JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

By John Ruch

© 2006

 

“Stupid Question” Resurrection: Questioning the Answer-Men and Why Poor People Wear Barrels

 

            As you can see elsewhere on this site, for several years I wrote an answer-man column called “Stupid Question.” I have many vivid memories of triumphantly finding an answer I was fearful I never would, from talking to the widow of the “Murphy’s Law” Murphy to the nut in India who still badgers me with his supposed proof that he’s squared the circle.

            But what I really remember are my failures, the stumpers that stumped me. Part of that’s my perfectionist nature, but mostly it’s because my readers asked excellent questions, and I usually wanted to know the answer just as badly myself.

            Complete, tidy answers are not the stuff of drama, and many have already faded from my mind. I sometimes have to go back and consult my own columns as a reference work. But I can probably recite all the questions I failed to answer off the top of my head—especially the ones where it seems likely an actual answer lurks out there somewhere. They haunt me to this day, and I find myself still subconsciously attuned to them, filtering everything I read for some new clue.

            I’m still convinced I was one missed phone call away from nailing down the definitive origin of the phrase “the whole nine yards.” Things like that will bother me forever.1

            Time was often my enemy. A little-known fact about “Stupid Question” is that I didn’t research various questions and then print the one I could answer that week, as many people presumed. I did them sequentially. I either found an answer within seven days (in practice, more like four or five business days), or I had to admit defeat. My friends sometimes suggested I should advertise the insane, reality-show rigor of this practice, which they found at times astonishing. I thought it was an interesting experiment; what’s astonishing is how much you can find in a mere week of truly devoted looking.

            The most vexing unanswered question was also the first one to stump me. In the Oct. 22, 1998 column, Charles Cody asked, “Where did the image of a poor person wearing a barrel originate?”

            This seemed like it would be an eminently answerable question. And yet, for starters, I couldn’t even find an image of a poor person wearing a barrel. It was six months after the column ran that I finally saw one. Nor could I even remember specifically where I had ever seen that deceptively familiar image.

            As I have mulled this question over again recently, for reasons we’ll get into below, I can see how my very tight time limit led to some strategic errors. For example, it suddenly popped into my head that I’m pretty sure barrel-wearing was a gag on the old TV show “Hee Haw.” I don’t think that’s germane anyhow, but it shows that my memory was affected by the rush to find hard data, rather than leisurely speculation. More significantly, I noted that I hewed closely to the wording of the question, seeking “a poor person” wearing a barrel. But this time around, with about six weeks to chew things over, it occurred to me that the image more specifically connotes a broke person—someone who lost everything they once had. The distinction is subtle, but I think it’s key in tying things together.

            At any rate, in the original column and three updates over the next six months, I was able to pull together various tidbits, though their connection still eluded me. I tracked the wearing of barrels as a punishment, both for 17th century European drunks and Civil War POWs. I recalled the use of the image in a 1941 cartoon featuring stripper Sally Rand and comedian Harpo Marx. And, thanks to a friend, I finally found images of poor people in barrels—editorial cartoons in 1949 issues of a New York Communist newspaper.

            There things stood for seven years. Then, last month, things came full circle. Charles Cody e-mailed me again—this time, with what may be the answer to his own question.

            He directed to me to the eclectic Web site of Mikael Uhlin, where the origin of the image is attributed to newspaper cartoonist Will B. Johnstone. His cartoons used the image in the form of an archetypical fleeced taxpayer (typically identified by “taxpayer” written on the barrel).  Uhlin’s site is a marvel of quality research about an unlikely collection of pop-culture icons; in this case, he was investigating Johnstone in relation to the Marx Brothers, for whom Johnstone did much writing, both on stage and screen.

            From about the mid-1920s to the early 1940s, Johnstone was a cartoonist for the New York World (later merged into the World-Telegram, and now defunct), creating a (usually) multi-panel series of gags typically based on a “news item.”

            We can’t say for sure that Johnstone invented the person-in-a-barrel image, but he apparently was credited with doing so in his lifetime. Johnstone’s obituary in the Feb. 7, 1944 rival New York Times describes “the unfortunate taxpayer, a scrawny little chap clad in a barrel held up by suspenders” as “one of the artist’s pet creations.” And a New York Times editorial the following day mourning Johnstone remarked, “His plucked and pathetic little taxpayer, reduced to a barrel for clothing, seemed somehow to symbolize us all.”

