The root word for befuddled is fudd, and the prefix for fudd is Elmer. He's the poor little dupe with the lightbulb head (with nary a watt in it) who is the volunteer foil for Bugs Bunny's lightning antics. He's practically taunted by the universe thank goodness he's too dim to realize it.
With his baby-like enunciation and tremulous voice that seems always on the verge of tears (provided by the inimitable Arthur Q. Bryant), Elmer is the hunter who can't really stomach the kill. In fact, in the Bugs Bunny short A Wild Hare, he's grief stricken when he believes he's really shot the rabbit. "I'm a murderer!" he wails, to Bugs's (and the audience's) supreme amusement.
Elmer is most often cast as the hunter on the trail of Bugs or Daffy Duck, or both, although he often turns in his shotgun to take on other roles.
Because he takes everything at face value (he is not deep enough to take things any other way), he is easily confused. In Hare Tonic, Elmer brings Bugs home for dinner (rather, as dinner) only to have the "wascawwy wabbit" dupe him into thinking there is a terrible outbreak of "rabbititus" and that they must be quarantined.
He is easily influenced, even by his enemies, and is more than willing to believe anything he is told, which plays right into Bugs's specialty. He is like a child, curious and incapable of true wariness, which makes him the perfect target for Bugs, whose well-being Elmer is constantly threatening.
The pair played off each other so well that they were cast against each other in over twenty cartoons, including The Wabbit Who Came To Supper, Bugs Bonnets, the classic Rabbit of Seville, and Robot Rabbit, in which Elmer buys a robot to rid his carrot garden of the gray pest.
What's Opera, Doc?, became Elmer and Bugs's (and Chuck Jones's) magnum opus, a six-minute distillation of Wagner's "Ring" cycle with Elmer as Siegfried and Bugs as Brünhilde. In keeping with his rather long-term success at wool-pulling, Bugs also dons a rather shape-enhancing women's sweater and jodhpurs to charm and eventually disarm the love-struck Elmer in Rabbit Seasoning.
Elmer also appeared with Daffy Duck in several cartoons such as The Stupid Cupid, in which Elmer as Cupid just can't seem to get it right. In the classic Wise Quackers, Daffy volunteers to be Elmer's slave (thus enslaving Elmer's household). And in What Makes Daffy Duck, Elmer has to compete with a hungry fox to catch Daffy-who pits them against each other instead.
But Elmer never really met trouble until he tried to figure out whether it's duck or rabbit season in a trio of Chuck Jones shorts that formed a trilogy of brilliant comic dialog and animation. Duck! Rabbit! Duck!, Rabbit Fire and the earlier mentioned Rabbit Seasoning became benchmarks of comic timing.
Elmer set aside his shotgun (momentarily) in Friz Freleng's Kit for Cat, in which Sylvester competes with a tiny kitten to be Elmer's pet cat, and Heir Conditioned. He again does battle for a good night's sleep with the ever-crooning Sylvester in another Freleng short, Back Alley Oproar.
The thing that sends Elmer into a fury is being made a fool, but he is such a fool that most of the time, he never notices. And he's got dozens of cartoons to prove it.
