Playboy Interview: Al Capp

a candid conversation with the caustic, iconoclastic creator of "li'l abner"

In August 1934, a heroically built young lunkhead named Li'l Abner, wearing supersize clodhoppers and the beatific grin of an idiot, was born, fully grown, in a mythical hamlet named Dogpatch and promptly established himself as a national institution. He also established his creator, a brash, bumptious New Englander named Alfred Gerald Caplin, as one of the most successful cartoonists of all time; he is better known to his 80,000,000 readers as Al Capp.

Published in more than 1000 newspapers throughout the world, Capp's comic strip is far more than the hick humor it seems to some. According to one student of comic art, it can be read as "the adventures of a queer lot of bumpkins--or as a considered, Hogarthian attack on American shibboleths and pretensions." Another critic has called it "a decoction of surrealistic action, mystery, horror and adventure featuring the most outlandish collection of caricatures since Daumier."

Capp himself has been seriously compared with Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, Voltaire, Mark Twain, Dickens and even Dante. He has been called "an intellectual Gargantua," "an oddly concocted mixture of optimist, cynic and lover of humanity," and "a cheerfully angry middle-aged man with opinions about almost everything." The last description is his own. Whichever one fits, it is true that Capp uses his strip as a sounding board for his own irreverent, and often bitterly iconoclastic, views on politics, society, economics, world affairs and human folly. Recently "Abner" included a sequence in which the Yokum family set out to help its even more poverty-stricken relatives, the Deep Misery Yokums, whom it invites to share its home and hospitality; before long Abner and his family are forced to move out by the filth, indolence and ignorance of their unregenerate kinfolk. A thinly veiled attack on the Government's War on Poverty, the strip immediately touched off a storm of mail--pro and con--and a few rumbles even from those in Washington who administer the program. Their concern was understandable, for when Capp strikes, his impact is felt widely. Once when he ran a contest among his readers, he received a phenomenal total of 1,000,000 entries. Rubber dolls of his ingratiating Kigmy and Shmoo characters flooded the country within months of their invention. And when Capp invented Sadie Hawkins Day, a Dogpatch holiday during which unattached females run down, hog-tie and marry helpless bachelors, he created a national festival.

The instigator of all this profitable but not-so-innocent fun began inauspiciously in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where, as a boy, he lost his right leg in a street-car accident. After studying in nine different art schools (he usually quit when the bursar's office presented its bill), he finally landed his first job at the age of 23--as a cartoonist for the Associated Press, where he lasted for several months. "Finally," he says, "I couldn't stand my stuff, so I quit." Others say he was fired. But two years later he walked into the office of United Features Syndicate with the idea for his "Li'l Abner" strip (now owned by Chicago Tribune-New York News, Inc.), and thereby began his flamboyant career as cartoonist, comic and social critic.

In addition to working on "Abner"--a labor reputed to net him between $500,000 and $1,000,000 a year--Capp has turned a talent for verbal satire into a regular spot as critic-without-portfolio on NBC's "Monitor." He will also be debuting shortly as an asp-tongued news commentator on a series of hourlong television specials with Art Buchwald as a comic Huntley to Capp's sardonic Brinkley. United Artists, meanwhile, is preparing for NBC a situation comedy based on "Abner" (which already enjoys the distinction of having been the only comic strip to inspire a hit Broadway musical); and producer David Merrick is putting together still another series--on the misadventures of Capp's intrepid sleuth, Fearless Fosdick. A chain of Li'l Abner restaurants is opening from Canada to California; Kickapoo Joy Juice, now a bottled soft drink, is being sold in at least seven states; and Capp is being plagued by manufacturers who want to market Li'l Abner overalls, Daisy Mae blouses and Mammy Yokum corncob pipes.

All of this keeps Capp shuttling busily among a farm in New Hampshire, a studio in Boston and an elaborate pad in Manhattan, where our interviewer, Alvin Toffler, recently bearded the 56-year-old cartoonist for an exclusive 11-hour interview. Amid nervous gestures with his hands, frequent interruptions by the telephone, and outbursts of laughter provoked by his advance knowledge of what he was going to say, Capp sprayed forth acerbic opinions--as a crop duster does DDT--on everything from avarice to adultery, and everyone from L. B. J. to Liberace. We began by asking him his opinion of himself.

