Photos: Charles M. Schulz Museum//Television Academy
Surfing has its own dialect. We’ve got all sorts of strange words that don’t make a whole lot of sense. Non-surfers often still think of surfers as Spicoli types — stoned, stupid, and sunburned. And while there certainly are quite a few of those, surfers aren’t all idiots. But idiot or not, we’re all speaking the same language. One of the words most associated with surfing is “cowabunga.” But what is that word? Where did it come from? Well, as it turns out, it was just made up out of thin air.
I know that cowabunga isn’t a word you’re going to hear anyone saying seriously these days. Bart Simpson took it. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles did too. Before them, though, it was used on The Howdy Doody Show, which was a bit of a cultural phenomenon back in the late ’40s and early ’50s. The Howdy Doody Show had nothing to do with surfing.
According to the head writer for Howdy Doody, a guy named Eddie Kean, needed a catch-phrase for a character called Chief Thunderthud. He needed a word that could be used in multiple situations — saying hello, swearing, or expressing surprise — and another character was already saying “kowagoopa.” He took that weird word, smudged it around a bit, and came up with “kowabonga.”
“Kowagoopa was sweet and soft and charming and lovely,” Kean said in an interview many years ago. “For some reason, I came up with the phrase “kowabongo” for Chief Thunderthud when he got mad or frustrated or whatever — using hard syllables like B and G. For some reason or another, unbeknownst to me at the time, the word caught on long after the show went off the air. What I learned next was that surfers in California picked up the word to screech out when a particularly big wave hit.”
By the mid-1950s, “kowabongo” was a becoming a commonly used word. It was even printed in Mad Magazine, which was insanely popular at the time. That helped push the word’s usage into an even wider audience, and soon it was being said by kids everywhere.
When The Howdy Doody Show went off the air, the word cowabunga didn’t go with it. By the 1960s, California surfers — who were enjoying surfing halcyon days — took it up, but since surfers needed to be different, the spelling changed to “cowabunga.” Then came the thing that really cemented it.
Back in the late 1950s and ’60s, a surf cartoonist named Rick Griffin (you’ve seen his work if you’ve been around surf culture long enough) created Murphy, a cartoon surfer, for SURFER magazine in 1961. Murphy struck a chord with readers, and cowabunga became his catch phrase. The meaning, however, shifted slightly. Now, it was used in times of great exhilaration.
Now, all these years later, the word has been everywhere. Snoopy said it. It was in Lilo & Stitch. While it might not be used in lineups around the world, everyone knows what it means. But the guy who made it up had no idea just how far it would go.
Kean died in 2010, but the word he came up with for a kid’s show way back in the 1940s sure has stuck around. It’s even made its way into the dictionary. “We’ve been all over the map with this thing,” Kean laughed.
