Lord Give Me the Confidence of Leroy Lockhorn and Sluggo Smith
Podcaster and Gawker writer Sarah Hagi famously wrote, “Lord give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.” It’s a phrase and a conceit that caught fire and quickly became viral, popping up on tee-shirts and coffee mugs and whatnot.
I personally am fascinated by the utterly unmerited but bulletproof confidence of two white men of the funny pages who, honestly, would need to seriously work on themselves just to qualify as mediocre.
I’m referring of course to Sluggo and Leroy Lockhorn of Nancy and The Lockhorns respectively.
Let’s begin with Sluggo. By his own admission, he lives in a slanty shanty with a stooped roof and a peeling ceiling in a rundown part of down after the death of his parents and an extended stint in an orphanage.
Seriously! How fucked up and depressing is that? They might as well have killed off his immediate family in the Holocaust or a bloody home invasion by the Manson family.
Sluggo Smith is such a feral, albeit lit, creature that if he were desperate and starving I can easily see him eating a sewer rat. Even if he’s not desperate or starving, I can still envision him happily feasting upon an unfortunate rodent.
Sluggo is not rich. He’s not smart. He’s not connected. He’s not hard-working. He’s not worldly. He talks like a bricklayer from Queens. Yet that does not prevent him from constantly shooting his shot with beautiful girls.
It doesn’t matter to Sluggo that he has a girlfriend who is extremely jealous and prone to violence in Nancy. To paraphrase a notorious ex-president, Sluggo is automatically attracted to beautiful girls. He just start kissing them. They’re like a magnet. He just kisses. He doesn’t even wait. And when you have Sluggo-level swag, they let him do it. He could do anything.
I don’t understand Sluggo’s cockiness or confidence but I respect and envy it.
Leroy Lockhorn doesn’t just have a jealous girlfriend. He has a jealous wife who has devoted her life to making him miserable. Like Sluggo, Leroy is objectively a massive loser. His wife doesn’t respect him. His work life is a nightmare. He’s unattractive and out of shape.
Yet in comic strip after comic strip this sub-mediocre white man is aggressively hitting on every halfway attractive woman he encounters.
Loretta will be off in the corner of one of the many cocktail parties they’re inexplicably invited to with murder in her eyes and rage in her soul to and Leroy will drunkenly be ogling a sex bomb with the looks and attire of a 1960s Go Go dancer and flirting to the best of his abilities.
Leroy has nothing to offer a beautiful woman, just as he has nothing to offer his long-suffering wife. I don’t even want to imagine what Leroy is like in bed other than bad, yet Leroy overflows with sexual cockiness all the same.
God give me the confidence of Sluggo Smith and Leroy Lockhorn because these two short kings never let their troll-like appearance and lack of money and power keep them from giving every attractive woman they meet a chance to get to know them, the more biblically the better.
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