By Noah Tomko-Jones

I was raised in a political household. There’s no two ways about it. From a young age, my parents impressed on my older brother and me the importance of being an informed citizen. NPR was on almost constantly in the car and in the house, and if we wanted to watch our beloved Simpsons, we had to sit through the full 60 Minutes broadcast that came on beforehand. That was the deal.

Another important part of this media diet soon became those ever-present programs of the mid- to late-2000s, which felt like a combination of our Sunday evening double-headers: Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report. These shows, and the idea of communicating the news with strong satire, felt like such a part of that early-2000s media landscape, so married to that time and place, that I wouldn’t have expected Chicagoans of a past era to have their own entertaining source of social commentary: Finley Peter Dunne.

Dunne was born in Chicago on July 10, 1867, to Irish immigrant parents, and at the age of 16 became a copy boy at the Chicago Telegram. He soon became promoted to a full-time reporter in various major city papers of the day, including the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Evening Post, the latter being “where Dunne truly came into his own,” said June Sawyers in an article for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

“Given that booze and writing have always been big parts of the Chicago literary scene it may not be surprising that Dunne decided to combine the two “ingredients” into one singular creation, Martin Dooley,” said Sawyers. “And in perhaps his boldest move, he allowed his character to speak in Irish dialect.”

Mr. Dooley, modeled after the traditional Chicago Irish bartender, was a vehicle for Dunne’s biting social, cultural, and political takes of the day, filtered through a working-class sensibility and timely humor.

One of the most surprising things I learned about Dunne was that he (as Dooley) coined a phrase that I learned in journalism school as a sincere mission of us journalists.

“Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us,” said Dunne/Dooley. “It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.”

What a surprise for me to learn that “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” was in fact couched in a critique of the omnipresent power of the media.

I suppose that’s what humor does best though. It provides a sobering cushion with which to accept even the most difficult truths about your world. Dunne’s work did so, taking aim at all the powerful institutions around him, yet ingratiating himself to them so much that even President Theodore Roosevelt, a frequent target of Mr. Dooley’s slang-filled diatribes, was a fan.

It’s no surprise, then, that humor and satire have been major conveyors of news in modern times. According to the Pew Research Center, “12% of online Americans cited The Daily Show as a place they got their news,” on par with sources like USA Today and The Huffington Post.

There’s a strong case to be made that humor can lessen or cheapen the solemn duty of the journalist. And to be sure, there is a time and place for humor anywhere, especially in the news. But being able to see the absurdity of the world around you is a great way to begin questioning why it is that absurd way—and journalists are at their best when they’re helping us understand why.

 

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