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From Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 4/24/05

Only the throwaway front-matter gag is worth commenting on in Sunday’s BB & SS, and it’s only worth commenting on to the extent that it enrages me. But boy, does it enrage me. Here’s a tip: when you make jokes that emphasize the weird, Depression-era limbo in which these hill folks seem to live most of the time, sometimes the strip is amusing. When you take transient catchphrases from the late ’90s and try to play them off as “cool,” it just feeds my rage … rage … RAGE!

Anyway, since I have nothing to say about these panels except that I hate them, I thought I’d turn to more pleasant matters and point out that I am slowly but surely falling in love with the “next” teasers that come at the end of Sunday editions of Spider-Man. They’re ludicrously overblown, no doubt on purpose. There’s this:

And this:

And, my personal favorite, this:

Yes, who does have the rhino? I’m sure there are versions of these that you can come up with for other comic strips, which exercise I leave to you, my eager commenting minions of humorous evil.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 11/16/04

Do you ever read a comic and get the feeling that you’re just missing something? Like, is there a connection between a stovepipe hat and cleaning a chimney that I’m missing? Is the fact that she’s cleaning the chimney part of the joke, or is it just an arbitrary chore that the artist picked out, and it the strip would be just as “funny” if Maw were sloppin’ the hogs or darnin’ socks or whatever the hell it is she does with her time? Would I get this if I lived in the heartland and actually did an honest day’s work around the house myself, instead of hiring a migrant chimney sweep like the Chardonnay-swilling member of the liberal elite that I am?

Like most Americans — heck, I’ll go out on a limb and say most people — the first thing I think when seeing a hat like that is “Abraham Lincoln.” Maybe it would be funnier if Maw were saving the union or something, though you’d think that being a proponent of the Union cause would get you tarred an’ feathered in place like Hootin’ Holler.

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 10/15/04

Many times, I’m sure, you’ve read Barney Google and Snuffy Smith and said, “Jus’ whar in tarnation do these folks live, anyhow?” Well, today’s installment answers that question.

The various names of a long sandwich on Italian bread (sub, hero, grinder, hoagie, what have you) have long been the example used when discussing dialectical variations in American English, but I’d argue that the nationwide advent of Subway has killed off most of the variants. In my mind, the most prominent remaining geographical tip-off terms are those used for soft drinks: do you say “pop”, “soda”, or “coke”?

Now, I grew up in Buffalo, New York, which is pop country. I remember going to Los Angeles when I was a kid and asking for a pop at a restaurant, which utterly baffled our waiter. I went to college in soda-land, with a lot of kids from New York City, and had the pop beaten out of me by relentless verbal abuse, but I still get excited when I see it used in print. Even if, you know, it’s being used by toothless, semiliterate hillbillies.

Anyway, the first thing I did when I saw this comic was to go to the alarmingly well researched county-by-county map at popvssoda.com. As you can see, the only traditionally hillbilly-populated areas that fall into the pop zone lie in a relatively restricted corner at the north end of the Appalachians: West Virginia, western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and western Pennsylvania (affectionately known by its inhabitants as “Pennsyltucky”). So there you have it, America: we’ve used linguistic science to narrow down the true location of Hootin’ Holler, which we can now thankfully avoid.

I like the fact that printed matter in Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, like the sign in the first panel, is written in the exact same wacky mangled spelling as the word balloons. I’d also like to note that just about every word balloon ends in two exclamation points. If anyone actually gets excited, look out!

Also, while we’re getting all linguistic, I’d like to revisit a comment I made in my last B.B. & S.S. entry, in which I remarked that Whar Th’ Boys Are would be a good beach movie for hillbillies or pirates. Upon further reflection, it seems clear to me that the pirate version would be Whar Th’ Boys Be.

In today’s alarming search engine query, we have a lonely Web-surfing pervert who likes mature, professional women, evidenced by his plugging “+’sally forth’ +nude” into AltaVista.