goon [M19th] To many people a goon is associated with the creators of the radio comedy series The Goon Show in 1951. The original sense of the word was ‘a stupid or hapless person’—it came from the name of the US cartoon character Alice the Goon, created by the cartoonist E. C. Segar (1894–1938) and appearing in the Popeye strips that also introduced Eugene the Jeep (see jeep). Segar probably took the name from the dialect term gooney ‘a simpleton’, recorded from the 1580s. In the USA in the 1930s a goon also became a thug hired to terrorize people, and in the Second World War the term was given by British and US prisoners of war to their German guards.