07):
We must. That's a b preak there and boob dude.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
So five hundred thousand dollars in the nineteen fifties is
equivalent to four million US dollars today. Inflation is just crazy, man,
This guy is a serious artist. He is known as
is his work at least is known. This may not
well have been the age of like celebrity creators quite
as much. You know, he probably wasn't as known, but
(22:36):
his characters certainly were. Yeah, now, help out our buddy
the hemman. Yes, ham Fisher, that's right. Well, you know what,
let's just hear from an expert R. C. Harvey of
the Comics Journal, who tells the delightful meet cute story
one version of it anyway, we're going to get to
that here. How the two matt was a story they
(22:56):
both agreed on.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
Caps swung his left leg out sideways, almost dragging it
forward for each step, and his stride had a practiced rhythm,
a rolling gait punctuated by a profound dip every time
he transferred his weight to his left leg, the wooden one.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
This just got interesting, by the way.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
That's all right. Yeah, it is a little bit of
a pimpwalk, and you want to keep on, keep it,
keep it wrong. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
But it wasn't the lurch that attracted the attention of
the man in the limousines so much as it was
the sheaf of paper in a blue wrapper that the
tottering stroller had tucked under his arm.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Good stuff. The man in his limousine was a cartoonist,
and he thought he recognized the blue wrapping paper it was,
he believed, the paper his syndicate used to wrap rejected
artwork in when returning it to hapless supplicants.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
Pull up alongside that fellow, the man said to his chauffeur,
And he turned to the woman seated next to him
and said, I bet that guy is a cartoonist.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
The subject of this wager. The young man rolling along
the sidewalk on Eighth Avenue near Columbus Circle was a
somewhat shabby specimen who, despite the chill of the spring day,
was hatless and nearly coatless. But he didn't need a hat.
He had a shaggy mop of thick black hair. He
had only been in New York for a few weeks,
(24:14):
and the six dollars he'd arrived with had long since evaporated.
If it had not been for the kindness of his landlady,
who's boundless faith in her tenant's artistic skill prompted her
to stake him to his assault on the citadels of
the mass media, he would have been back in his
native Boston. Basically paraphrasing, his landlord let him stay in
(24:37):
her attic without paying rent, and sometimes she would give
him some pocket money so he could eat one hundred percent.
And this is such beautiful language, but it goes on
a bit, So why don't we just kind of sum
up what happened? This is essentially a somewhat hyperbolic kind
of myth making kind of stuff. In this particular version
(24:57):
of the story, ham Fisher is kind of painted as
the saviors of young al Cap and offers him a job.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Yeah yeah, yeah, not known as al Cap yet.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
This kid is Alfred G. Kaplan.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
And when this fancy pants dude says hey like a guy,
stops his limousine and says, I bet my sister, you're
a cartoonist?
Speaker 2 (25:20):
Are you hell? What day is in Christmas Day? Set? Exactly?
Speaker 1 (25:25):
Fish me the finest time in all of Harlem. So
he had sold a few cartoons our buddy Alfred in
New York and Boston, but he wasn't doing it full time.
It was kind of catches catch can where you still
have to have a day job.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Ben Can I just say you got pretty close Nail
in the neighborhood. We're in the Upper West Side, which
is you know, the little past Harlem. Thank you, sir,
we know that.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
A year prior to this, I love what you said
about it being a meek you. A year prior to
this moment, al had been in New York and he
was he got one of the golden geese of a
cartoonist at the time, a syndicated cartoon feature There's about
a pompous young jerk, a blowhard. But he didn't love it.
(26:13):
A real galute, a real poluca, a real peluca.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
So he gave it up and he went back to Boston.
And it's a good thing he did, because he had
just gotten married and that's not the ideal long distance relationship.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Visit, that's right. So six months later he gets back
to the Big Apple to give it another go. At
this point, we are squarely in the midst of the
Great Depression. They didn't call it that at the time.
