Bringing Up Father — buf370618

Four panels trace a comic misunderstanding about adding machines: Jiggs, the Irish-immigrant social climber, is wished luck selling office equipment; he hustles off to make a call; a pompous businessman on the telephone insists his firm has no need for a new adding machine — and then the kicker lands in panel four: Jiggs's *son* already borrowed sixty dollars on the one they supposedly don't own. George McManus launched *Bringing Up Father* in 1913, and its consistent daily gag structure — compressed setup, reversal, punchline — helped standardize the four-panel comic strip as a narrative unit. That unit, reprinted and bundled by publishers through the 1930s, is the direct ancestor of the comic book as a physical object.