Tain't Funny

Al Capp's comic strip Li'l Abner walks a dangerous rope: it often picks its topics out of the headlines, and sometimes finds its humor in the neighborhood of the outhouse. Last week, on both counts, it disappeared for a week from the columns of the Scripps-Howard Pittsburgh Press. Editor Edward Towner Leech had taken umbrage at a broad burlesque of the U.S. Senate.

In the censored strips, the Senate needed one vote to defeat a bill to put Congress on the air ("and you know what'll happen to us if the American people can actually hear us!"). The Senate's only hope was hideous, snaggle-toothed Senator Phogbound of Dogpatch, "th' most ignorant commoonity in th' country." Phogbound's price was $2,000,000 to build a Phogbound University, "to be known as P.U." He got the appropriation (argued one Senator: "It isn't as though it were my money--it's just taxpayers' money"), and the Senate was saved.

Editor Leech was not amused. Wrote he: "We don't think it is good editing or sound citizenship to picture the Senate as an assemblage of freaks and crooks . . . boobs and undesirables. In addition the continuity contained a double-meaning statement so obvious that we considered it vulgar."

The Right to Be Wrong. Editor Leech's mailbox was soon full of letters accusing him of censorship. But was it? What vested right did Cartoonist Capp have to appear in the Pittsburgh Press? To accuse Editor Leech of censorship was to say that an editor's duty was to run everything his staff wrote and everything he bought from a syndicate. Editor Leech may have been wrong, but he had a right to be: in an era of canned journalism, he at least had the privilege of choosing what to spoon out of the cans.

According to Cartoonist Capp, it was the first time Li'l Abner had ever been cut out of the 420 daily and more than 500 Sunday papers which buy the strip. (Two other papers also objected to one of last week's strips.) Said Capp: "If anything is public property, it's the U.S. Senate. We elect 'em, and we pay 'em. Anyway, the whole sequence is just a cleaned up version of the Hughes investigation, during which the U.S. Senate was a more ludicrous, comical spectacle than any artist would dare draw."

Cartoonist Capp was not the only cartoonist to suffer:

P: In the coffee port of New Orleans, Publisher Ralph Nicholson of the Item deleted the name of Detective Dick Tracy's current villain "Coffyhead" from every strip, making gibberish out of some of the speeches and captions. ("Coffyhead" is a no-good who earned his nickname by always brewing his evil deeds over a cup of coffee.) Publisher Nicholson explained that he considered the name "a nasty and unfair reflection on a fine beverage."

P: In Manhattan, the complaint was different: Cartoonist J. N. ("Ding") Darling's drawing was approved by the editor, and then cartoonist and editor heard from angry readers. The New York Herald Tribune published a Ding cartoon picturing high prices as a gigantic Topsy. In the background was a Negro couple, obviously Topsy's parents, labeled Excessive Demands and Low Production. Then the squawks came. As representative of "a number of" protests, the Trib published a letter from Thurgood Marshall, counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Wrote he: "This vicious libel. . . can easily be interpreted as an effort to make the Negro the scapegoat for high prices."

The astonished Trib replied that it regarded Topsy as part of the U.S. literary heritage, and no more a reflection on the Negro than Mr. Milquetoast is upon the white race. In recent cartoons, added the Trib, high prices have been represented by "a fat (and ugly) white baby, a silly little white man leading a mountain-climbing expedition to failure, an enormous tree, a blindfolded white man of shambling and oaf-like appearance, a white poker player somewhat resembling a disreputable banker, a hound dog chasing a (white) figure representing the public, who was depicted as a rabbit." Added the Trib: "In none of these cases was the economic comment taken as either cultural or racial or personal because of the symbols used."

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