            Johnstone was apparently proud of the creation himself. On Uhlin’s Web site, Johnstone’s great-granddaughter, Margaret Farrell, reports that one of the original “taxpayer” cartoons hung on the wall of Johnstone’s home.

            It’s still unclear when precisely his “taxpayer” first appeared and what inspired an image that is not really obvious or intuitive.2

            I recently looked at 70 or so of Johnstone’s World cartoons from 1925 to 1931 on microfilm. Shades of “Stupid Question” days, I was working under the gun of a distant university library’s summer hours with a collection that was incomplete and disorganized. Nonetheless, there was no barrel-wearing nor recurring characters in any of the cartoons, making me suspect it was a later introduction in the World-Telegram days.

            The only barrels in the cartoons were in jokes about Prohibition. The closest to one being worn was a sailor using one as a strapped-on drum, beating it with empty booze bottles, in a Prohibition-razzing parody of “The Spirit of ’76.”

            There was one interesting image that may be a prelude—or not. An Oct. 30, 1929 cartoon in the wake of the stock market crash depicted a rich man reduced to wearing an advertising sandwich board to make money. The man was still wearing his fur coat, top hat, gloves and cane. It’s not the same as wearing a barrel, but it seems like a possible foreshadow.

            Johnstone’s descendants still have boxes of his original cartoons and his journals, but so far have found no indication of his inspiration.3 Farrell told me that, according to her great-uncle, Johnstone was interested in the Civil War, so it’s possible (if unlikely) that he was familiar with those barrel-wearing punishments.

            Obviously, a full review of newspaper archives and of Johnstone’s original materials is required to try to nail down all the details. But at least we have something that, after all these years, approximates an answer.

            It’s interesting to see that I at least had tracked the image to New York editorial cartoons. I even had a Marx Brothers connection; I don’t think Johnstone had anything to do with that particular Harpo Marx cartoon, but if I had doggedly investigated the Marx Brothers, I might have come across Johnstone and his history. I also could have looked at other New York papers for the image. And, if I had realized the importance of being broke as opposed to merely poor, I likely would have focused more on the Depression era.

            Frankly, finding Johnstone would still have been sheer luck. But I have to recognize mental errors that prevented me from refining my search into something more cohesive. Another part of my rigor in the early days of “Stupid Question” was to be entirely empirical, just grabbing and assembling data with little regard for hunches. That was a mistake, particularly in the realm of cultural artifacts, which usually follow only their own logic. Thus, for example, I obsessed with the sheer triumph of finding the image in a New York cartoon, as opposed to viewing New York newspapers as a possible hunting ground for the answer. It’s a mistake I later corrected.

            What would shock anyone under 30 is that I did all my fact-grabbing on library bookshelves, not on the Internet. I started writing “Stupid Question” in the early days of the Web, before it reached its critical mass of mainstream participation—and well before today’s still-peaking mass of subcultural and obscure participation that is putting virtually every oddity since at least 1995 online. Perhaps more significant than the answer to any particular “Stupid Question” is the column’s context as a case study in the research revolution. Just the ability to pull off a one-week deadline is an artifact of the new age.

            After all, the reason we now have an answer of sorts to the barrel-wearing question is because of the Internet. Johnstone’s connection to the image is still ultra-obscure, producing about three search-engine hits—non-existent in Web terms. But I would’ve found it nonetheless, and had an answer within minutes instead of years.

            The Johnstone material online is relatively new. But even a few months ago, I could have assembled the material it took me months to gather in 1998-1999 within minutes online. Various sites will now give you information on the Civil War barrel-wearing, complete with pictures. I found out about it totally by accident, by flipping through a book in the gift shop of a faux historical village.

            So, hooray for the Internet, eh? Well, sure. Look, I was still using card catalogues as a college freshman. Now I’m writing this to a server in Montana and hoping it will be indexed to the world by a bot in California. I have researched live without a ’Net. I’m in the cheering section.

