Uncle Duke

Uncle Duke is a fictional character in the comic strip "Doonesbury".He is nominally Zonker Harris's uncle, although early in the "Doonesbury" continuity he was established as a Harris family friend, making him an "uncle by courtesy" only. Duke's appearance and mannerisms are heavily based on the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson (see Raoul Duke). When the character was first introduced, Thompson protested (he was once quoted in an interview saying that he would set Trudeau on fire if the two ever met), but it was reported that he liked the character in later years.

In spite of being in a near-constant state of inebriation, Duke is a highly skilled con artist and bureaucrat who has played a role in some of the biggest political scandals of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, both real and fictional.

Biography

Duke's early life is murky, but it is almost certain that he had a father and was born in a hospital. His mother is mentioned very few times in the strip; a flashback has her noting at Duke's college graduation that "one of three men I used to know would be very proud of you." "Duke" is the only name ever used for him the strip--historically it was not clear whether Duke is his given name or family name: that Zonker calls him "Uncle Duke" suggests the former; that others call him "Governor Duke" and "Ambassador Duke" would also support the idea that "Duke" is his family name. Duke himself finally stated (on September 1, 2000) that Duke was his only name, and that he considered it a given name: "On my first day of school, my mother dropped me off with a tag that just said "Duke" pinned to my shirt. For some reason, she never came back to pick me up. So that's how I grew up without a last name." Duke's own memories, however, are notoriously unreliable.

However, the obituary excerpt on the back of the Doonesbury book "Death of a Party Animal" gives his full name as "Raoul Duke". Furthermore, in the strip dated 03/09/2006, his son mentions his initials are "E.D.", lending more credibility to the theory that Duke is his last name. He is almost always depicted wearing sunglasses, and since the early 1980s, has always been drawn with his eyes closed when he takes them off. During a near death experience, he recalled having been born wearing Ray Bans; during most of the strip's run, the style alternated between Wayfarers and Ray Ban Aviators.

During Duke's early appearances in the strip, he was portrayed as a happy-go-lucky, congenial stoner and alcoholic journalist who struggled to meet his deadlines. Once he became solidified as a main character rather than a recurring character, his personality gradually morphed to make him into a sociopathic con artist whose drug abuse and drinking took on a darker, albeit gallows humor, tone. While in his early appearances in the strip Duke was almost always in the company of Zonker and usually grinning, he is now almost never depicted in the same story arc as Zonker, and is drawn with a perpetual scowl on his face.

Duke vs. John Denver

Duke acquired a dislike for folksinger John Denver when Denver moved in next door to Duke's estate in Colorado and serenaded the neighborhood daily. Duke made a habit of shooting icicles off of Denver's porch roof with a high powered rifle. To this day the song "Rocky Mountain High" sends him into a violent frenzy. Despite theories by many of Duke's fans, Trudeau has refused to confirm or deny any complicity on Duke's part in the death of Denver in an ultralight flying accident. The closest he has come to commenting on the matter comes from the [http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/faqs/faq_sl.html FAQ] pages on the official [http://www.doonesbury.com Doonesbury Website] . Although the original entry was more caustic towards readers demanding that Trudeau make light of a tragic event, the current FAQ entry regarding Duke's reaction to Denver's death now reads as follows:

::Q: Will Duke react to John Denver's death? --E. Zuckerman ::A: Fortunately, Duke is not in charge of his own storylines. Readers will be spared his grotesque, loathsome reaction.

Career path(s)

The 1970s

Since his first appearance in the strip, Duke has assumed many career hats, each more outlandish than the last. When first introduced, Duke was working as a writer under Jann Wenner for "Rolling Stone" magazine, much to Wenner's chagrin and aggravation over Duke's inability to meet deadlines and/or maintain coherence within the confines of his articles, which were often written with the aid of controlled substances.

While still on the staff of "Rolling Stone", Duke applied for the position of Governor of American Samoa, and to his - and everyone else's - surprise, was actually appointed to the post by the United States Congress. Duke's tenure as governor was marked by a series of consecutive natural disasters, culminating in Duke himself instigating a hostage crisis.

Despite Duke's gross incompetence, he earned the favor of then-President Gerald Ford, who saw Duke's negotiations during the hostage crisis as indicative of a "knack for diplomacy." Ford appointed Duke as the United States Ambassador to the People's Republic of China, a role for which Duke claimed to be perfectly suited do to his being "Good with minorities." His tenure was largely uneventful, and mostly consisted of his abusing his authority to gain material wealth. During his time in China, he took on Honey Huan, a grad student, as his translator; she proceded to develop a one-sided, masochistic love for him, and would remain his obsessive assistant and de-facto "girlfriend" for the next thirty years.