[Q] Playboy: John Steinbeck once described you as "possibly the best writer in the world today." What's your reaction to that?

[A] Capp: I revere John Steinbeck far too deeply to question his literary judgment.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't you call yourself a cartoonist rather than a writer?

[A] Capp: Oddly enough, I don't think of myself as a cartoonist, or of L'il Abner as a cartoon. I think of myself as a novelist and of Abner as a novel, a page of which is published every day. At the end of the year I've written 365 pages, fully illustrated. After 31 years at it, that's a pretty damn big novel.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever thought of writing a conventional novel instead?

[A] Capp: No, because I discovered long ago that if you publish a page a day in an odd size with illustrations, you can make about 100 times the money and get millions more readership than if you publish it all together, between covers, and without pictures.

[Q] Playboy: We've never heard you called a novelist before, but some critics regard you as a bitingly satirical social critic. Do you agree with them?

[A] Capp: I cringe when people say "social critic" or "social commentator." You can't write or draw anything without making some comment on society. No cartoonist, no matter how talentless or obscure, has ever drawn a dog without having made a comment on the state of dogs. He's never drawn an outhouse without making some incidental comment about rustic life in America.

[Q] Playboy: The satiric social comments you make in your strip could hardly be called incidental. They form the heart of much of your material. Sometimes your cartoon attacks on leading political figures are not even veiled behind caricature. You once called William Miller, for example, a "boy Madam Nhu."

[A] Capp: Did I say that?

[Q] Playboy: Yes.

[A] Capp: Well, I was so terrified at the prospect of Goldwater and Miller, that Laurel and Hardy of statesmanship, running this country that I actually got up off my rump and on the stump for Johnson--no, not so much for Johnson as against those other guys. Not that their views terrified me much. Most people who get to be President turn into Dwight Eisenhower. It's hard to be anybody else in that job. Anyone who gets to be President of the U.S. behaves pretty much as all Presidents have behaved. The job itself remakes the man. For the Johnson cause, I even consented to campaign with groups of--ugh!--folk singers. Not only did I have to bring them to the microphone with flattering introductions, I also had to listen to them. Folk singers are perfectly pleasant people, you know, but the sounds they make I find unbearable. And they all seem to want to be Secretary of State or head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Joan Baez keeps advising the President in song how to run the war in Vietnam--namely, to run away. Pete Seeger also sings foreign-policy folk songs telling the U. S. Army to take it easy on the Communists. His advice is to stop shooting at them because we may hurt them. Tragically, however, many people are content to leave our foreign policy in the hands of the White House, the U. S. Senate and the State Department--groups who haven't even one hit record to their credit.

[Q] Playboy: Are you just against folk singing, or against folk singers who involve themselves in social-protest movements?

[A] Capp: I am against primitive singing, primitive guitar strumming and primitive political solutions. I remember when we used to complain about conformist students. I miss them now. I long for those good old money-crazed kids of yesteryear who didn't carry placards and banners and chain themselves together in front of courthouses; they didn't get involved in anything that didn't lead to becoming vice-president of General Motors. I trust an 18-year-old who has an ungovernable passion to make a buck; but I don't trust an 18-year-old who wants to remake a world he hasn't been in long enough to understand. That produces idealistic young leaders like Fidel Castro, Robert Shelton and George Lincoln Rockwell. No, avarice is a most refreshing and reassuring quality in a youngster. It's the only honest, trustworthy motivation. A kid who wants to make good and earn his keep is a kid who is going to be of service to his fellow man.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you give our young rebels any credit for humanitarian ideals?

[A] Capp: I'm suspicious of the "humanitarian ideals" that inflame the young today, and have set them marching, picketing, rioting and demanding--just as I was suspicious of the "humanitarian ideals" of Lenin and Trotsky when they inflamed the young of my teens. But there's little danger in mistaking our campus nonconformists for the sane young. It's the uniforms they wear that warn you: "Here comes hysteria!" All kid nonconformists think, dress and riot exactly alike. All nonconformist girls wear their hair in bangs in front, and cascading in back like berserk batwings over the shoulders, every strand unwashed. And all nonconformist boys wear the blue jeans of laborers, but live on the labor of their fathers. They wallow in the best of both worlds--disdaining the decent manners of the bum and the patrimony of the patrician, while other and better kids are doing their sit-ins in Vietnam rice paddies and their lie-ins in Saigon hospitals.

