Crown Comics, published from 1945-49, was a comic book mostly featuring hackneyed adventure stories. One recurring character, rugged boat captain Buck Farrel, was drawn by various artists, including Paul Parker, who drew the Buck Farrel splash panel pictured here, from Crown Comics #11, November 1947.
Transposing the initial letters of the captain’s name results in fuck barrel, which means a messed-up situation, according to an entry in the Urban Dictionary. (No matter what one thinks of the quality of the Urban Dictionary, the entry – posted on 8 January 2007 – establishes a definite date for its existence.) I haven’t found the term in the handful of slang dictionaries I own, so perhaps it’s of recent coinage, postdating the run of Crown Comics.
But there was a joke current in the late 1930s about a fuck barrel, although it was not called as such.
G. Legman, No Laughing Matter: Rationale of the Dirty Joke, Second Series (New York: Bell Publishing, 1975), 165-6.
The hard-up miner or western cowboy […] is told by the bartender that there are no women in town, but that (in this case) he can “use the barrel.” He is shown a large barrel in the stable, with a fur-lined bunghole at one end, and is left alone with it. After some hesitation, worrying about possible disease, he fucks the barrel and finds it wonderfully lifelike in feeling. He rushes back to the bartender and asks, “Say, can I use that anytime I want?” “Sure,” says the bartender, flipping over the pages of a well-thumbed ledger, “any day except Wednesday. Wednesday is your day in the barrel.” (N.Y. 1938).
If Buck Farrel was a deliberate Spoonerism, perhaps based on a contemporaneous dirty joke, did the comic book writers expect their (adult) readers to snicker at the skipper’s name while imagining his first mate, Corny, squatting inside a barrel and dutifully servicing the rest of the crew?
Of course, it’s quite possible that the captain’s name had no intended obscene meaning – and shame on those who think it did.
Finding twentieth-century examples of fuck barrel in print wouldn’t resolve this question, but it would make the case for a deliberate Spoonerism more compelling.