As you point out Off and Ben, fourteen million folks
were out of work in New York City. There were breadlines,
nearly a million jobless, with twenty nine New Yorkers potentially
(26:49):
dying of starvation every single year. But this fancy pants,
this high falutin character, riding around isolated from the horrors
of of New York City life behind the you know,
the protective glass of his limo, offered this hapless young
fellow ten dollars to do some drawings for him and
(27:11):
Kaplan or al CAPPIs he would later sign himself. Agreed,
of course.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Yeah, I mean that's such a flex Hello from my limousine,
you pull cartoonist, here's a tetta.
Speaker 2 (27:24):
It was a big deal when he realized who it
was because this is a guy that was known, Like
to my point, earlier, the average comic strip reader might
not have known who this guy was. But this dude
is a comic writer artist. He knows who the big
players are, and when he realizes this, it's a big
revelation for him.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
One hundred percent. Yeah. So, initially they have a pretty
good relationship, you could even say mentor mentee. But by
the nineteen fifties they have been feuding for quite some time.
They had their own versions of the meeting story, and
(28:02):
these two versions began to increasingly diverge. McLean's magazine was
very interested in this, and on April first, nineteen fifty
they published both cartoonist version of the story.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Yeah, they sure knew. The version that we ever counted
as far is a little bit of a combo deal, right, Yeah,
so Ham says from his account, Ham Fisher says exactly
what we had described earlier.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
He agrees with the loose order of operations, but he
also says he also embellishes a bit on his own behalf.
He says, Look, I invited him for lunch in my limo.
I didn't tell him my name. I asked him what's
your favorite comic strip? And he said Joe Peluka. And
(28:56):
then eventually, when they went back to his place for lunch,
Cap sees a portrait inscribed to Ham and he goes,
why it's you. You are Ham Fisher. He begged me
for a job. I had an assistant. I didn't know
if I could afford another wink, very self aggrandized.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Yeah, come give.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Us just like a few more details.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
On this guy seems to think quite highly of himself.
Let's see, I took pity on him and gave him
a job lettering and inking. Many months later, I was
going on a week's vacation. Cap came up just as
I was leaving and demanded a fifty dollars a week raise.
I sneered that I wouldn't be able to go away
if he refused to work. I blew up. I fired
him and took the work with me.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
And then he says, you know, he gets back from
vacation and he says, and Cap just kept calling me
begging for his job back. I got him a job
with the United Feature Syndicate and he started some kind
of hillbilly' strip called loel Abner. It was so similar
(29:59):
to the hill Billies I created in Joe Peluka. I
protested to the syndicate. Cap apologized and said he would
change it, and he never did.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
Basically, I mean, to be fair, you can't really own
Hillbillies as a concept. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, and
you give the people what they are. If the Hillbilly
strips are doing well, you give them Hillbillies.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
And so we go to Again. It's wild that this
is published at the same time in the same magazine.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
It's confusing though, too, because like later we see another
statement from Fisher where he kind of contradicts what was
purported to be a statement from him in the first place,
Like it wasn't it him meant to have said that
he took six weeks vacation. I'm confused because then he
later has to say, I never took six weeks vacation
in my life. Yeah, it's it's like that.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
Oh gosh, it's it's like that interview with Rick James
in The Chappelle Show where he says he never messed
with the couch and then he immediately he says, yeah,
messed up his couch to keep him lying. Yeah, there
is some self contradiction. Absolutely, Cap Fire's back, and he says, look,
Cam Fisher's story about picking me up in his car
(31:13):
after accosting me in New York.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Street is truthy. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. He is absolutely
galled by the implication that he was hired as a letturer,
because that was what considered I think, a more lowly position,
or like an entry level position, and he said, no,
I was hired as an artist. I was just as
skilled as anyone else, you know, working for the publication. Uh,
(31:37):
and that is what I was brought in to do.
He then gets real personal, saying that Fisher is himself
a fraud. He's not an artist at all. He's an
idea man and he cannot draw it all these except
for a few simple chalk talk So I love that tricks.
