Eugene Leslie Ahern (September 16, 1895 – March 6, 1960) was a cartoonist best known for his bombastic Major Hoople, a pompous character who appeared in the long-run syndicated gag panel Our Boarding House.

Many of Ahern's comic strips took a surreal or screwball approach, notably The Squirrel Cage with its nonsensical catchphrase "Nov shmoz ka pop?"

[1][excessive quote]In his teens, he worked as a model, which he later recalled, "Daily, I slipped on cutaway coats, silk top hats and immaculate white gloves—and stood indolently in the front of a room while an artist sketched me for a catalogue."

In 1914, after three years study at the Chicago Art Institute, Ahern went to Cleveland and worked for the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) syndicate as a sportswriter and artist, initially inking comic drawings for $18 a week.

This period of the strip was, for my money, one of the funniest slapstick sequences ever committed to newsprint... Ahern knew that trying to make Otto Auto a series endlessly plying this single joke was a mistake.

Our Boarding House began September 16, 1921, scoring a huge success with readers after the January 1922 arrival of the fustian Major Hoople.

King Features launched one called Room and Board, starring the very Hoople-like Judge Puffle, in 1936, and hired Ahern himself to write and draw it.

This was a reprise of a move King had made nine years earlier, hiring George Swanson (Elza Poppin) to produce a duplicate of his own NEA strip, Salesman Sam, and it had a similar result—success, but not to the extent of the original.

Today, its memory is overshadowed by its own topper, The Squirrel Cage, where the enigmatically familiar phrase, "Nov shmoz ka pop?"

When he died of a heart attack in 1960, he was survived by his wife, Jane; a daughter, Mrs. Nancy Hayward of Clemmons, North Carolina; a sister, Mrs. Donald McCurdy; and three brothers, Walter, Harold and John, all of Chicago.

[6] Ahern's The Squirrel Cage (1936–53) featured a bearded character known as The Little Hitchhiker, who became notorious for his frequent expression, "Nov shmoz ka pop?