Transcription
Have you ever wondered what the heck is Jughead's hat because this is not a crown? That is called a whoopee cap, sometimes also called a Palooka-ville kingpin hat, or in fact a Jughead hat.
And whenever Jughead was introduced in the '40s, everyone would have known exactly what that hat is and what it is supposed to represent and how it even gets made. That is because during those days, essentially every single man was required to wear some sort of felt fedora hat whenever he left the house. And whenever one of those felt caps would get too worn out to wear, you wouldn't throw it away. Instead, you would invert it and like push out the crown, and then you would cut off the brim and cut it into this like scallop-like crown fashion, thus creating the whoopee cap.
And because the whoopee cap was essentially as close as what they could get to a casual cap during those days, it was used primarily by two groups of people: hard physical blue-collar workers like factory people or like mechanics who would use it to keep their hair out of their face and grease and oil out of their hair, and snot-nosed brat children because as you can imagine, a lot of those passed-down hats that got turned into whoopee caps were hand-me-downs from father to son. Which is why, depending on the circumstance, whenever you see this in media, it can either depict like just a spungnacious little kid or funny enough like an antisocial like street-tough thug.
Eventually, as baseball caps and other types of headwear became more popular, the whoopee cap went the way of the dodo. To the point that in Riverdale, Jughead has to wear a beanie version of the whoopee cap because if he wore an actual one, no one would know what the heck he has on his head. And while in mid-century America, whenever these cartoons were drawn, everyone would have known exactly what this is, it's now one of those things that only lives on in those cartoons.
But let me know, did you ever wear a whoopee cap? And do you think that they should come back? Let me know.