The very last Happy and Hapless cartoon that was shown at the Babbington Theater is the one that remains sharpest in my memory.
After a number of mishaps and close calls, Hapless, in his chubby-man incarnation, found himself in a rowboat, rowing across a gray bay. A storm was coming up. Already the bay was choppy, and Hapless was struggling to row into the wind. He was having a terrible time of it, and his expression showed the strain that he was under. Over the sound of the wind and the waves, we began to hear Happy’s chuckling, building gradually, coming as if from behind all of us kids, as if Happy were sitting up in the balcony somewhere, where the bigger kids sat to neck and smoke.
Poor Hapless began to hear it too, and he turned toward us, stopped rowing, and looked at us with a sadness that we didn’t recognize from earlier episodes. There was a scattering of nervous laughter, and all of us expected something to happen to change Hapless’s situation, if not for the better, at least to make it different, at least to get this horrible look off his face. But nothing happened. Hapless just sat there, drifting, looking out at us with misery in his eyes while Happy’s chuckle filled the theater.
Finally, Hapless spoke. “I don’t want to do this any more,” he said. The sadness in his voice was bottomless.
Kids began squirming in their seats and looking at one another. I looked at Matthew and laughed a tentative laugh, as if to say, “This is funny, right? You get the joke, don’t you—even though I don’t?”
Matthew gave me the sardonic grin that he had, as our friendship had grown, added to his sneer and his impassive look of disappointment.
On the screen, the wind suddenly died, and the bay was calm, though the sky was still dark. Hapless sat in the rowboat, drifting. “I don’t want to do this any more,” he repeated, and right before the bulging eyes of a hundred kids, he and his rowboat began to melt into the water of the bay.
It took only a few seconds, I suppose, for Hapless to disperse himself. The water lay there, undulating slowly, under a featureless gray sky. We all sat in silence for a while, and I heard some blubbering, but then Gene Autry came onto the screen, smiling and singing, and the boys and girls seemed to forget Hapless at once.
I didn’t. I realized that I had spent part of every Saturday afternoon for an entire summer laughing at Hapless’s misfortunes. The thought made me miserable.
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You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
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