Quest for the Bumbling Dad

[steepholm]

My son and I were discussing this one over supper tonight. We have of course noticed how hard it is to get through an advert break without seeing fathers represented as incompetent buffoons. That they can't load a washing machine or sew a button goes without saying. They also have a distressing tendency to dip their tie in the cheese sauce, break windows when showing off their football skills in the garden, embarrass their children by disco-dancing, etc. And while they boast vaingloriously about their prowess we find that their omnicompetent wives are simply getting on with it, quietly and efficiently - but above all smugly, with perhaps just the odd heavenward glance indicative of amused exasperation. Can these paunchy poltroons really be related to the square-jawed wielders of Gillette razors with whom they share the ad breaks, and from whose necks women dangle like so many ribbons from a maypole?

Okay, most of the products being advertised are bought by women, I guess, which might explain much of the above. But such dads are legion in family sitcoms, too, from My Family to The Simpsons. What I really want to know, and couldn't answer tonight, is - when did this particular version of fatherhood first gain widespread currency? Is it since World War II, say? I couldn't think of any earlier examples. Authoritarian fathers, absent fathers, emotionally unavailable or violent fathers - yes, of course. Fathers might even be ineffectual in various different ways, for example finding it hard to keep down a job - but could this particular combination of buffoon and braggart be a modern invention?

Comments

[oenone-borealis.livejournal.com]

I was just wondering about this last week. None of the fathers nor men I have ever met have the incompetent buffoon quality. When did it arise? Good question. I suppose I'll look into myself, too.

[mraltariel.livejournal.com]

Although highly stylized, I wonder if we see the prototype of this in the Pantalone of the Commedia dell'Arte and Falstaff (although Pantalone is more often compared to Shylock, I don't think that's quite right) and similar figures. You could argue that there is usually a greater sense of malice and often avarice in those earlier examples; but then, that's still a common thread in e.g. My Family, Father Dear Father, perhaps even Man About The House / George and Mildred. Although I think that they have evolved almost beyond recognition, I *might* try to argue that that is as much "dramatic taste" as change in character. Consider George Roper and Falstaff, for example.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Although I suspect that it really was an invention of post-war advertisers, I like your explanation more. Perhaps we could introoduce Mr Micawber as a kind of missing link in this genealogy?

[mraltariel.livejournal.com]

I am firmly of the opinion that a good theory shouldn't be shot down merely because it doesn't fit the facts.

[mraltariel.livejournal.com]

I'm not prepared to give up my theory so easily, though! I'll flog the dead horse one more time.

I think that "it was cooked up by post-war ad execs" misses an anlysis of the influences on *them*. In the 50s and 60s, as advertising starts to become more sophisticated, the people involved start to have a film/theatre background in a way they didn't before. The 50s saw a migration from "Buy Dunlop Tires, They Make Your Car Go Round Corners and They're Quite Inexpensive" (satirized at the end of their life in things like the "Dobbieroids" commercials in "Round The Horne"). By the early 50s, and especially into the 60s, there was an explosion of storytelling in advertising (the epitome of which is probably the 60s efforts of prototype BBHers and junior ad folks like Ridley Scott and Alan Parker involved). Although they may have invented the story *in the context of advertising*, they borrowed an archetypical motif - and wasn't that the original question?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

You're right, of course, that advertising execs seldom create ab nihilo, though I'm not quite convinced by "archetypal motif", either: the whole phenomenon seems too culturally and historically specific for that. If the bumble-dad has a long history, I'd still like to see more of his immediate antecedents. Might Mr Pooter be a relation, for example? But I also I suspect gair's idea that bumble-dad was born of a particular female conception of men is on the right lines, and that the advertising execs were trying to tap into a vein of indulgent contempt that had long existed but found few public means of expression. Could the current crisis of masculinity really have been the indirect result of a drive to sell cleaning products, in short? Stranger things have happened.

[mraltariel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think it is putting it too strongly to suggest an archetype (but you've got try, haven't you).

I'm still not sure we don't see more of these characters, though - a lot of the wartime films show a "father" figure, ususally involved in the previous war, who is a proud and preposterous (often stuffy and officious), and tends to be looked down upon by the younger people serving in the new war.

But, and it is a big but, I can't find any good (late) 19th century examples. I've a feeling that there should be something somewhere in Holmes, but I don't have anything good. Dickens is a wash, AFAIK.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I think Pooter might be quite a good late 19th century (1892) example.

I'd forgotten those stuffy and preposterous fathers - some of whom indeed survived the war, in various forms, to be rebelled against first by the angry young men and then the baby boomers. They weren't generally comic, mind, and they had to be seen as authority figures to at least a certain extent to make the act of rebellion meaningful (whereas even the idea of Bumble-dad successfully asserting his authority is risible): but they may well have contributed a gene or two to his DNA.

[mraltariel.livejournal.com]

Ah, well, yes then. For some reason I had DoaN in my head as 190x and therefore elided it, despite you mentioning him only a paragraph or two later!

[altariel.livejournal.com]

How about Mr Bennett? Oh, and Mr Woodhouse, now I come to think of it.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

They both deserve their places in the pantheon of paternal inadequacy, to be sure. This is turning into a large and complex subject!

[mraltariel.livejournal.com]

Why on earth didn't I think of Mr Bennett!? Austen was going round in my head, too!

[gair.livejournal.com]

Gerald says the Bumbling Dad of housework adverts is an evolution from 50s advertising trying to get people who did domestic labour (ie women) to accept mechanization. Originally the inept housekeeper whose skills had to be supplemented by improved technology was a women - the archetypal example for Gerald is Mr Sheen, the tiny little cartoon man who helped the incapable blonde housewife to dust (Gerald's childhood memory: her widowed mother dusting away with nary a man in the house and repeatedly singing Mr Sheen, Mr Sheen, you're the cutest little man I've ever seen!). So her guess is that it switched over to being an incapable dad when - or a few years after - women started complaining about that particular kind of representation, ie the 1980s. (Doesn't explain Homer Simpson, though.)

What it reminds me of is the 'Aren't Men Daft' columns in women's weekly magazines - that mix of indulgence and contempt. One of the nastier strands in (representations of) heterosexuality. And actually I read Madame Bovary recently, and that looked to me like the nastier end of chicklit: Flaubert wants to have it both ways, so he simultaneously mocks Emma Bovary for thinking that her husband should be a romance-novel hero and Charles Bovary for not being a romance-novel hero. So although Emma is inherently laughable for expecting Charles to be suave, well-dressed, aristocratic and witty, Charles is also inherently laughable for being sloppily-dressed, bourgeois and not all that bright. So maybe the braggart/buffoon as husband predates the braggart/buffon as father, and he got imported into the father role at a certain point?

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Oh, do you think Charles Bovary isn't a romance-novel hero? I suppose everyone in the book is mocked, if only for being, like Flaubert himself, provincial. But it always seemed to me that Emma is attracted by the outward signs of romanticism, but it's all dressing up clothes and play. Charles is the one who actually feels a grand romantic passion, and ultimately dies of grief. Perhaps this makes him more of a romance-novel heroine than a hero...

I beg your pardon, steepholm, that isn't what you were talking about at all.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I beg your pardon, steepholm, that isn't what you were talking about at all.

Let a hundred flowers bloom, I say. (My favourite character in Brief Encounter has always been the husband, Fred.)