A surfer riding the tube of a wave off Teahupo’o (Tahiti)
1 August 2022
Cowabunga is an exclamation of surprise. Originally, it expressed displeasure, but in the mouths of 1950s–60s surfers it came to mean an expression of pleasant surprise or enthusiasm. The word was coined by Eddie Kean, head writer for the Howdy Doody show, a children’s television show that aired in the United States from 1947–60. Kean originally used cowabunga as a faux-Native American term.
The exact date of Kean’s coinage is unknown as most of the early episodes of Howdy Doody are lost. A 1997 Chicago Tribune interview with Kean places the date as 1949, but according to IMDb, the character of Chief Thunderthud, who originally uttered the word, did not begin to appear on the show until 1950. An extract from the Tribune interview reads:
The 79-year-old lounge pianist and composer coined cowabunga in 1949 while working as head writer for “The Howdy Doody Show.”
Only, he spelled it “kowabonga.” The plot thickens.
“On ‘Howdy’ we had a character named Chief Thunderthud,” says Kean, “and (host) Buffalo Bob Smith rightly thought the old boy needed his own greeting. Movie Indians said ‘How!’ in those days, you know, but I always felt ‘How’ sounded stupid and contrived. Did any self-respecting Indian ever say ‘How!’? I seriously doubt it.
“Our Princess Summerfall Winterspring used kowagoopa as her greeting, so kowabonga seemed logical enough for Chief Thunderthud. At least Bob and I felt kowabonga worked…”
Buffalo Bob Smith, semi-retired and living near Flat Rock, N.C., remembers Kean as “a creative genius with a marvelous sixth sense for knowing what kids would enjoy. Only Eddie Kean could have come up with kowabonga…and believe me, kowabonga caught on!
“Bill Lecornec walked in dressed as Chief Thunderthud and rarely got his line out,” Smith says. “The Peanut Gallery always beat him with their own `Kowabonga!’”
(Lecornec, who played Chief Thunderthud for 13 seasons, keeps a low profile in his Miami neighborhood these days, declining any discussion of “Howdy Doody,” or of cowabunga.)
“The full line went ‘Kowabonga, Buffalo Bob!’" Kean says. “Later, I had the chief use kowabonga as a mild curse in his fights with Clarabell. Kowabonga meant ‘hello’ or ‘darn it!’ My preferred spelling was kowabonga, but I see where the surfers changed it to cowabunga.
A later interview with Kean, conducted in 2005 by the Television Academy Foundation tells roughly the same tale, but with slightly different details:
This is crazy. In the show Clarabelle squirted the villain, Indian chief, Chief Thunderthud, He started screaming when he got squirted. I had to come up with something for him to say. Now, we couldn't say, “Damn you, Clarabelle,” or anything close to that. Earlier in the show, I gave the Indian Princess and another Indian, Chief Featherman—and we loved Indians and clowns together—a greeting to say, “Hello,” kowagoopa, instead of the usual Indian greeting, How, because I didn’t want to resemble real Indians that much. So, kowagoopa was sweet and soft and charming and lovely, and for some reason they came up with the phrase kowabonga for Chief Thunderthud when he got mad and got squirted or mad or frustrated, or whatever, using hard syllables like B and G, and for some reason or another, unknown to me for a long time, the word caught on for long after the show left the air.
As with many slang terms, which usually originate in speech, the spelling varies in early uses before settling down to a canonical form, which in this case has become cowabunga.
The word begins appearing in print by 1954. The Oxford English Dictionary has this citation from a comic book based on the show (Howdy Doody #26, Dell Comics) from January of that year:
Kowa-Bunga! Then Me Fix You Good! You Be Sorry.
Another early appearance is in an article from Jersey City’s Jersey Journal of 27 September 1954 which details a live charity show for children with cerebral palsy that featured characters from the show:
“Kowabunga,” Chief Feathman [sic] shouted the magic words from the stage, and out Zippy came, acting more like people than people
* * *
THE LITTLE chimpanzee skated around the stage, hugged kids who came too close, chewed on a policeman’s boot and generally wrecked the furniture.
“Kowabunga,” said Chief Featherman, in full Indian regalia, and out of the runway came Papoose Shining Leaf, who didn’t get the kids to scream as loud as Zippy did, but was much prettier.
Papoose Shining leaf, whose real name is Eleanor Duffy, and who hails from Jersey City, sang a few songs, started clapping her hands, and 1,000 kids applauded with her.
Frame from a 1954 Mad magazine parody of the Howdy Doody television show. Chief Thunderthud utters Kowabunga! as he and Buffalo Bob flee from Clarabell who is about to squirt them with seltzer.
And kowabunga also appears in Mad Magazine in December 1954 in a spoof of the television show. In the spoof, which alters the names of the characters presumably for copyright reasons, Chief Thundamelvin utters Kowabunga! as he and Buffalo Bill flee from Clarabella who is about to squirt them with seltzer.
The cultural insensitivity in the supposedly Native-American characters on the TV show is palpable nowadays, but the pseudo Native American connection is not carried through in later, popular uses of the word.
By the early 1960s, the word had been picked up by surfers, who standardized the spelling and shifted the meaning to the more positive sense. Their use of cowabunga was, perhaps, influenced by the Hawaiian word kupaianaha, meaning amazing or wonderful. A 1965 Peanuts cartoon has Snoopy using the phrase while surfing.
Frame from a 1965 Peanuts comic strip depicting Snoopy on a surfboard yelling “Cowabunga!”
The word occasionally cropped up in other contexts. In 1978 television special Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, the Muppet Cookie Monster yells Cowabunga! as he smashes with a karate chop a typewriter that he was using to write a letter to Santa Claus. By this point, the word seems to have infiltrated the culture of Japanese martial arts, or at least the American media’s depiction of that culture.
Cowabunga was introduced to a new and wider audience when it became a catchphrase of two popular television cartoon characters. The Simpsons began appearing as a series of shorts on the Tracey Ullman Show starting in April 1987, before being spun off into their own show in 1989. The character of Bart Simpson used the phrase on occasion in those shorts. And in December of 1987, cowabunga became the catchword of the character Michelangelo in the animated television show Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987–96). The Turtles clearly carry on the connection with Japanese martial arts that can be seen in the earlier Sesame Street bit. I haven’t determined which of the two characters, Michelangelo or Bart, was the first to utter it, but it’s clear that the resurgence in the word’s popularity was sparked by the Turtles, as the Simpsons did not reach a wide audience until their own show hit the airwaves two years later in 1989. And while Bart did on occasion utter the word, his association with cowabunga was mainly through t-shirts and other merchandizing items that did not start appearing until 1989, indicating that the word’s popularity among the new generation had already started to rise due to the Turtles.
Sources:
“Appendix: Etymology/cowabunga.” Wiktionary, 16 October 2021.
“Bill LeCornec.” Internet Movie Database (IMDb), 2022.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. cowabunga!, excl.
Kean, Eddie. Interview with Karen Herman, Television Academy, 3 November 2005.
Mueller, Jim. “Holy Cowabunga!” Chicago Tribune, 21 May 1997.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2007, s.v. cowabunga, int.
“Shining Leaf, Chimp Star in Cerebral Palsy Show.” Jersey Journal (Jersey City, New Jersey), 27 September 1954, 4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Image credits: Duncan Rawlinson, 2007, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license; Elder, Bill. “Howdy Dooit.” Mad, December 1954, fair use of a single, low-resolution cartoon frame to illustrate the topic under discussion; Charles Schulz, Peanuts, 9 August 1965, fair use of a single, low-resolution cartoon frame to illustrate the topic under discussion.