[Q] Playboy: What about the sacrifices of civil rights workers who have been beaten and killed in the South? Don't you believe in the sincerity of their dedication to the ideal of racial equality?

[A] Capp: I'm suspicious of any form of selflessness other than that of parents to their kids. I, myself, have found selflessness in myself only in momentary flashes and only when it concerns my children. I don't mistrust idealism, but I mistrust idealism that is romantic, self-indulgent and exhibitionistic--and that's the way most of it comes lately. If I have any talent at all, it's a gift for sniffing out fakery, and our current crop of college rebels is redolent with it. They've been taken by their leaders.

[Q] Playboy: Would you consider Norman Mailer a leader of nonconformist youth?

[A] Capp: Naturally. He has every quality the nonconformist young admire: His language is uncouth, his actions are violent, he despises the institutions that protect him, and he seldom buttons his fly. And just as the students who adore him are too busy protesting to do any studying, Mailer is too busy protesting that he's a great writer to do any of the great writing he is capable of.

[Q] Playboy: What about James Baldwin?

[A] Capp: He is pompous, ill-tempered and hates everybody. And yet everybody doesn't love him. This so infuriates Baldwin that he keeps threatening to write another play. While there is still time to prevent that, I urge that a law be passed compelling everyone to love Baldwin, or be sentenced to sit through a complete performance of Blues for Mister Charlie.

[Q] Playboy: At the opposite end of the political spectrum, what do you think of William Buckley and his archconservative philosophy?

[A] Capp: Buckley is a profound thinker, a dazzling scholar, a fearless crusader, and is therefore considered unfit to hold public office.

[Q] Playboy: You campaigned for Johnson. Do you like him as President?

[A] Capp: I've never been able to generate any affection for Johnson, whereas I did in a rueful way for Goldwater. Goldwater is genial, ingratiating and warmly impulsive. Johnson is cold, tough, tyrannical and won't ever lose a poker game because of a warm impulse. So I'm glad he's playing our hand, because this is the big game, and it's for keeps.

[Q] Playboy: And yet you've attacked certain aspects of his War on Poverty. Don't you regard it as a worth-while humanitarian program?

[A] Capp: When I hear anything described as "humanitarian," I ask: "humanitarian to whom?" Say a restless young chap mugs and robs a senior citizen. Say he's caught in the act. Naturally, he lunges at the cop with a switchblade. The cop shoots him. Immediately an army of humanitarians springs to the defense! But to the defense of whom? The mugged senior citizen? Certainly not. He's left to die on the sidewalk or use up his life's savings in a hospital. The policeman? Don't be silly; he's brought up on charges of brutality. Today being a "humanitarian" is to demand more-than-human rights for any homicidal subhuman on grounds that he's "culturally underprivileged." Today it's considered inhuman--and, more importantly, unfashionable--to demand as decent treatment for the guy who was mugged as for the guy who mugged him.

[Q] Playboy: What's this got to do with the poverty program?

[A] Capp: Well, I'll be for the poverty program when I see just who it is going to impoverish. It certainly won't impoverish that splendid army of humanitarians who have selflessly volunteered to administer the program at $50 an hour.

[Q] Playboy: For many years you've been regarded as a political liberal. But you sound disillusioned with liberal programs. What's changed you?

[A] Capp: I haven't changed. Liberalism has. The liberal fought for welfare. It began as compulsory Christianity; it has degenerated into something maudlin and mindless. Under today's corruption of welfare, any slut capable of impregnation is encouraged to produce bastards without end--for which she is given welfare checks without end. A woman who has proven herself an unfit driver has her license taken away; yet the unfit mother is given unbridled license to continue to produce children doomed to lovelessness and neglect from the moment they are born. And society is doomed to support them, to cure their dope addiction, to jail them, or to terminate their terrible little lives because we will not take away from the unfit the license to reproduce.