Recalled by the newly-elected Jimmy Carter in 1977, Duke briefly worked as a laetrile farmer before being appointed as the manager of the Washington Redskins, ostensibly for his experience in "sports medicine" and actually for his vast knowledge of various ways that the team could drug its players without getting caught. Ultimately, he was forced to flee from the team--and the state-- following a series of depraved activities in a hotel room, involving massive quantities of hallucinogens and grapefruits.

The 1980s

Shortly after his departure from the Redskins, Duke was hired as a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association, owing to his borderline paraphilic love for firearms and gun violence. Duke parleyed this position into a mercenary-for-hire business, and offered his services to an oil company to perform an "unspeakably depraved but highly patriotic" job by parachuting into Tehran and bribing a government accountant for oil rights. Although Duke successfully made it to Tehran, he was shortly thereafter captured, tried and convicted for for "high crimes against god and the Islamic Republic of Iran". Duke was taken to a rooftop and put before a firing squad, where the final panel of a strip found him trying to negotiate his own release by bribing the executioners. Following this, Duke's fate was left ambiguous, and when the Iranian Hostage Crisis developed shortly afterward, Trudeau vowed that Duke would remain as a hostage as long as the US Embassy hostages remained in captivity. During this period, attempts were made by Duke's caretaker, Zeke Brenner, to have Duke legally declared deceased after having written a "tell-all" book on his employer. However, Zeke's efforts were thwarted by Zonker, who was declared Duke's sole heir in his will and subsequently placed Duke's estate in escrow.

Following the resolution of the real Hostage Crisis Duke was released as a hitherto-unknown "53rd hostage". It was revealed in flashbacks that Duke had successfully managed to bribe the firing squad, and indeed had unwittingly instigated the entire hostage crisis in the course of his negotiations.

Upon his return to America, he first attempted to seek revenge against Zeke - not only for Zeke's attempts to have Duke declared legally deceased, but for refusing to send Duke the stash of Krugerrands he needed to negotiate his release. After wounding his former employee and fleeing a SWAT team with Honey's help, Duke settled down to a new career as a drug smuggler in Florida, where he used his own smuggling boat to take tourists on paid trips into international waters. This new career move was cut short by an ill-timed sightseeing cruise to the Falkland Islands during the Falklands War. After running the boat into a reef, Duke and Honey suffered a mutiny at the hands of their own cruise passengers, and ended up shipwrecked for months on what they believed to be a deserted island in the Atlantic. They were eventually rescued by a pair of bird watchers, who informed them that they were on Matagorda Island, a few miles off the coast of Texas.

Upon returning to the mainland, Duke became entangled in Hollywood politics, encountering "superagent" Sid Kibbitz. Kibbitz represented Duke in negotiations for a John De Lorean biopic project entitled "Fast Lanes, White Lines". In order to secure funding for the film, Duke became a cocaine dealer, and was shortly thereafter arrested after trying to deal drugs with a man who turned out to be a federal agent.

Shortly after, Trudeau took a 22 month hiatus (from January 1983 to October 1984), during which he helped create a "Doonesbury" Broadway production. The Broadway show, entitled "". While the fate of Duke following the cocaine bust was covered in the plot of the musical - Duke is found guilty, sentenced to five years probation, and required by the court to open and manage a drug rehabilitation center for that period - most readers were unaware of these events due to the show's short run and limited publicity. At the end of the musical, Duke's efforts to seize the Walden Commune so it can be razed and the land used for the rehab center are thwarted, and Trudeau has stated in interviews and on the official website FAQ that, while not shown in the musical, both Duke and Honey were forced to flee the country afterwards.

Following the hiatus, Duke and Honey opened the "Baby Doc College of Offshore Medicine" in Haiti, where Zonker was admitted as a medical student not because of his grades - which were unsurprisingly low - but because the volleyball team needed his talent. After yet another night of drug ingestion, Duke was discovered by Honey looking "more inert than usual" and pronounced dead. The death was portrayed by Trudeau seriously enough that the St. Petersburg Times ran a full obituary.

However, unknown to all but Trudeau (but suspected by fans), Duke was in fact not dead, but merely "zombified" and taken into slavery. He wound up being purchased by the deposed tyrant Duvalier, who used him as a manservant and renamed him Legume. A side effect of the zombification process resulted in Duke losing all of his hair. With a change in eyeglasses and shirt this almost prevented reporter Rick Redfern from recognizing "Legume" as the former Ambassador when Redfern interviewed Duvalier. Redfern notified Zonker of Duke's existence, and Zonker arranged to buy Duke's freedom using most of the 23 million dollar (USD) lottery he'd recently won. Duke's new look lasted through several story arcs before Trudeau returned him to the old hair, Ray-ban sunglasses and aloha shirt. During this period his head took to "exploding" in various cartoonish ways when he was confused or surprised--possibly a lingering side-effect of the zombification, which has persisted into the present day.

