Problems and solutions

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