Dooley was one of several dialect-speaking characters of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American humor. Like such predecessors as Jack Downing or Hosea Biglow, Mr. Dooley exemplified the frank honesty, unabashed self-confidence, and blunt democratic manner of a secure American villager, though his "village," while as parochial as any New England village or Mid-western county seat previously invoked in American popular humor, was the Irish-American Sixth Ward on Chicago's industrialized South Side.
While embodying the personal characteristics of a cracker-barrel philosopher and speaking as an established citizen of a small, coherent ethnic community, Mr. Dooley is distinguished from the line of American popular humor dialect-speaking characters who preceded him by his experience and language. In presenting Mr. Dooley to the public, Dunne endowed him with forty years of experience working and living in his Chicago neighborhood, and he skillfully modulated Mr. Dooley's voice to the peppery rhythm and usage of an urban dialect, the profane brogue of a saloonkeeper in a working-class, Irish-American political ward.
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