Barney Google and Snuffy Smith - Characters and Story - Snuffy Smith

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 extremely popular at the time (as Al Capp was proving with Li'l Abner ). The strip increasingly focused on the southern Appalachian hamlet of "Hootin’ Holler", with Snuffy as the main character. The mountaineer locals are extremely suspicious of any outsiders, referred to as "flatlanders" or even worse, "revenooers" (Federal Revenue agents).

Snuffy was so popular that his name was added to the strip's title in the late 1930s. Eventually, Barney Google himself left Hootin' Holler in 1954 to return to the city, and was essentially written out of the strip except as a very occasional visitor. Google has appeared extremely rarely in the feature since the mid-1950s, but returned to Hootin' Holler for a visit in a series of strips beginning on February 19, 2012. His previous visit occurred 15 years prior, on January 5, 1997.

Snuffy 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 (except the occasional visiting "flatlander") are exaggerated hillbillies in the classic burlesque tradition (see Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon by Anthony Harkins, 2003 Oxford Univ. Press, pgs. 103–114): sharp-tongued gossipy women such as Snuffy's wife "Loweezy"; his baby "Tater"; his nephew "Jughaid"; his neighbors Elviney and "Lukey" (Lucas Ebenezer Hinks); the sanctimonious (but nonetheless ungrammatical) Parson; Silas, the 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.