            But as someone who went through the revolution, specific problems are also apparent to me. Just as I saw spell-checkers leaving people unable to spell in the early 1990s, I now see search engines leaving people unable to search, their brains choked by a “Fahrenheit 450” of too much knowledge handed out too easily.

            The answer-man (or –woman) column is a key casualty. Ironically, the Internet is killing the art of stupid-question-answering, even while proliferating it into the hobby of thousands of people. Sites like Yahoo! Answers let you serf the ’Net, commanding a horde of link-farmers to work the cyberfields for you. What’s missing is independent, primary research—and even more importantly, critical thinking.

            (Arguably, I’m standing on the wrong soapbox here, as free-answer sites likely would have found the right links to answer the barrel-wearing question. Simply ID-ing sources is certainly a function of answer-men. And after all, the guy who asked my question ended up answering it thanks to the Internet; in that sense, I’m no longer required. But I think it’s unlikely any generic Web site would interview people, search archives, etc.—the extra details that count toward a real answer.)4

            The old answer-man newspaper columns, especially popular in the mid-1800s to early 1900s, were often excellent and sober resources, at least within their own cultural context (i.e., much racism, sexism and Christianity still prevailed). The terrific British journal “Notes & Queries” turned it into a real art; several newspapers aped the format, creating a kind of proto-wiki for their readers.

            The next big step was in 1973, when the Chicago Readers’ “The Straight Dope” column appeared. It pepped up the answer-man formula by answering subcultural, obscene and absurd questions, and by being written by the pseudonymous Cecil Adams in an aggressive, sarcastic style. Adams’ style often overshadowed his substance, and he was repeatedly incorrect in some subject areas, especially evolution and biology. (Compare his non-answer to “why men have nipples” to evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s elegantly correct one to see the difference between discursion and revelation.5) But his work was generally high-caliber for its time and helped define the Watergate/drug-trip/Pentagon Papers era of believing the truth could set you free.

            “The Straight Dope” wasn’t killed by the Internet; it was replaced by it, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”-style. The world woke up one morning, and the column still looked the same, but it had been replaced by a staff of Googlers and cullings from a Web forum. It was fascinating to watch the decline. The lameness was especially obvious in the early years of the Web, before the critical mass had developed, when content was mostly newsgroups laden with questionable stuff. Cecil began barfing up this material like a search engine gone bonkers. And that’s about all “The Straight Dope” is now, an irrelevant, “Ask Jeeves”-type portal. Meanwhile, the Web has created an encyclopedia big and crazy enough to contain much of what you might once have asked Cecil about.

            Furthermore, it has created the aforementioned horde of answer-people who work for giant corporations like Yahoo! for utterly incomprehensible reasons. Mostly they just present you with a downsized collection of links—search results for the oh-so busy. The answer-man has become, essentially, a virtual search engine.

            With Amazon.com’s beta-testing “Mechanical Turk” program, you can request particular tasks that would be hard for a computer to do (such as describe the pictures in a particular book) through what appears to be a computer program, but in fact is just an e-mail bouncer that notifies various serfs who then perform said task and e-mail you back.6 Amazon calls it “artificial artificial intelligence,” itself an intriguing concept; it simultaneously implies suspicions of computers’ limits, but also presents the computer interface as more authentic and reliable than dealing directly with a  specific person. However, as a coder/artificial intelligence expert I know remarked more simply, it’s essentially just another way to recruit Internet serfs for brutally cheap labor (especially as Amazon is using the program to get people to do its own work).

            Cheap labor and self-reflexive citation of Web links is what answer-man-ing is today. I know this first-hand; I’ve had to get an Allexperts.com answer, written by someone working for free, kicked off the Web because it plagiarized “Stupid Question.” Even without plagiarism, it amounts to answer-men quoting other answer-men. I’ve even now had my links cited by newspaper answer columns. It’s all very flattering, but it makes me wonder how circular the thinking is, and whether anyone will ever get a straight answer. (Anything based on “Stupid Question” is on a rock-solid foundation, of course.)

            I’ve even seen the would-be gurus who shepherd their pet Wikipedia pages reject citations of actual print material, instead demanding Web links as “more authentic”—even if the links are only secondary references to the material. In 1998, the prejudice was that the Web was full of lies; in 2006, the prejudice is that nothing besides the Web even exists.

