Regarding the use of the word “Doodle” in “Yankee Doodle,” I was told in elementary school by one of those folks who comes by to do an assembly once a year that “Doodle” was a general insult along the lines of “nimrod” or “spaz” or “doodie-head.”
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While the origin of doodle is unknown, it almost certainly was not a nice thing to call someone in the mid-to-late 1700’s.
The OED cites it in 1628 with a meaning of a fool or idiot. And by 1785 it was in a dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue as “a silly fellow, or noodle…Also a child’s penis.”