Mutt & Jeff

Mutt was the tall one, Jeff the short one. They were a funny paper team for well over 70 years. Cartoonist Harry "Bud" Fisher invented Mutt first, in 1907, introducing him solo in a comic strip that ran daily on the sports page of the San Francisco Chronicle. Fisher originally used his strip to recount Augustus Mutt's misadventures in betting on the ponies. He also tossed in racing tips. In 1908, while spending some time in a lunatic asylum, Mutt encountered Jeff and the two teamed up. Though often credited with being the first daily newspaper strip, Mutt & Jeff had a few predecessors. It was, however, the first truly successful one.

Popular from the beginning, Mutt & Jeff eventually moved from the San Francisco Chronicle to William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Examiner. Eventually the shrewd Fisher acquired ownership of his feature and, with the aid of the Bell Syndicate, became the first millionaire cartoonist in America. A large list of papers all across the country helped, as did extensive merchandising. There were Mutt& Jeff reprint books from 1910 on, as well as toys, animated cartoons, and even Broadway shows.

Fisher involved his pair in various contemporary activities, including the fracas with Pancho Villa, the First World War, and Prohibition. His basic aim, however, was to get across a joke a day. Mutt was married, henpecked, and the father of an ageless son named Cicero. He and Jeff tried any number of professions, never able to hold down any job for long. For decades the two of them operated pretty much like a movie or stage comedy team, daily delivering many a tried and true joke borrowed from vaudeville. It is safe to say that there was not a single variation of the classic "Waiter, there's a fly in my soup" gag that did not appear in Mutt & Jeff more than once. Fisher and his staff were very much given to slapstick elements and brickbats; clubs and other weapons were frequent props. Mutt, although not the brightest of men, was the more practical partner. Jeff was the zany one, often not too well grounded in reality. When one of their innumerable get-rich-quick schemes went awry, Mutt was not above doing violence to his little top-hatted sidekick. Jeff, however, often got the last laugh and, almost always, the pretty girls who frequented the strip. Their basic relationship was akin to that of such screen comedians as Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello.

The life of a millionaire, in Fisher's case filled with such upper-class distractions as a racing stable and chorus girls, did not leave him much time for his comic strip. Fairly early in his career, he hired others to produce Mutt & Jeff. Ken Kling was the first ghost writer and he went on to do comic strips of his own, including a racing tip one called Joe & Asbestos. Next came Eddie Mack and then, in the early 1930s, the long-suffering Al Smith. A much better cartoonist than his boss or any of his predecessors, Smith wrote and drew the strip, daily and Sunday, for over 20 years without any credit and not too much in the way of a salary; he eventually created the Sunday companion strip, Cicero's Cat. After Fisher's death in 1954, Smith was allowed to sign his name to the strip. He stayed with it, gradually mellowing the tone and putting more emphasis on Mutt's home life, until 1980. For its final two years Mutt & Jeff was drawn by George Breisacher.

—Ron Goulart

Further Reading:

Goulart, Ron, editor. The Encyclopedia of American Comics. New York, Facts On File, 1990.

Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Funnies. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1994.