Satire Dogwatch-style

Wouldn't Al Capp have had fun in today's world? Of course, in today's world, newspapers and thus the comic strips found in newspapers have shrinking importance, so we should be glad Capp lived when he did (1909-1979). Still, it is interesting to wonder what he would have made of the soap opera that the national political scene has become.

Capp had a knack for making sharp political commentary while seemingly drawing his Li'l Abner comic strip about absurd happenings in a never-never land called Dogwatch. In The Best of Li'l Abner, a 1978 collection I just read again, we find tales about a girl called Boyless Bailey who because of a curse may remain boyless even with the Sadie Hawkins Day race approaching, another girl whose lips can fry a boy's brains and a plague of turnip termites that could bring starvation to Dogwatch. Yet Capp always managed to insert just enough mid-20th-century reality into these outlandish stories to make them read like current events.

"A satirist has only one gift," Capp wrote in an introduction, "he sees where the fraud and fakery are. I turned around and let the other side have it." For Capp, the "other side" often actually was the other side, not the conservatives who were usually the ones targeted by satirists but those on the left. This was especially true during the turbulent Sixties when he again and again targeted campus radicals and those college administrators who seemed willing to let them get away with anything.

Much of Capp's humor had to do with playing with names, which may seem like junior high school except that he did it so well. In this book we find a body builder named Stanley Strongnose, a plastic surgeon named Rex Moosehead, a Liberace-like pianist named Loverboynik, a long-haired singer named Hawg McCall, a cartoon busybody named Mary Worm, a chubby movie star named Anita Eatburg, a pork-and-bean executive named J. Roaringham Fatback, an Indian princess named Minihahaskirt, an advice columnist named Hazel Homewrecker (actually a bigamist named B. Fowler McNest), a wild boar named Porknoy (who naturally has a complaint) and a TV talk show host named Tommy Wholesome.

Richard Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson and other political figures of the day made cameo appearances in the comic. It was all great fun.