Do you know that feeling? For weeks, months, even years on end you can walk through life and something really small and tiny is niggling away at you every once in a while that is completely incongruous, doesn’t matter much, but keeps you slightly off centre, yet you can’t quite put a finger on it why.Then all of sudden somebody comes along and writes a little piece that makes it all fall into place and helps identify the itch that’s been troubling you without you really ever noticing.
And life is good again. Till the next time.
This was the case with me when I read Fústar’s excellent research into Count Curly Wee, a daily comic strip that appears in the Irish Independent for as long as I can remember…. well ever since I moved to Ireland ten years ago.
Humour generally doesn’t age well. (When was the last time you had a knee slappingly funny night while watching a Shakespeare comedy? Or split your sides looking at a Punch cartoon?) Count Curly Wee is quite obviously from a different epoch. It’s hard to believe that its humour was ever considered remotely funny. The drawings aren’t hot either. No-one ever reads it or generally talks about it. It has no admirers and there are no fannish websites about it. (Surely the sign that it simply doesn’t matter at all to anyone!)
Yet, the Indo prints it day in and day out.
And every once in a while I had my WTF moments that didn’t last long and didn’t upset me too much, yet kept niggling at me.
And now Fústar reveals all anyone never needed to know about the strip. And the world is a better place for it.
14 comments:
I agree. I was of course being facetious when I said that all humour ages badly, but most ages worse than other forms of entertainment as humour is very much a product of its time. Most of the comedians you mentioned also make me laugh though I could never get into Charlie Chaplin. And Marx Brothers on film = good. Groucho Marx on radio = excruciating.
From the Curly Wee stories that I've read, I have to admit that humour is conspicuous by its absence. Most of the stories have a moral, and this kind of moralising in mega doses can be off-putting. I suppose it's difficult to fault anyone who dislikes goody-goody Curly Wee. Notwithstanding all this, I do love Curly Wee stories.
See my posting
Hello, Anyone with annual issues of Curly Wee to sell or barter?
curly wee and all the other lovable characters of Fur and Feather land delighted me when I was a child and they delight me now I'm sixty and I shall think me senile and demented if and when I become impervious to the charm and substnce of Maud Budden's and Clibborn's magic
Count Curly Wee,Inspector Goat ,Mr.Fox, Ginger Dick- lame humour or not bad verse or worse. I do not care. I loved the strip.It was part of my growing up experience in the Nilgiris.
Philip Abraham
11:33
Iused to read 'Curly Wee and Gussy Goose' in Fur and Feather town in the Liverpool Echo in the 1950's. As a child I was very upset by a couple of things that happened to Cuthbert Colt in the annuals. He was a horse in school uniform -blazer and cap. In one he got his hoof caught in the points while crossing a railway line. In another, they were holidaying on an island when a volcano blew up and lave streamed down towards them. I was pretty young, and I still recall them as horrific images today. :-)
Hmmmm-Say what you like, we all love and remember the Curly Wee strip! And I still laugh at Punch cartoons and the rest, too.
Is it not easy to see that CW sends up a lot of the moers of its day-don't take it so literally-some of the verses are a delight!
I have been a Curly Wee fan frommy childhood.The Mail of Madas was publishing it and after some time it reproduced the older ones.I had cut,asted and saved a lot of them which I have scanned and put in CDs now.I want to complete my collection.I would like to hear from other Curly Wee fans to pbkhema@gmail.com
PBKrishnamurthy
Chennai
India
Hello, I remember my Dad reading me a book-sized comic about Count Curly Wee. It made such an impression on me and it was so exciting. All about Count Curly Wee (good) and the nasty weasels (evil) It was a political satire I suppose, rigged, elections, lots of night pictures and torch light. I would love to find out more about this comic. Any ideas??
Used to read these when I was in primary school! There was a really interesting one where he had a gun, wore a trench-coat, flying a plane wearing a leather helmet and goggles and catching spies. Always wonder if he was the inspiration for Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso..
further to my earlier post I have improved my collection from the google news archives. I am willing to share.Yo complete the collection I want 3 episodes of the first artist and 1 to 480 of the second artist.I need help in fetting the strips
I read the strip as a child growing up in Capetown.It was in the early 50’s. At the time the recently elected Nationalist government was legislating Apartheid into law. My older brother decided that I (aged about 11) ought to learn about Parliamentary procedure and the mechanics of government. As a result he turned the house into a series of parliamentary constituencies and election were held, using a pinball machine as the mechanism for voting in each constituency.
For this purpose we needed two political parties. Mine was the Fur and Feather party and his the SLP, or Shakespeare Literary Party. Since the number of characters in the FFP were limited by the number of characters in the strip and the SLP had the whole of Shakespeare’s plays to draw upon I invariably lost the election as he would simply have so many invented constituencies which he would win, unapposed! This meant that I was permanently in opposition and he could pass legislation in the manner of the Apartheid government.
The effect was that he permanently controlled our home and I learned everything there was to know about parliamentary at age 11. It also gave me a life long hatred of Apartheid and totalitarian government. One of the reasons why I have lived in the UK for the last 60 years.
Parliamentary procedure !
Hello Irish people, count curly wee was the stupidest cartoon from Irish Newspaper.
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