Born in 1895 in the Bronx, Milt Gross began his first comic strip, "Phool Phan Phables", at the age of 20. It was for the New York Journal and featured a rabid sports fan named George Phan. Milt had been hanging around the newspaper in search of cartooning gigs for a few years. He was actually working for Tad Dorgan, a major sports cartoonist of the day, when he landed his inaugural strip. It was to be the first of a series of non-memorable false starts. Animation, WWI and more short-lived strips served as his training ground for his first major success, "Gross Exaggerations".
"Gross Exaggerations" began as an illustrated column in the New York World. What made it unique, besides Gross' homespun drawing style, was the use of phonetic dialect in the dialogue. The dialect was based on that of Jewish immigrants who were struggling to make themselves understood in a new language. "Hollo! Hoperator! Hollo! Who's dere by de shvitzbud? I vant Haudabon--hate--vun--ho--fife. Hate! HATE! Vun, two, tree, fur, fife, seex, savan, HATE!" The column featured the dialogues between stereotypical Jewish mothers conversing out the windows of their tenement.
First Floor and Second Floor were the indications of who was speaking, with an occasional interjection from Third Floor. On the Fourth Floor, there's a baby. So not only were the columns about life in New York, they occasionally strayed into what could only be considered Fractured Fairy Tales told to entertain the "nize baby." One might be "Nize ferry-tail from Elledin witt de wanderful lemp", another "from Jack witt de binn stuck." With appropriate illustrations, of course - like the giant's talking harp (doing Henny Youngman jokes) .
Nize Baby was published in book form in 1926 to immediate success. Also in 1926, he published Hiawatta witt no odder poems. This was a riotous parody of Longfellow's Hiawatha and ran 40 pages, each with a barely decipherable stanza and a drawing which only sometimes helped.
Both these 1926 hits were followed by two more in 1927: De Night in De Front From Chreesmas and Dunt Esk. More dialect in both. Gross had found his niche. Cashing in on the popularity and name-recognition of his first book, "Nize Baby" was immediately transformed into a newspaper strip in early 1927. 1928 saw Famous Fimmales Witt Odder Ewents From Heestory. Finally, in 1930, his non-dialect (non-verbal, actually) parody of the many novels in woodcuts being published at the time was released. Titled He Done Her Wrong, and released in a black cloth binding that echoed the first few silent novels of Lynd Ward, this was just as much a loving tribute to the Perils of Pauline and silent films. Reprinted in paperback form in 1963, Gross boasts this to be "The Great American Novel - and not a word in it -- no music too." It was again reprinted in 1983 as Hearts of Gold. It's still funny today. Not much humor seems to have survived the ensuing years, but Gross hit a universal funny bone and managed to keep tickling in throughout the nearly 300 pages of this classic. Three consecutive pages are shown below.
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