Barney Google and Snuffy Smith
Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, originally Take Barney Google, for Instance, is an American comic strip created by cartoonist Billy DeBeck. Since its debut on June 17, 1919, the strip has gained a large international readership, appearing in 900 newspapers in 21 countries. The initial appeal of the strip led to its adaptation to film, animation, popular song, and television. It added several terms and phrases to the English language and inspired the 1923 hit tune "Barney Google " with lyrics by Billy Rose, as well as the 1923 record "Come On, Spark Plug!"
Barney Google himself, once the star of the strip and a very popular character in his own right, was at one point almost entirely phased out of the feature. An increasingly peripheral player in his own strip beginning in the late 1930s, Barney was officially "written out" in 1954, although he occasionally returned for cameo appearances, often years apart. During a period between 1997 and 2012, Barney Google was not seen in the strip at all. Barney was reintroduced to the strip in 2012, and has slowly returned to being a semi-regular character.
Snuffy Smith, who was initially introduced as a supporting player in 1934, has now been the comic strip's central character for over 60 years. Nevertheless, the feature is still titled Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.
As of June 17, 2019, Barney Google has run for an entire century, making it the third-longest running and uninterrupted comics series of all time, after Rudolph Dirks' The Katzenjammer Kids and Frank O. King's Gasoline Alley. After Gasoline Alley, it is the second-longest running newspaper comic still in syndication and producing new episodes as of 2021.
Characters and story
Barney Google
Like Mutt and Jeff, Barney Google started out on the sports page. First appearing as a daily strip in the sports sections of the Chicago Herald and Examiner in 1919, it was originally titled Take Barney Google, for Instance. The title character, a little fellow with big "banjo" eyes, was an avid sportsman and ne'er-do-well involved in poker, horse racing, and prize fights.The "goggle-eyed, moustached, gloved and top-hatted, bulbous-nosed, cigar-chomping shrimp" was relentlessly henpecked by "a wife three times his size". The formidable Mrs. Lizzie Google, or "the sweet woman", sued Barney for divorce and thereafter virtually disappeared from the strip. By October 1919, the strip was distributed by King Features Syndicate and was published in newspapers across the country.
His name might have been an inspiration for the large number name googol, which in turn inspired the company name Google.
Spark Plug
Beginning on July 17, 1922, the strip took a momentous turn in popularity with the seemingly innocuous introduction of an endearing race horse named "Spark Plug". Barney's beloved "brown-eyed baby" was a bow-legged nag that seldom raced, and was typically seen almost totally covered by his trademark patched blanket with his name scrawled on the side. Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz was known to his friends as Sparky, a lifelong nickname given to him by his uncle as a diminutive of Barney Google's Spark Plug. Comics historian Don Markstein noted:In deference to his enormous popularity during this period, the strip was retitled Barney Google and Spark Plug. DeBeck's strip hit its peak of popularity with Spark Plug at about the same time the 1923 song "Barney Google", written by Billy Rose and Con Conrad, was sweeping the country. It became one of the best known, most iconic novelty records of its era, and has been recorded by such artists as The Happiness Boys, Eddie Cantor, The Andrews Sisters, Spike Jones, and Mitch Miller:
Other popular characters and concepts introduced in the strip about this time include "Sunshine", Barney's black jockey, a troublesome ostrich named "Rudy", "Sully", a monocled champion wrestler, and the mysterious hooded fraternity "The Order of the Brotherhood of Billy Goats", a parody of mystic secret societies. Their password was "O-K-M-N-X" which, deciphered, stood for a standard breakfast order. Barney was elected "Exalted Angora" in 1928.
Image:Bdebeck31.jpg|thumb|center|720px|Billy DeBeck's Barney Google
Transition to ''Barney Google and Snuffy Smith''
In 1934, an even greater change took place when Barney and his horse visited the North Carolina mountains and met a volatile, equally diminutive moonshiner named Snuffy Smith. Hillbilly humor was popular at the time. The strip increasingly focused on the southern Appalachian hamlet of "Hootin' Holler", with Snuffy as the main character. The mountaineer locals are suspicious of any outsiders, referred to as "flatlanders" or even worse, "revenooers".Snuffy Smith was so popular that his name was added to the strip's title in the late 1930s, while the top-billed Barney Google became an increasingly peripheral character in what once was his own comic. Eventually, Barney Google left Hootin' Holler in 1954 to return to the city, and was essentially written out of the strip except as a very occasional visitor. Barney has appeared rarely in the feature from the mid-1950s on, but returned to Hootin' Holler for a visit in a series of strips beginning on February 19, 2012. Prior to 2012, Barney had not appeared in the strip since January 5, 1997, a span of over 15 years. Nevertheless, even during Barney's long absence the strip was always officially titled Barney Google & Snuffy Smith.
Barney Google — usually with Spark Plug in tow — made occasional return trips to Hootin' Holler from 2012 to 2020, and moved back permanently to Hootin' Holler in a series of strips run in May 2021. He now appears in the strip as more of a semi-regular character.
