Snuffy Smith
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For the World War II Medal of Honor Recipient please go to Maynard "Snuffy" Smith
Snuffy Smith has been for many years the predominant character in the syndicated newspaper comic strip Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, created by Billy DeBeck and later drawn by Fred Lasswell from 1942 until 2001 (when Laswell died). The strip is currently drawn by John Rose.
Snuffy is a very stereotypical hillbilly. He lives in a shack, makes moonshine, is in constant trouble with the sheriff, and is very shiftless, occasionally doing a small amount of farm work but primarily working his still and loafing. 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 1980's. He is very short, wears a broad-brimmed felt hat almost as tall as he is, has a huge mustache, and almost invariably wears a pair of tattered, poorly patched overalls. His speech is ungrammatical in the extreme. In fact, almost all of the characters in the strip (except of course for the occasional visiting "flatlander") were/are stereotypical hillbillies – sharp-tongued gossipy women such as his wife Loweezy (Louisa), his baby, Tater, his nephew Jughaid (Jughead), his neighbors Elviney and Lukey, the sanctimonious (but nonetheless ungrammatical) Parson, the burly sheriff with his huge, star-shaped badge, and many others. All vehicles were rundown jalopies of a seeming 1920s vintage, even in the 1970s and beyond.