So when he says he took the drawings with him,
it's a pathetic claim. I never told him Joe Peluka
(32:01):
was my favorite strip. It's the kind of strip I deplore,
the glorification of punches and brutishness. Wow, what a they're
so bad?
Speaker 1 (32:19):
He says, I was making nineteen bucks a week, and
then later I'll set the record that too, Yeah, twenty
two bucks a week, while I was working for Fisher,
and he says, I drew all of his Sunday pages.
I created all of the characters. I wrote every line.
And that time he told you guys, he went on
a vacation. He wasn't gone for one week, he was
(32:41):
gone for six. He didn't leave me any money. We
had to live on what my wife was making, and
so I whipped up Lil Abner with my free time. Basically,
I sold the cartoon to United Features Syndicate. And that
part where he says he got me a job with
United is the part I am most bitter about. When
he found out I was with United, he threatened to
(33:03):
sue for three years. He tried everything to get me fired.
These guys hate.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Each other, they really do at this point. Yeah, it's
kind of a I mean rip by the way Brian
Wilson with the Beach Boys such of who I think
we all love and respect and meyer everything he brought
to music production, you know, songwriting, an absolute legend of
an individual who beefed openly with Mike Love of the
(33:29):
Beach Boys, who claimed that they wrote a lot of
those songs together. They suit each other. It was a
very similar rivalry with a lot of he said. He said, potential,
you know, revisionist history. There. I am team Brian Wilson
all the way. Mike Love I find to be insufferable.
Even when he was asked about Brian's passing, he made
it about him and immediately said, all these brilliant songs
(33:51):
we co created, no thanks.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
I mean, Brian Wilson just was a prophet in the world.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Music, out of the universe. I mean, I can't unbelievable,
especially with the hormone. We should do an episode on Brian.
You're absolutely right, and there is I don't typically like biopics,
but there is a film called I Believe, Love and
Mercy that is about Brian Wilson and it shows two
eras of his life. It's played by John Cusack and
the older and oh gosh, the kid who plays the
(34:21):
Preacher and there will be blood whose name is totally
escaping me. Paul Dana plays the younger Brian Wilson, and
I really love it. It's very artistically done and not
just like kind of a glaze fest like some of
these other biopics.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Yeah, speaking of glaze fest and being wankish. Being wakish,
Fisher fires back and says, I've never had six weeks
vacation in my life.
Speaker 2 (34:47):
Yeah. That's the weirdest part because he the way it's
attributed in the publication, it made it sound like he
was saying while I was away on vacation, this stuff transpired.
So it may well be some creative license on the
part of the folks were counting these stories as well,
I think is getting Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:04):
Yeah, and so Hamm is saying, look, when this al
guy worked for me, I never had more than a
week of vacation. He says, I'm amazed at caps effrontry.
His entire statement is false, and he says he's grossly
exaggerating this stuff, saying that I sued him, I made
a complaint because he was spreading this lie that he
(35:26):
created some of the Joe Peluca sequences. And he says
ultimately that company apologized to him when he when he
launched that complaint. And Noel, we were talking a little
bit about this offline. There there's a lot of back
and forth. We've given you sort of the broad strokes
(35:46):
of what happens. But speaking of strokes, there's there's a
saucy that we just have to share true scandal and
I think it's a real good way to Cap to
al Cap. This one nice.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Yeah, yeah, it involves I don't know, man, it reminds
me of or at least in the conspiracy angle of
the what we're gonna get to in the discussion of
what actually happened those rogue Disney artists that like snuck
penises and the like Loyal made arts and like some
of those like you know, things that are real by
the way that they have been removed from a lot
of the reissue versions, streaming versions, But there definitely were
(36:24):
some naughty bits hidden in some Disney animations, and this
story involves some very naughty bits printed uh in the
lit l Abner cartoon.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
That Disney stuff is an excellent comparison, all right. You
need to know that these guys are taking shots at
each other in their work. They are mocking each other
through the characters that they create and through the situations
those characters find themselves in. So they are again like
(36:56):
much slightly petty stuff getting hardcore dude fish relating Fisher
gets plastic surgery, and so Cap makes fun of him
in his comic, and they're constantly just just taking shots
at the bow of each other, and Fisher will not
stop talking trash. This is where we go to an
(37:19):
excellent observation by Morris Weiss, or Weiss who was interviewed
in the Comic Journal we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Fisher won't stop going on about the potential plagiarism, the
idea that Cap stole his characters. He just got real
personal and mudslingy and raving about, according to Weiss, Caps
being a sex maniac. Right, and this notion he put
out there in the public that he was hiding pornographic
(37:51):
images and plain sight in his little Abner cartoons. And
so now we've got a full blown like censorship witch hunt, right,
I mean truly a moral panic, which wouldn't you say
to a degree one hundred percent?
