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Archive: Barney Google & Snuffy Smith

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Perfect thing to mindlessly chew while staring at your phone

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Gasoline Alley, 3/25/23

Not that there’s much by way of competition, but Ida Knoe, the evil talking doll who can travel through time, is now officially my favorite character in the century-long history of Gasoline Alley. Today’s strip, in which she taunts these children into dangerous meddling in the timestream, really seals the deal. “What’s a matter, are you guys babies? Are you worried that you’re accidentally going to make Hitler president or make your parents mad? Don’t be chicken!”

Judge Parker, 3/25/23

Meanwhile, back in NYC, Sophie and Reena are getting into the latest big city fad, which is ordering pizza with nothing on it. No cheese, no sauce, no nothing, just a flat triangle of baked dough. “These kids today, they’re … they’re pure nihilists,” said the Village Voice’s food critic, sweating openly. “They don’t believe in anything anymore.”

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/25/23

Look, you might make fun of the inhabitants in Hootin’ Holler as “financially illiterate bumpkins,” but Snuffy just invented a new kind of lottery-based financial derivative, so maybe you need to start giving them some credit.

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Problems and solutions

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Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/23/23

I think it’s worthwhile to occasionally reflect on how weird the newspaper comic Snuffy Smith is, as a cultural object. Starting out as an entirely different strip about city life in the 1920s, during the Great Depression it changed its setting and vibe entirely to cash in on the vogue for vaudeville-derived jokes about hillbillies and kept going with that for more than 80 years. This humor genre only imperfectly mapped onto the lives of the Appalachian rural poor at the time, and has stayed more or less locked in place as reality drifts further and further from it. That’s how you get oddities like today, in which a distant memory of deadly clashes over land and status that arose between kinship groups in the absence of a government with a monopoly on legitimate violence gets processed through decades worth of creative and cultural drift and comes out as “a new world record for stubborness [sic].”

Gil Thorp, 3/23/23

This is pretty much a worst case scenario for a one-day celebrity coaching cameo: the celebrity coach not only completely revamps your team’s overall gameplan, but does so in a way that requires that everyone be at peak physical condition in order to execute the new strategy. Then he leaves and makes it Coaches Thorp and Cami’s problem! At least the Mudlarks will have some time to really perfect their “Apache basketball” techniques before [aide whispers in ear] oh, right, I’ve neglected to tell all of you that in fact Milford has had an undefeated season thanks to its pre-Kareem strategy and now the only game left to play is the championship. This’ll go great!

Pluggers, 3/23/23

Look, I’ve read Pluggers every day since 2006 and I feel pretty confident in saying that this isn’t even remotely true. Pluggers have a ton of problems, and most of them cannot be solved by a cup of coffee. A lot of them can’t be solved at all!

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Deadly Sunday

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Mary Worth, 3/19/23

It’s true and tragic that the veterinarians have higher than typical rates of death by suicide, and it’s also great that there’s a support group specifically targeted to them. But you have to admit that it’s very funny that Estelle has been blown off by a Ed after exactly two dates that were a year apart, and the conclusion she’s come to is “He’s probably avoiding me because he wants to kill himself.”

Rex Morgan, M.D., 3/19/23

Am I little sad that we didn’t get several strips of Hank Jr. watching rambling hour-long YouTube videos of “cruise tips from an expert”? Am I disappointed that we weren’t treated to the several wrong turns he and Yvonne took on their journey to this cute little out-of-the-way eatery? Yes, of course. But just as it was designed to do, the carefully crafted narrative of this strip BLEW THOSE THOUGHTS OUT OF MY MIND in the final panel by teasing me with the prospects of who the last-minute musical guests are. Will one of them be “Mud Mountain Murphy?” Will his signature musical power move — pretending that he has to take a huge shit in order to move up in the order from opener to headliner — backfire spectacularly, during this cruise’s inevitable norovirus outbreak?

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, 3/19/23

This is actually a cunning move on Snuffy’s part. The pastor is about to wander onto the landholdnings of the Barlows, who don’t take kindly to being hit up for money, and Snuffy’s made sure that his clan rivals’ alibi isn’t going to hold up in court.