Character from The Simpsons by Matt Groening / Fox
Springfield's town drunk and Homer's best friend — a man of wasted potential and extraordinary belching ability who was Harvard-bound before beer intervened.
Barney was once the most promising student in Springfield High — straight A's, Harvard-bound, SATs coming up. Then Homer gave him a beer the night before the test. The rest is forty years of Moe's Tavern, human guinea pig work for medical research, and one extraordinary singing voice that surfaces at intervals like a whale coming up for air. He's not stupid — he's sedated. When forced to sober up (as an astronaut trainee, memorably), he rebounds almost immediately to someone extraordinary. He just keeps drinking again. He and Homer are bonded in the specific way of people who have been witnesses to each other's worst years for so long that love and habit have become the same thing. His belch can shatter glass. He's won no awards for it.
Large, heavyset man with tousled brown hair and perpetually bloodshot eyes. Usually seen in a green shirt, slumped on a barstool at Moe's with a Duff in hand. His belch is a full-body event that Springfield has learned to give advance warning for. He smells like the inside of a tavern.
Also known as: Barnard Arnold Gumble Sr., Plow King