Fred D. Lasswell (July 25, 1916 – March 4, 2001) was an American cartoonist best known for his decades of work on the comic strip Barney Google and Snuffy Smith.

[1] Lasswell began cartooning during his childhood; he was in third grade when his first comic strip, Baseball Hits, was published in the school newspaper, The Seminole Searchlight.

In 1933, Lasswell drew a poster advertising the Tampa Chamber of Commerce Jamboree, which attracted the attention of Barney Google creator Billy DeBeck.

After he and Lasswell conducted a tour of the rural southern United States to research the culture of the region, the two cartoonists introduced the character Snuffy Smith to the strip in November 1934.

Throughout the 1930s, DeBeck continued to mentor Lasswell, sending him to work with preeminent illustrators of the era and to study at the Art Students League of New York.

He worked alongside several assistants during his career; these included Fred Rhoads, Ray Osrin, Tom Moore, Bob Weber, and Lasswell's eventual successor John R. Rose.

[2] During World War II, Lasswell served as a flight radio operator for Pan American Airways in North Africa.

Lasswell worked on all editions of Leatherneck Magazine, for which he created cover art, humorously illustrated stories, and the wartime comic strip Sgt.

Lucy Shelton Caswell, Professor and Curator of the Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State University, has described Lasswell as "one of the few cartoonists to inherit a successfully syndicated comic strip and transform it into his own creation".

He was an actively contributing member to the convivialities of the group for almost its entire existence, and no Reuben Weekend was complete without some shenanigan from Uncle Fred.

Even the last year when he didn't attend, an unprecedented occurrence, he supplied punchlines for others standing at the microphone: all you had to do was refer to Uncle Fred—to one or another of his well-known proclivities—and you could get a laugh.