page_title: Mr. Dooley
section_title: Language and technique
hierarchical_section_title: Mr. Dooley / Language and technique
caption_attribution_description: English: Depiction of Mr. Dooley
context_page_description: Mr. Dooley is a fictional Irish immigrant bartender created by American journalist Finley Peter Dunne. Dooley was the subject of many Dunne columns between 1893 and 1915, and again in 1924 and 1926. Dunne's essays contain the bartender's commentary on various topics. They became extremely popular during the 1898 Spanish–American War and remained so afterwards; they are collected in several books. The essays are in the form of conversations in Irish dialect between Mr. Dooley, who in the columns owns a tavern in the Bridgeport area of Chicago, and one of the fictional bar's patrons with most of the column a monologue by Dooley. The pieces are not widely remembered, but originated lasting sayings such as "the Supreme Court follows the election returns".
  Mr. Dooley was invented by Dunne to replace a similar character whose real-life analogue had objected. By having the garrulous bartender speak in dialect and live in an unfashionable area of Chicago Dunne gained a freedom of expression he often did not have in standard English. The first four years of the weekly column made Mr. Dooley popular in Chicago, but little noticed elsewhere.
context_section_description: Over 500 columns and thirty years, Dunne's use of Irish dialect remained fairly consistent.  He avoided stereotypically Irish words like begorrah. Among the vowel shifts Dunne used is that from ē (as in the first vowel sound in "easily") to ā (thus, it becomes "aisily"). The word "my" becomes "me" in the mouth of Dooley, and "by" becomes "be", but these are more grammatical distortions than vowel shifts. The letter "y" is often used to begin constructions beginning with multiple vowels, like "-ious" and "-iate", thus they become "-yus" (gloryus) and "-yate" (humilyate) and when added next to consonants or diphthongs can distort the word in a way confusing to the reader (villain becomes villyan; giant becomes joynt). Some of the puns that Dunne made transcend language barriers, as when Dooley renders Émile Zola's famous admonition in the Dreyfus case, J'Accuse…! (I Accuse!), as "jackuse" (jackass). Pronouncing it at Dreyfus's trial gets Zola "thrun ... out" for "a hell of a mane thing to say to anny man".
  The authenticity of Dunne's use of dialect was controversial even in his own lifetime.  Dunne's partisans claimed that it was genuine Roscommon dialect, phonetically transcribed. But Dunne never called it such, making it clear in the columns that Mr. Dooley had been in America for many years, and so his dialect would have been modified by decades of exposure to an Archey Road wherein was known every way of speaking heard from Armagh to Bantry Bay, and more besides. Dunne was not always consistent in his usages, and spells Dooley's favorite subject, "polytics", "polliticks", "pollytics" and correctly. According to Ellis, while Dunne was no philologist, he had a good ear, and the biographer considered the Dooley pieces the outstanding use of Irish-American dialect in written form. Paul Green, though, in his introduction to the 1988 edition of Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War, averred that scholars in Ireland have stated that Dunne did not capture the dialect, and have written that the Dooley pieces were not popular there. According to Dunne's son Philip, except in a few of the early pieces, Dooley "spoke always as an American, dealing with American and world issues. Eliminate the brogue and the pieces stand out as what they were: pure Americana."
  Scholars have differed on the issue of what is to be made of Mr. Dooley and the often bizarre things Dunne placed in his mouth: whether Dooley is intended to believe that he is a cousin of Admiral Dewey, or that "Mack" (as he calls President McKinley) has actually said the seemingly unlikely things that the barkeeper relates. Walter Blair, in his 1942 volume on American humor, considered Mr. Dooley too much of a provincial innocent to grasp that referring to the president so familiarly might be a solecism. Many Dooley pieces commence "I see by the papers", that is, the newspapers Dooley subscribes to for his customers to read and which the bartender peruses at slack times, constituting a major source of information for him. Blair contended that Dooley knows only what he reads in the Evening Post and other papers, and gullibly believes quotations he has heard without attribution from his customer Hogan were made up by that bookish patron. Dunne wrote in 1898 that Dooley "reads the newspapers with solemn care, heartily hates them, and accepts all they print for the sake of drowning Hennessy's rising protests against his logic".
  Norris Yates, in his The American Humorist (1964), argued that Dooley is entirely reliant on the papers for information, and has understood them badly. He wrote that Mr. Dooley is intended to be the opposite of the well-informed citizen sought by the Progressive Movement, and that his comments contain more truth than he knows. John O. Rees, in his journal article on Mr. Dooley, suggested that the barkeeper is intended to act in full awareness of how fantastic his words can be; he is expanding on what he has seen in the papers, turning it into a pointed story for the entertainment and edification of Hennessy, and himself. Dooley's apparent misrenderings of the l
caption: Mr. Dooley reads his "pa-apers" (by Gordon Ross, 1907)
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image ExifOffset": "90", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "239", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "289"}