Also appearing again on a semi-regular basis is Spark Plug, and — slightly more frequently — new cast addition "Li'l Sparky", billed as Spark Plug's grandson.
Snuffy Smith and the townsfolk of Hootin' Holler
Snuffy Smith is an ornery little cuss, sawed-off and shiftless. He lives in a shack, mangles the English language, and has a propensity to shoot at those who displease him. He makes "corn-likker" moonshine in a homemade still and is in constant trouble with the sheriff. He wears a broad-brimmed felt hat almost as tall as he is, has a scraggly mustache and a pair of tattered, poorly patched overalls. He constantly cheats at poker and checkers. He also has some proclivity toward stealing chickens, which led to a brief but effective use of his character in a marketing campaign by the Tyson Foods corporation in the early 1980s. In 1937, he held the post of "Royal Doodle Bug" in the "Varmints" lodge; during this period, the strip heavily employed the catchphrase, "What did the Doodle-Bug say?", an apparent homage to "What did the Woggle-Bug say?" in L. Frank Baum and Walt McDougall's Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz strip of 1904–1905.Almost all of the characters in the strip are exaggerated hillbillies in the classic burlesque tradition: sharp-tongued gossipy women such as Snuffy's wife Loweezy; his baby Tater; his mischievous nephew Jughaid; his neighbors Elviney and Lukey ; the sanctimonious Parson; Silas, the ever-parsimonious owner of the General Store; the ostentatiously badged Sheriff Tait, and others. Vehicles are rundown jalopies of a seeming 1920s vintage, even in the 1970s and beyond. The characters are drawn so that they appear to be talking out of the sides of their mouths.
Topper strips
''Bughouse Fables''
On December 24, 1920, DeBeck began a gag panel called Bughouse Fables, featuring his observations of ordinary people doing foolish things, which he signed "Barney Google". This daily panel ran until November 13, 1937. DeBeck added Bughouse Fables as an accompanying topper strip to run with Barney Google on Sundays, from January 17 to May 9, 1926.''Bunky''
On May 16, 1926, DeBeck began another topper strip, originally called Parlor, Bedroom and Sink—but better known as Bunky. Parlor Bedroom and Sink—which evolved into Parlor Bedroom and Sink Starring Bunky, and eventually simply Bunky—is an over-the-top parody of stage melodramas and movie and radio serials that were popular at the time. The title character "" was a hapless waif whose penniless parents, Bunker Hill Sr., and Bibsy, had given birth to the strangely erudite newborn with the enormous nose on November 13, 1927. The irresponsible Bunker Sr. eventually disappeared from the strip. From then on, pint-sized Bunky was the star, protector, and benefactor of the family. His vocabulary rivaled that of any educated adult.Arch-nemesis Fagin, introduced in 1928, was as vile and despicable a villain as any Charles Dickens antagonist. He "would steal pennies from a blind man's cup and kick dogs that weren't even in his way. Robbing widows and orphans... was routine for him", according to comics historian Don Markstein, who said the strip popularized the phrase, "Youse is a viper!"
Fantasy author and Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard, a big fan of Bunky, was fond of quoting from the strip, as noted by his friend, Tevis Clyde Smith. After DeBeck's death in 1942, Bunky continued for a time under Joe Musial and Fred Lasswell. The series ended on July 18, 1948.
Other toppers
Other toppers featured above Barney Google included: Who's Who, Youse Is a Viper, I Learnt This Trick from the Prince, Knee-Hi-Knoodles, Hill-Billy Ba-Looney, What Did the Doodle Bug Say? and Write a Caption for This Cartoon.Fred Lasswell
When Barney Google began to lose popularity during the Great Depression, DeBeck introduced a simpler style through artist Fred Lasswell after seeing a poster by Lasswell, then in high school, at a golf tournament at Palma Ceia Country Club in Tampa, Florida. Lasswell, who drew cartoons and posters at the McCarthy Ad Agency and for the Tampa Daily Times, was brought in to create the Snuffy characters, which by 1934, surpassed Barney Google in popularity.Lasswell took over the strip, now named Barney Google and Snuffy Smith after DeBeck died in 1942. In 1944 and 1945, Lasswell began featuring Snuffy in guest appearances in Laswell's own Sargent Hashmark comic strip that appeared in the U.S. Marines' Leatherneck Magazine. After the war, Lasswell gained steady increases in distribution, with the strip eventually appearing in more than 1,000 newspapers throughout the world.
In 1962, Lasswell received the Silver Lady Award, and two years later won the Reuben Award and the Best Humor Strip Award from the National Cartoonist's Society. In both 1984 and 1994, he won the Elzie Segar Award, being the only cartoonist who received this award more than once.
Lasswell died in 2001, 16 weeks ahead on the strip, leaving a digital archive containing 35,000 original comic panels and sketches, including over 20,000 daily and 4,000 Sunday strips and about 24,000 original gags.