            Also typically missing are responses to highly localized questions about specific towns, a mainstay of much classic answer-man material.

            And what of “Stupid Question,” which began in print in 1998 and expired online in 2005? You can look at the archives and judge for yourself. But I think “Stupid Question” weathered the Internet revolution especially well, only benefiting from it.

            I stuck to a few basic principles that the Web couldn’t alter. My main goal was that my answers would be correct. That sounds obvious, but it’s hardly the aim of all answer-men. I would “dare to be boring”—for once in my life, step aside and let the facts be entertaining enough in themselves. But I wouldn’t merely gather facts and toss them onto the table. I would scrutinize them ruthlessly. I would never be afraid to say I didn’t know the answer. I would teach myself and my audience how to think about the unusual and confusing. And I would always try to find things out first-hand for myself, attempting to become an instant expert, not a mere medium.

            These attitudes plowed through the drivel on the Web (or in any other source), and were assisted by the good stuff. The most significant part of the Internet revolution to me wasn’t personal/commercial Web pages or discussion groups; it was e-mail, university faculty pages and scans of primary-source archives. It’s been an amazing tool for reaching out in the world, experiencing things hands-on, or at least asking actual experts, not attention-hungry slaves.

            I’m personally offended by the idea of the answer-man column as something more akin to sharing gossip around the cafeteria table than figuring out what’s what. The motto at the top of this page is, “Knowledge is power. Context is omnipotence.” Even “The Straight Dope” still declares, “Fighting ignorance since 1973. (It’s taking longer than we thought.)”

            Yahoo! Answers lamely suggests you “get answers from real people” (as opposed to what—fake people?) and “learn something new today.” Allexperts.com just says you can “ask any question.” Google Answers offers, “Ask any question. Set your price. Get your answer.” Truth, accuracy and critical thinking are not selling points; having your ideas challenged is out of the question.7

            The old-timey answer-man George W. Stimpson, who worked in the era of mailing epistles to university professors, became one of my heroes after a few years of doing “Stupid Question”—not so much for his answers (which were pretty good) as for his philosophy behind them. Here’s what he said in the preface to one of his books:

            “Perhaps the basic characteristic of this work is in the nature of the questions, the fact that they are such as continually occur to all sorts and conditions of people. Nevertheless, the author has tried to impart to it another in the reliability of the answers. He has spared no effort to obtain the facts, though the search often led him through many labyrinths in the stores of knowledge….Not all of the questions dealt with admit of definite answers. The fact that a definite answer is not obtainable, however, has not been deemed sufficient reason for excluding the question. Frequently, it is of value, and aids in dispelling misconceptions, to know just what authentic information is available on a particular subject. The author’s policy has been to take the questions as they have been repeatedly presented to him, and in each case to endeavor to give, in the clearest language at his command, the best information obtainable by painstaking research.”8

            Did you feel your brain harmonize with every line? That’s the first question that should be asked of any would-be answer-man.

 

            1 For the record, the other great unanswerables: the origin of the phrase/idea of “Chinese water torture”; origin of the Friday the 13th superstition; origin of the phrase, “The butler did it.”