Back on his feet, Duke founded the "Dr. Whoopee" condom company, but lost control of it following a bad financial deal with John Gotti. Afterwards, Duke took a much-deserved rest in Bellevue ("Uncle Duke's been committed?" remarked Zonker, "Then our long national nightmare is over"), which was followed by a return to active duty as captain of Donald Trump's executive cruise ship, the "Trump Princess". During Duke's captaincy, Honey returned to Beijing for a college reunion, which led to her inadvertent involvement in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Seeking refuge in the U.S. Embassy after being named one of China's "25 most-wanted hooligans", Honey attracted the attention of Trump, who offered a million-dollar reward for her recovery as a "symbol of freedom." Financial inducement succeeding where personal loyalty failed, Duke smuggled Honey out of China by marrying her, a move that he would come to regret.

At decade's end, Duke was tapped by President George H. W. Bush, to serve as Maximum Proconsul in post-invasion Panama.

The 1990s

The first Gulf War found Duke smuggling arms to the underground resistance in Kuwait, then opening "Club Scud", a popular wartime watering hole in Kuwait City. After working on David Duke's campaign, he began selling doctored photos of the John F. Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas to conspiracy theorists.

After the Republican revolution of 1994 Duke appealed to Speaker Newt Gingrich to help him open a low budget, privatized orphanage called "Nothin' But Orphans." One of his first charges, according to the DNA test results, was one of his long-lost sons, Earl. Abandoning the orphans and Honey, father and son lived in a trailer in Las Vegas, gaming and trafficking in stolen Beanie Babies (which belonged to Mike Doonesbury's own daughter).

Duke also spent some time in the early nineties as a bodyguard for Ollie North. When asked by Honey why North needed a bodyguard Duke replied "The Colonel's got enemies- powerful enemies!" When pressed he admitted, "Well, so far they're mostly imaginary." North was slow to trust him; but Duke soon became a key part of his security during his campaign for senator in Virginia. The public office bug soon became a key part of Duke's increasingly megalomaniacal psyche.

Duke 2000 and beyond

Duke ran for the White House after a short stretch as a key advisor to Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura. His campaign, headquartered in a motel in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, was a resounding failure, despite corporate sponsorships by heavy hitters Lipton Tea and Absolut Vodka. (Through the magic of motion capture technology, Duke was able to announce his candidacy in the real world on "Larry King Live".) A successful business trafficking in stem cells was followed by a lucrative involvement in the messy fallout from the Enron scandal. As conflict with Iraq loomed, Duke made a return to government work, taking up a post as Viceroy-in-Waiting.

During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Duke installed himself as mayor of the (fictional) Iraqi city of Al Amok. In late September 2005, Duke escaped Iraq and relocated to New Orleans to profit from the reconstruction efforts after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. After years of verbal abuse and neglect - with the "final straw" being that she was living in a lifeboat while Duke occupied a first-class suite - Honey finally left Duke. As Duke interviewed new candidates for the position of love-slave and aide-de-camp, none of whom lasted more than a few hours, Honey partied on a Mardi Gras float. Although she did advise Earl on treatment of Duke while he was comatose, she seems to have broken with him for good.

Hunter S. Thompson's death

Between March 7, 2005 (roughly two weeks after Thompson's suicide) and March 12, 2005, the strip ran a tribute, with Uncle Duke lamenting the death of the man he called his "inspiration." The first of these strips [http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2005/db050307.gif] featured a panel with artwork similar to that of Ralph Steadman, who illustrated several of Thompson's works, including "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas".

Current events

Duke spent the period from late 2005 to late 2006 as a high-powered K Street lobbyist under the direction of his son Earl. He was not aware of the fact, since he was also comatose during that period (Earl conjectures this had something to do with losing Honey; Duke denies it). Earl used Duke's knowledge of indigenous people to secure lucrative contracts with Native American tribes. Upon Duke's awakening he and Earl must renegotiate the corridors of power under the new Democratic Congress. Recently there have been signs that Duke is having considerable success, finding a niche as a lobbyist for the repressive Middle Eastern regime of "Trff Bmklfrpzz, President-for-Life of Greater Berzerkistan," strategically located between Iran and Russia. [ [http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20071112 Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose ] ] He is currently trying to deal with the problem of the Berzerkistan Olympic Team defecting in the run-up to the games, recruiting a team of ringers from athletes who didn't make the final cut for their own country's team and swearing them in as citizens of Berzerkistan. It appears that he could be heading for success in this effort, as his longtime sidekick and aide Honey Huan has reappeared on the scene, working for the Credentials Department at the Olympics.

References

External links

* [http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/videodump.html The videos created for the Duke 2000 campaign]