Speaker 1 (38:05):
Man, this is the He is trying so hard to
come off as the wronged party, but he sounds increasingly deluded. Yeah, yeah,
he said, great things are happening to me now. The
detective that al Cap had following me to get dirt
on me, well, that detective is now working for me.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
What And there's a cover story in Time magazine that
blows the lid off of this whole thing. They said
that Fisher had certain panels of Little Labner enlarged and
zoomed in on circled graphic details in red that he
believed were hidden or believed whatever, or was just being
a crazy person pornographic subliminal messages. I'm not just the
(38:48):
Oh my god, it's just he's like, look at the nose. Really,
think about the note, Think about what else looks like
you nose, y'all. And he distributed to editors of the
newspapers that were carrying the strips like he is on
a slow and burn, scorched earth campaign against this dude.
And he is saying that there's subliminal pornography designed to
undermine the youth of the nation and urges the newspaper
(39:11):
editors to drop caps cartoon entirely.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
And keep in mind, even though he may be behaving
a bit irrationally, he is a big deal himself. He's
not just some guy writing to these papers. And in
the strip examples that he provides and disseminates, he says, quote,
this insane perverted pornography is from Little Abner. Yes, this
is what al capp has perpetrated for fifteen years. Are
(39:37):
the unsuspecting editors of American newspapers. Now normally right in
an attempt to create a moral panic, people will generally
ignore a lot of this stuff. But because we're in
the dawn of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, and because
(39:58):
comic books are increased seemly targets of criticism, and as
you said, all the safety of the children, this is assigned.
This problem is assigned to the Joint Committee on Comics.
They're the folks who decide whether or not to censor comics.
And so now the idea is that ham Fisher has
(40:21):
escalated this Poluka argument so much so that he's not
just attacking his former protegee al Capp, he may have
consequences for the entire industry of comics.
Speaker 2 (40:33):
Well, I mean he he. There's a committee assembled, the
Joint Joint Committee from I believe the Cartoonist Society, that
investigates this stuff and determines that the images that were
being submitted to them had been doctored or it's implied.
It's very much. It says here in the in the
(40:53):
findings of the report from Raymond. Alex Raymond, the president
at the time of the Cartoon Society, I am convinced
after seeing the photostats reproduced in the report of the
Joint Committee, compared with the original drawings of Lil Abner
from which the photostats were made. That someone distorted, cropped, faked,
wrongfully emphasized, and twisted your material during the process of
(41:15):
reproduction to make it appear pornographic. Such machinations could cause
the work of any contemporary artist to appear erotic, but
Fisher never copped to it. So make of that what
you will. But it sure seems like this dude was
getting increasingly unhinged and bitter, and it's exactly the kind
of thing someone would do in that state, right.
Speaker 1 (41:38):
Right, exactly, And this is where we see you know,
we see echoes even now today with famous celebrity beefs. Right.
