Vox Populi
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Charles Harper Webb: Flubadub Invents the Sixties
This strange-looking puppet became one of the most popular characters on the show.
—Howdy-doody.fandom.com
.
Dachshund, duck, seal, spaniel, cat, pig,
giraffe—all dumped DNA into his gene-pool.
His elephant-brain conceived The Howdy
Doody Show, and chose what Old-Time
Movie played when Buffalo Bob pried open
his Hostess cupcake-with-the-surprise-inside.
We can thank Flub for classics like Queen
for a Day, Liberace, What’s My Line?
“One nation under rabbit-ears!” he prophesied,
planning to introduce The Beatles
on The Flubadub Show, right after Topo Gigio,
the puppet-mouse, gave Ed Sullivan
the puppet-plague. But first he had to shove
the Russians out of Cuba, found the Peace
Corps, and fight for civil rights. He had a dream
years before MLK, Jr., though his concerned
Marilyn M, whose favorite bathtub toy
he became as the U.S.A. morphed
into Camelot, where we might be playing
knights and ladies to this day
if Lee Harvey Oswald-the-Rabbit’s rifle
hadn’t, one November afternoon,
sprayed three shots that left Mrs. Dub
struggling to sew Flub’s duck-bill, cat-whiskers,
and spaniel-ears back onto his tousled
head: come, like the whole country,
undone.
.
~~~~
Poem copyright 2025 Charles Harper Webb
A former professional rock singer/guitarist and licensed psychotherapist, Charles Harper Webb is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. His collections of poetry include Sidebend World (Pitt, 2018).
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Wow, Charles–I did not see that ending coming. The humor at this poem’s start really lures us in and sets its trap. WOW.
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Hi Meg, Good to hear from you. I’m glad you like the poem.
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So happy for this chance to reconnect, Charles! You know I’ve been a fan for many years now. (-:
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I don’t remember Flub-a-dub but do know Howdy-Doody show and love this dark humor and right-on satire and secretly, since he does the stuff JFK did, he kind of is him, with his wife trying to put him back together a little like Humpty-Dumpty, and the, and the whole country in the end “come undone.” It’s breath-takingly bold satire, insight, and in the end, grieving. Haven’t read Charles Harper Webb before—will find more of him!
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Charles is wonderful He creates a mix of pop culture, satire and pathos.
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Love this poem’s wry combination of nostalgia and satire; a portrait of the boomer zeitgeist (Now that Phineas T. Bluster is in the White House.)
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Phineas T. Bluster sounds like a Groucho character. Hahahaha.
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Took me back to my birthday on the show, and then Beanie and Cecil, and Lambchop, and Sheriff John, and Pinky Lee and who was the train engineer and put another candle on my birthday cake and then a screeching halt as I pull the covers over my head and silent scream.
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Awwww. Barb, there are people who love you.
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I second my buddy Marty!
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As I was reading this satire, smiling and frowning grew apace. I’ve been tinkering with poetic AI, as it wants to write poems on this screen, without me even asking. Failures, all of them. It does create unintended whimsy at times, but somehow can’t think out of the box. Charles Harper Webb’s poem does so. A Doodyful romp through a political life.
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Thanks, Jim.
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It mad me laugh and I “liked” it, but I’m not sure why…..but maybe on gray mornings with gray skies and a gray fascism looming over all of us except those who think “oh, you’re just over-reacting” and who keep talking to themselves in smaller and smaller silos of self-aggrandizement and self-righteousness that says if we only elect “them” in two years all will be right with the world and like the Donald try to persuade us that it will all be “big and beautiful” when we get pie in the sky…when we die….but I still liked it….and I still don’t know why.
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Nice prose poem, Mel. Charles’s poems are absurd and silly and serious all at the same time.
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I love this. I was formedby/drowned in/and swam out of this culture.
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Me too, Doug.
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This is a wonderful Charles Harper Webb poem, a feint toward levity, toward light, and then the dark explodes.
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good description of Charles’s method of disguising serious subjects as jokes. thanks, Marty!
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