            2 Farrell later told me that all the “taxpayer” images she’s familiar with are from the World War II era; if they originated then, it is surprising how quickly the image entered other media, such as the Sally Rand cartoon. After the publication of this column, Uhlin wrote me to say it got him thinking about how he, in his home region of Scandinavia/Northern Europe, also was familiar with the barrel-wearing image before he heard of Johnstone. However, he was at least able to recall an example of the image: “I immediately thought of the Maharajah of Howduyustan, who became totally broke after a statue-making competition with Scrooge McDuck” in the 1952 comic “Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories” #138. He was kind enough to send me a scan of a panel from the Swedish version of this comic, which shows Donald Duck commenting to Scrooge McDuck about a figure in the background—a humanoid dog sitting on a park bench, wearing a barrel attached with suspenders, and holding out a begging cup. “True, 1952 means a rather late appearance, but it’s interesting to note that by then the image of a broke person having to wear a barrel was well-known on both sides of the Atlantic,” Uhlin perceptively notes. (Of course, Disney might have left an unfamiliar image in the translated copy anyway; but Donald Duck has always been very popular in Europe, and it seems likely care would have been taken with any extreme oddities, especially since European versions are generally printed in Europe.) It’s interesting to note that all the early uses of the image I’ve gathered  are in cartoons (newspapers, comic books and animated shorts), making direct descent from Johnstone seem likely enough. At the same time, the relative scarcity of examples of the image still surprises me, given how recognizable it is. I wonder if I’m overlooking some significant example that truly popularized the image nationwide/internationally. Back on the question of origins, Uhlin also asked if Diogenes, the Greek philosopher who lived in a public tub, could have been an inspiration; I already shot this idea down in one of the original “Stupid Question” updates, as it’s clear that modern descriptions of Diogenes as living in a “barrel” are a back-formation from the familiar image, and there is no evidence or continuity of imagery connecting him directly to barrel-wearing. However, it did occur to me there’s a remote chance Diogenes did somehow inspire Johnstone, a rather witty Cynic himself. Farrell said she is unaware of any interest in Greek philosophy on Johnstone’s part. As a final update note, I originally said that there is “no doubt” Johnstone was credited with inventing the image in his lifetime, based on the New York Times write-ups; but on second examination, they actually praise his “taxpayer” character specifically while remaining ambiguous as to whether barrel-wearing was already a recognized symbol before Johnstone used it for the “taxpayer.” The closest thing to a direct credit of Johnstone is the still-ambiguous obit headline: “…Created Taxpayer in a Barrel.” (By analogy, you could credit Bob Kane and Bill Finger with inventing Batman, the “Caped Crusader,” without meaning that Batman was the first cape-wearing superhero.) Incidentally, anyone who immediately thinks of the Maharajah of Howduyustan for any reason will always have a place of honor in this obscure hall.

            3 There is reportedly a family dispute about whether these materials should be donated to some kind of research institution, a debate I am happy to enter on the side of academe. Johnstone’s work would be significant to researchers in several areas and would be best preserved by a library. In terms of general interest, the cartoons are often still amusing and perceptive today, though sometimes dipping into racial stereotypes (all the more in the World War II era).

            4 As it turns out, I was giving the surfing serfs too much credit. About seven weeks after the publication of this column, someone actually did ask Yahoo! Answers about barrel-wearing. No answerer found the links to information on Johnstone. Indeed, the only answer to even mention Johnstone consisted entirely of quotes from this column. It was voted the best answer.

            5 At www.straightdope.com and in “Bully for Brontosaurus,” respectively.

            6 The name is an allusion to a supposedly artificially intelligent mechanical chess player of the 1700s—a kind of proto-Big Blue—that in fact was a hoax device occupied by a human being. The name is also pretty racist-sounding and creates terribly mixed and inaccurate metaphors for what the program actually does. 

            7 Shortly after this was published, Yahoo! placed several of its “top” answerers from Yahoo! Answers inside a giant fake brain atop the Hard Rock Café in New York. Including a running wheel for the human gerbils was apparently considered too obvious. The idea that question-answering can be well done inside a bubble with a laptop reflects the entire neo-answer-man concept; Yahoo! Answers is merely a glorified Usenet. It emphasizes the quantity of queries it has processed—never mind that on Yahoo!, there really is such a thing as a stupid question, and no one to explain why. And what makes a “top” answerer? It’s decided through user feedback, which is to say a reflection of people deciding not which answer is most true, but which answer they like best. I can’t blame Yahoo!; companies in general benefit from people being stupid. But I humbly suggest that at the next PR stunt, top answerers are instead placed inside a giant fake upper digestive tract—the organ not of thought, but of regurgitation.

            8 From the unfortunately-named “Why Do Some Shoes Squeak? And 568 Other Popular Questions Answered.”

 

A significant source not cited in the text or footnotes is “Jay’s Journal of Anomalies: Conjurers, Cheats, Hustlers, Hoaxsters, Pranksters, Jokesters, Imposters, Pretenders, Side-Show Showmen, Armless Calligraphers, Mechanical Marvels, Popular Entertainments” by Ricky Jay. Many thanks to Mr. Uhlin for extraordinary assistance. Posted June 11, 2006. Updated June 13, 14, 15 and 29 and Aug. 4, 2006.

 

 

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