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Who’s the dapper Union general in a double-breasted coat, you ask? Why, it’s none other than Galusha Pennypacker in his Civil War days. Pennypacker (unlike many hard-to-pronounce names on this blog) is a jubilant joy for the tongue, like pedalpusher or Miss Moneypenny. It also brings Mother Goose to mind: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pennypackers. 

Born on the first of June, 1844 in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, Pennypacker’s life began with tragedy; his mother passed while he was yet a baby, and his father, a veteran of the Mexican-American war, decided he would rather go to California to see if there was gold in them thar hills than provide for his son. Raised by his grandmother, he grew up in the very home occupied by George Washington and used as headquarters during the Revolutionary war, in which his grandfather fought.

So it was no surprise that Pennypacker, at only 16, enlisted…

Today’s beholder of a funny name is testerosterone-filled trabadour Manly Wade Wellman. Technically, a troubadour is a composer or poet, while Wellman was an author of sci-fi and fantasy, but writing is writing, no?

Before we dig into the person that was Wellman, I’d like us to reflect on how his name contains both Manly and Man. And if, purely hypothetically, one were to drink three pints of Blue Moon and glance at his name, it might appear to say Manly Well-Made Man. His image does not betray his name.

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As they say on Chat Stew, “So meaty!”

Wellman passed away 30 years ago this month, but during his nearly 83 years, his science fiction and fantasy stories appeared in such pulps as Astounding Stories, Startling Stories, Unknown and Strange Stories. He was a contributor to the legendary Weird Tales, which published his fantasy and horror stories…

Check this out: Martial artist Hung Yan-Yan hanging from some sort of bamboo scaffolding thing. His past tense verb name is present participling. When’s the last time you present-participled your name?

Today we present to you the hairless-headed Yan-Yan–actor, stuntman, martial artist, and action director. While you may not have heard of Yan-Yan the man, you have probably heard tell of Mr. Jet Li, for whom he stunt doubles. If it doesn’t ring a bell, Li played the villain in Lethal Weapon 4.  I’m wondering why Jet Li the wushu champion even needed a stunt double. Turns out he was considered “past his prime” (even though Yan-Yan was only two years his junior) and hurt his ankle, so there you go.

It also turns out that Chinese people like to take perfectly pronounceable H words like Hung and turn them into Xiong to confuse the rest of us. So Hung Yan-Yan (up there…

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Actually, there’s no need to “Netflix and chill” when a Chill Wills flick is on the tube. It demands your full attention. The colorful, guitar-strumming character actor above was a 43-year film veteran, whose career was defined by numerous cowboy roles, including Giant, The Alamo, and McClintock!

Chill Theodore Wills was born on a hot July day in 1902 in Seagoville, Texas. A musician from his youth, he performed from the age of 12 with tent shows, in vaudeville, and with stock companies.

He formed a musical group, Chill Wills and His Avalon Boys. During an appearance at the Trocadero in Hollywood, they were spotted by an RKO executive, who featured them as a group in several low-budget Westerns. His first movie, It’s a Gift came out in 1934, and led to a prominent appearance with both The Avalon Boys and as the bass-singing voice of Stan Laurel in Way Out West (1937). Soon…

When you see the name Ji-Tu, your brain probably checks its card catalog for best matches and then pulls up the sport jujitsu. But he is not jujitsu; he’s a veteran actor.

http://agianttoremember.com/

You may recognize Ji-Tu Combuka from his acting roles in Roots, Harlem Nights, Brewster’s Millions, Mandingo, or Bound for Glory. In a time where black actors are currently protesting the lack of roles for minorities (specifically African-Americans), we can look to Cumbuka as a successful actor of over a hundred films and television series, spanning the decades.

And, yes, Ji-Tu is his given name. Per the site agianttoremember.com, it was all Cumbuka’s grandmother’s idea. In Swahili, “Ji-Tu” means giant, and “Cumbuka means “to remember.” How she knew he was going to grow up to be 6’5″ is another question altogether.

