Doug Funny: A Namesake

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People keep asking me why I choose the nomes de plume that I employ online, so it’s time to comment as to the story behind this dramatis personae. Years ago and all through school, people mocked me for my name, attempting to malign me through association to a Nickelodeon cartoon character Doug Funny. Given that during the time it originally aired my parents opted out of TV (it cost money in FL to get local channels, so we had no TV at all), I knew absolutely nothing of the show.

When the opportunity presented itself after high school on Nick at Nite to watch Doug Funny reruns, I found I actually enjoyed the show. Like the cartoons of my youth, this particular series sought to fulfill two major goals: teaching of morays and dealing with controversial situations through satire.

Each episode ended with a thematic moral. Doug would comment on the things he learned as a result of his adventures and try to leave the audience with some lesson. So, the cartoons transcended the barrier of mere entertainment for those with eyes to see and ears to hear and served an important lesson now vacant, vanished from the vox populi of modern Americana. They showed us about human nature, just like the old classics, but in a manner to which children could relate, until such time as Hemmingway, Lewis, and Montesquie made sense to our immature minds.

All of Doug’s friends were different in ways that paralleled the modern world without actually pronounced demarcations. His best friend was blue skinned. His dog was intelligent. Some characters had funny shaped anatomy, and then there was of course Doug’s surname. Like Star Trek, which I also enjoy a great deal, this minutia represented microcosms of the world as a whole- differences in race, religion, gender, and culture. It allowed them to be dealt with as amorphous whole issues of differentiation without pointing to a specific group.

I owe those who mocked me a great debt of gratitude. Were it not for their gleeful disdain for my name, I might never have taken time to familiarize myself with that personae to which they attributed me. Maybe I’m not very funny in an entertaining way, but in terms of peculiarity and differing from the ordinary, that most certainly rings truth. More to the point, Douglas, originally from Gaelic, means “He who came from the Dark Water” or more to prose, “The Strange One” or “Dweller in a Dark Place”. So, yes, they were right when they called me Doug Funny, and so I proudly use the name today.