And the story goes on that we know that Fisher
never admits to doctoring the illustrations, even though everybody else
thinks he did.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
He won't let it die either, He keeps bringing it
back up, and then eventually there's some consequences for the guy.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Yeah, because Kep has always denied that he had drawn
these offensive examples of what we call it subliminal pornography,
so he still became somewhat toxic in this environment. Right,
he wasn't able to work with people in his ordinarily
routine ways, and he kept appealing over and over again
(42:27):
to that thing. We just mentioned the Cartoonist Society to say, Hey,
this Fisher guy is crazy.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
He is he trying to ruin me. Please do something.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
Take it to the ethics committee, which is a real
thing the Cartoonist had there, and they said, all right,
we're going to call Fisher to account for his behavior.
We cannot prove that he made the forgeries, but we
definitely know he circulated them. We also we think he's
(42:58):
up to something hinky because they found handwritten comments in
the borders of these alleged pornographic depictions, and it was
definitely ham Fisher's handwriting. So he gets his he gets
yelled at, essentially, right, the Cartoonist, the Society's board of Governor's.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Censures him more. There we go, Yeah, that's the right word. However, again,
maybe because he wouldn't let it go, it keeps coming
back up, and then there are more investigations that look
into it and do ultimately rule that he doctored these.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Yeah, and this doesn't have the happiest of endings. We're
on a real strange journey from just falling in love
with the word Peluka. But I would argue, knoweled that
there is a possibility of mental instability that may have
launched him on this strange crusade.
Speaker 2 (43:53):
Absolutely right, Yeah, yeah, crusade. I mean, that's a great
way of putting it. And on January twenty fourth, nineteen
fifty five, Fisher gets summoned to a special meeting of
the Society, the Cartoon Society's Board of Governors to hear
charges presented by the Ethics Committee, who charged Fisher with
doctoring the drawings and circulating the forgeries in a blatant
(44:14):
attempt to discredit and ruin CAP acts which were determined
to endanger the creative well being of not only CAP
but every cartoon. This is the stuff that has farther
reaching implications. It has to be nipped in the butt
here or else someone else could use these same tactics
to ruin others in the industry just because they have
(44:36):
a personal vendetta.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
It's kind of like deep fakes at the time. Absolutely yes,
And they're also saying, look, don't don't make us appear
to be a bunch of purved out James Joyce's that's it,
I promise it's so. Here is why we think there
may have been some sort of mental issues involved. On
(44:59):
December twenty seventh, nineteen fifty five, Ham and Ham, Fisher
purposely overdoses on pills and he dies as a result.
And this is the only time. This is how the
feud ends, because Fisher takes it to his grave. The
story of Joe Peluka continues a little bit afterwards. For
(45:21):
four years after Fisher expired, one of his assistants, mo
lef drew the strip, and he had been doing the
cartoonist version of ghost writing since the late nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Well, let's also recall that Fisher was accused right, not
really being able to draw that well in the first place.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
And that is the strange, fascinating and disturbing story behind
the Great Peluca feud.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
I really went some places, man, unexpected. Yeah, very much, Mike,
no doubt it. Really us have similar intersecting kind of
threads there. So huge thanks to research associate extraordinary Andrea
for this one. This was a real whot.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
Yeah, big, big thanks to our super producer Max Peluka Williams.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
Big thanks to A. J.
Speaker 1 (46:16):
Bahamas, Jacobs and of course uh Jonathan. Strictly I was
gonna do a joke aka the Quist, but I'm not.
Speaker 2 (46:25):
I'm not in a bit of a peluca. No, No,
he's not big enough to be a pooch. There we go.
He's a Kazukas. He's a Kazukas. Definitely a gazuka.
Speaker 1 (46:37):
Yeah, big, thanks to the roup. Dude's a ridiculous crime.
Thank you, folks so much for tuning in. Join us
in the future. We have, as always, some fresh baked
ridiculous history coming to you. No, Noel, can we bring
back the phrase poluca? Do you think we can just
start deploying it in like work calls and stuff.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
I think we should. We'll see a next time, folks.
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Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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