Born in Alabama on March 4, 1942 to a Baptist minister who believed acting was “the devil’s work,” Cumbuka grew up in…

Merry Christmas, everyone! Today we do not spotlight only one funny-named person, but some of the poor souls who had to share their birthdays with the baby Jesus. One gift instead of two. I wonder if anyone born on Christmas enjoys it?

Well, we can’t ask Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, because he died in 1948. Being born on that day probably wasn’t a problem for him in the city of Karachi, but now 12/25 is observed as a national holiday in Pakistan because it is HIS birthday. Way to be famous! P.S. How many Muhammed Alis are there? One is enough. Right, Cassius Clay?

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Now one name NO ONE steals these days is Adolf. Yep, that name had a quick decline in the 1940s. But that was way before Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus, was born on Christmas day in 1876. He won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1928 for…

These inspired lyrics are from the 80s hit “Do What You Do” by Jermaine LaJuane Jackson. ♫♪ I remember rollerskating to them back in the day, and thinking what a funny chorus that was. But not nearly as funny as the names of his kids, which we will discover today. Shown here is a solid handful of some of them.

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Today I learned that  it was not Michael who first parted ways with The Jackson 5. It was Jermaine. While his brothers decided to leave Motown Records, he chose to stay. You see, Motown’s founder was Berry Gordy, and Jermaine was enamored of his daughter, Hazel.

He took Hazel to be his wife in 1973, while still a teen. Together, they had Jermaine, Jr and Autumn Joi (not to be confused with Almond Joy). But fidelity was not his bag, baby. Jermaine got himself a girlfriend named Margaret Maldonado, who gave birth to Jeremy

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PaNaTa, y’all. Do you see this name? With random capitalization? And it’s not even a contrived, trying-uber-hard-to-be-unique NBA name. I can’t even hazard as to why they wrote it that way, but goodness, it looks like a series of elements on the periodic table. Protactinium, Sodium, Tantalum. Awesome.

Look at that tree from which she stems!! Puchethi? Fernaty? Are you kidding me? Chief Techumseh, a manatee, Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and some meth? You can’t make this up.

Deep breath. I presume y’all don’t have any facebook friends named PaNaTa. I’m just gonna go out on a limb here and call this one special. Now I don’t know if that rhymes with banana, but I sho nuff do know that it’s just one letter’s difference from a Mexican fiesta! Ole! Oh, honey, I wonder if they called her piñata.

I guess they didn’t–because her…

When you read “pigmeat,” you probably think of bacon–the breakfast meat or Kevin. But today’s funny name is no strip nor link nor patty; today we discover comedian, singer, actor, and dancer Dewey “Pigmeat” Markham (April 18, 1904 – December 13, 1981). And yes, there is “ham” in his last name. Can you ever have too much pork?

Born in North Carolina (a state famous for pulled pork), his nickname came from a stage routine, in which he declared himself to be “Sweet Poppa Pigmeat.”

Incidentally, if you were wondering what his Bacon number was (the degrees of separation from his movie career to Kevin Bacon’s), it’s 3.

Pigmeat began his career in traveling music and burlesque shows, running away from home at the age of just 14. He took up with a white showman referred to as “Mr. Booker” who “came over to us before the show with a can of Stein’s…

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Most self-respecting Americans would recognize that mouse and that Disney mustache anywhere. But today we celebrate the man on the right, Ubbe Eert “Ub” Iwerks, aka Walt Disney’s oldest and dearest friend. Ub was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1901. His father, Eert Ubbe Iwerks, appears, in naming his son, to have simply switched his own first and middle name, a move that seems frankly lazy to me. Father Eert had emigrated to the U.S. in 1869 from the German village of Uttum in East Frisia. In modern Germany, East Frisians in general are the traditional butt of ethnic jokes, an embarrassment that the American-born little Ub was spared.

Forty years after Eert’s emigration, the fully-grown Ub met Walt Disney while working at the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio. Both moved on to work as illustrators for the Kansas City Slide Newspaper Company, and eventually decided to work in animation…