It used to be a common visual clue – a guy wearing a barrel held up with shoulder straps was poor, usually suddenly and unexpectedly, and often previously rich. (Click here for a clip art pic).
(One of my favorite examples was in Spy magazine in the early 1990s when Donald Trump was undergoing financial problems: he wore a barrel, and Marla Maples wore a two-piece bikini barrel).
My question: was this purely a comic invention (and if so, whose?), or was a barrel ever used by people who couldn’t afford clothes?
I’m not sure as to the specific answer, but I would bet that the barrel didn’t originally indicate being unable to afford clothes, but rather having lost money in a bet. I.e. you walk into a poker game and by the end of the night you’re kicked out, rolling in a barrel. Most probably the barrel was chosen so as to aid the mental image of someone being kicked out and rolling away on the ground, disgracefully.
I’ve seen similar imagery in Japan, using a carpet to roll the person up rather than a barrel.
Here are a couple links to the same question at a column named ‘Stupid Questions’. The first link asks the question Straight-Dope-style and doesn’t offer much of an answer. The second link has the author revisiting the question and attributing it to newspaper cartoonist Will B. Johnstone from here. Oddly enough, the author then goes on to pontificate on the value his column in the internet age, extends that to all similar columns – including The Straight Dope in particular – and manages to squeeze out this line:
WAG: Rain barrels were commoner in ye olde days, so it might not have been that hard to knock the head off and slink off wearing the barrel in lieu of any handy laundry lines to rob.
And… I’ve always understood it as being a) either too poor or b) unfortunately robbed. Both of which leave the unfortunate without a stitch to stand up in.
Add in that during the Great Depresion they took everything in the foreclosure sale. I think that period added much to the image of wearing a barrel, because they were said to have even taken the clothes off your back.
I know we’ve done this several times, but this thread is the one that comes up in our wonderful search engine.
Will B. Johnstone was indeed a famed newspaper cartoonist but he wrote a million plays for Broadway and thereby got to write for the Marx Brothers, which makes him immortal. A new book, Gimme a Thrill: The Story of I’ll Say She Is, the Lost Marx Brothers Musical and How It Was Found, by Noah Diamond, naturally has a chapter on I’ll Say She Is, written by Johnstone.
Diamond calls “the naked taxpayer in a barrel” his “signature creation.” If so, most of them are lost in old newspapers. I found a couple of crude examples online, hereand here.
The Edison film, The Interrupted Bathers, that Walloon cited is available on youtube. It packs a lot into its 46 seconds. Yes, the girls are swimming in a stream in their copious underclothing when the hoboes steal their outerwear. One walks off in a barrel. Where the barrel comes from is left to the viewer’s imagination.
So Johnstone would be a popularizer and not a creator of the image, although applying it to the skint taxpayer couldn’t happen until after the income tax. He may have invented that iconic image.
But I could see an illicit poker game happening in a bar. And said bar having empty beer barrels sitting about since that’s how all beer was delivered in Ye Olden Dayes. So if somebody “lost his shirt” (and pants) in a poker game at the bar a barrel would be readily available as emergency backup clothing. Ditto if he got mugged; the other common thing that happens to ingénues in and around such dens of iniquity.
This is all conjecture on my part. But it seems a plausible idea that some cartoonist might come up with that the contemporary audience would immediately understand.
Wensleydale?
The “Bathers” reference reminds me of the joke about the Oxford students skinny-dipping in the river when a boatload of young ladies comes around the bend. Several of the men of course, cover their lower parts with their hands. one simply covers his face with his hands, and hangs out au naturel. Once the ladies are gone, they ask him why he did that. He responds “I don’t know about how you fellows are identified, but around here, I’m known by my face.”
I assume the barrel thing simply refers to the fact there was always a barrel lying around at the turn of the century. It would be the most convenient cover until cardboard boxes came along.
