I grew up reading (well, looking at mostly) the Snuffy Smith comic strip in the pages of my hometown paper, the Akron Beacon Journal by Fred Lasswell. It’s premise, a fantastically lazy unemployable and unlikable weird looking little man and his strained marital relations with a much bigger spouse, didn’t interest me much. It was to my mind just a rural version of Andy Capp, another one of the paper’s strips that I was more aware of than actually read. I never gave it’s rustic setting a second thought seeing as how television at the time, the 1960′s, was thick with hillbilly themed comedies (Hee-Haw, The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, etc.) and seeing as how it looked pretty much like this:

Even at a early age I found his predictable antics barren at best, and never dreamed that the strip had been around for decades under the name Barney Google, a much different and, to my mind, better strip. The creation of the incredibly talented Billy DeBeck it was one of those early comic strips that was insanely popular and infiltrated every aspect of American popular culture, most notably the ”Barney Google Song” (a.k.a. ”Barney Google (Foxtrot)” ), the song with the haunting refrain Barney Google—with the goo-goo-googly eyes!

Over the years I finally wasable to read chunks of Barney Google in collections and old comic books but I never got the chance to read it on a regular basis, which was, I told myself, the reason why I could certainly admire the skill behind the strip I never actually warmed to it. Oh I admired the hell out of Billy DeBeck’s work but contrarian son of a bitch that I am, I felt his signature creature wasn’t Barney or Snuffy, but Bunky, the super intelligent baby who became the star of “Parlor, Bedroom and Bath”, the strip that for years and years literally topped the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith Sunday strips. Your opinion may differ but if you want to see it for yourself you can check it out here:http://jeffoverturf.blogspot.com/2010/06/nemo-3-billy-deback-and-parlor-bedroom.html

In 1934 hillbilly humor was a national craze and while visiting the tiny Blue Mountain community of Hootin’ Holler Barney was introduced to his cousin Sniffy Smith. And for reasons yet to be discovered in spite of his distaste and distrust of big city ways the tiny moonshiner abandoned the wife and child he couldn’t bother to support for long periods of time to follow Barney and mooch off of his meager opportunities. In their fairly squalid adventures Snuffy attempted to deal with urban life; hilarity supposedly ensued but I’ve pretty much got to take their word for it because I for one just don’t “get” the appeal of Snuffy Smith And I’ve really tried; thanks to the King Features website, comicskingdom.com (who, unbeknownst to them, provide me with the “after and before” examples of the strip seen above) I’ve steadily been working my way through 1939 for almost a year now and I just flat out don’t see the funny. Maybe it’s just that “hillbillies” (like, say tramps) are just one of those things that just don’t age very well. And I must confess I find Snuffy’s mountain patoisto be mostly impenetrable jibberish. But, mainly, I just don’t find a serial philanderer who’s also a homicidal maniac with a hair trigger to be all that funny and frankly don’t understand why America found him so damn amusing. It just doesn’t make sense, unless Snuffy was using his magical “eyeball” (basically an evil eye) to convince a generation of readers just couldn’t do without the desperate antics of an insufferable douchebag.

Like most comic strip creators DeBeck must have felt a lot of pressure to get a least one of his characters into uniform, in spite of the fact tht both Bareny and Snuffy were both obviously too old and overwhelmingly unfit for military duty. With Snuffy being the most popular he got the nod and I have to hand to DeBeck; he found a way to get a character so thoroughly repellant and antiauthoritarian (in a lot of ways Snuffy Smith was a proto punk) involved in standard Army Game antics without “rehabitating” him in any way. And where before Snuffy would settle problems with either physical violence or barely understandable invective here he schemes his way around the rules, revealing a keen intellect. And I bet the newly conscripted servicemen must have just loved it

Believe it or not Snuffy even made it to the movies in the remarkably named Hillbilly Blitzkieg. See for yourself: