Zonker Harris
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Zonker Harris (his full name is revealed in Doonesbury: A Musical Comedy to be Edgar Zonker Harris) is the stereotypical hippie character in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury. He made his first appearance as a perennial pot-smoking pest plaguing B.D.'s football team in 1971. He moved with Mike, B.D., and the gang to a rural commune (named Walden in homage to Thoreau's 19th century idyll).
While at Walden Commune, Zonker spent most of his time watching TV, getting high, and swimming around in a small puddle (called "Walden Puddle"), which he considered to be a sacred and holy place. In his early years in the strip, Zonker had the ability to talk to plants. (Mike also talked to the plants during Zonker's stint as Lieutenant Governor of Samoa.) In later stories Zonker appeared to lose this ability, but it has sprung back up occasionally, and he has been seen conversing with a marijuana plant, and a scrawny christmas tree in recent years. Other than these few exceptions, this power seems to have left him, and he misses it terribly. When wondering out loud why he had it in the first place, he was told "It was the drugs, man". Ironically, it was a plant that informed him of this.
Zonker is habitually unemployed, and is very protective of his slacker lifestyle. He has taken on temporary jobs as a bartender and a postman, but always leaves these careers as soon as he gets bored with them. The only "work" to which he has shown any diligence is acquiring a suntan. Throughout the 1980s he spent more and more of his time trying to develop "the perfect tan", and even became a celebrity (on par with a professional athlete) for his accomplishments, with George Hamilton as his idol. Eventually he wised up to the damage the sun was doing to his skin, and has since appeared in public service announcements about sun safety.
After his graduation from Walden, Zonker eventually enrolled in "The Baby Doc College of Physicians" (which was run by Uncle Duke; an old family friend). However, he dropped out after winning $23 million from a lottery ticket. Shortly afterward he had to spend most of it on saving Duke from being a zombified slave, but had enough left over to buy a British title (His Lordship the Viscount St. Austell-in-the-Moor Biggleswade-Brixham) and ended up as a live-in nanny for Mike and J.J. Doonesbury (who kicked him out in the early 1990s).
Currently he is a live-in babysitter for B.D. and Boopsie's daughter Samantha in Connecticut. As they live on the former Walden Commune, Zonker has been reunited with his beloved puddle. He supports Samantha by working at McFriendly's, seemingly a portmanteau of McDonald's and Friendly's restaurants.
Occasionally he travels back to his birthplace of California to commune with "Old Surfer Dude", an elderly man who preaches the virtues of the surfer lifestyle in a style reminiscent of both a kung fu master and Yoda. He has been in conflict for many years with David Geffen for denying the public access to his beaches, in conflict with California law. Geffen finally gave in 2005.
Zonker's personality could best be described as "childlike". He is very irresponsible and immature, as well as extremely naive. Unlike most of the strip's characters, he doesn't follow politics, even to the point of being ignorant of who the president of the country is. He is also entirely uninterested in sex and romance and has never pursued a romantic relationship. He claims that this is because his heart was broken by a girl when he was ten years old, and that this convinced him that love wasn't worth the trouble. It is entirely possible that he doesn't even understand the basic mechanics of sex.
There is an accessway in Malibu named after Zonker. [1] On November 2, 1982, Zonker Harris received one vote for the governorship of Illinois.[citation needed]