[Q] Playboy: Who is to decide who is unfit to reproduce?

[A] Capp: Who decides who is unfit to drive a car? I think the right to inflict these children on society should be taken away by the same authority. Our society, I think, can impose the necessary discipline without resorting to sterilization. We don't amputate the hands of unfit drivers; but we might try amputating the Aid to Dependent Children checks we send to any unfit mother who remorselessly continues to reproduce.

[Q] Playboy: Doesn't what you've said really amount to a wholesale condemnation of public welfare?

[A] Capp: No. I'm simply asking who will fare well under welfare--and who will fare ill. Millionaires don't pay for welfare. There aren't enough of them. Welfare's millions come from those millions of Americans who just about scrape by--who prefer to fight their own private war against poverty with no weapons but their energy and dignity. What I fear is that it won't be long before it's possible to lead a far better life being on the bum and on welfare than being on the job and paying your own way--that those who take welfare will outnumber those who provide it; and I'm against the persecution of any minority group--even one so primitive that they still prefer to earn their own living.

[Q] Playboy: What do you propose, then? How do we lick the poverty problem?

[A] Capp: A thornier problem than licking poverty is finding some. You certainly won't find it on Malibu Beach, among that immense colony of sun-tanned gods and goddesses, the surfers. All of them--and their sports cars, too--are supported by unemployment. They are the most decorative specimens, of course, but you'll find their kind everywhere--refusing to repair fenders, refusing to clean streets, disdaining to run elevators, sitting stubbornly on their rights and on their rumps, getting up only to collect their welfare checks or to knock up a girlfriend so she can produce another child and be rewarded with an extra monthly check.

[Q] Playboy: Are you any happier with the Administration's foreign policy than you are with its domestic program?

[A] Capp: Our foreign policy is perfectly sensible; it's our explanation of it that's absurd. We ought to abandon the pretense that we're in Vietnam or Santo Domingo to protect their rights. We can no longer afford the luxury of permitting our excitable little neighbors the right to choose their own form of government--not if there's the slightest chance that it may be one dedicated to joining our enemies in destroying us. It's more honorable, I think, to admit that you're pushing a little guy around because you know damn well that if he gets any bigger he'll push you off the planet, than to claim you're doing it for his own good.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel we can afford to risk intervening militarily in the affairs of any foreign country, whatever the provocation?

[A] Capp: It's not our military intervention that's dangerous; it's the sanctimonious reasons we give for it that could lead to trouble.

[Q] Playboy: After these remarks, can you still deny that you're a social critic?

[A] Capp: I won't bother to--if you think that adds class to the interview. But to be honest about it, I'm no more a social critic than Ian Fleming was. Pick up any paperback from Peyton Place to the James Bond yarns, and you'll find social comment in them.

[Q] Playboy: What social message do you find in James Bond?

[A] Capp: The message is that if Sherlock Holmes was in business today, he'd be getting laid instead of playing the violin. He never did get laid, you know. Holmes was exactly the same guy Bond is, but he reflected the morals of his time. Bond reflects the morals of our time.

[Q] Playboy: If that's what accounts, at least in part, for the popularity of the Bond stories, how do you explain the appeal of your innocent hero Li'l Abner?

[A] Capp: I am puzzled that anyone regards Li'l Abner as any sort of hero at all. The size of his feet is heroic, but not much else about him. A hero is modest; Abner is vain. A hero's wife adores him; Abner's wife deplores him. A hero is innocent; Abner is merely ignorant. Maybe that's it: Maybe it's his ignorance the public admires. The scope of his ignorance is heroic. And when ignorance triumphs over intellect, we all feel more personally secure. English humorists, as in Tom Jones, used class as the yardstick of ignorance. Americans are apt to use geography. Dogpatch, because it is so far removed from the centers of culture, is accepted as a Fort Knox of ignorance. And the ignorant are accepted as Fort Knoxes of goodness, mainly because they aren't smart enough to be rotten.

[Q] Playboy: What is there about the hillbilly setting that fascinates the American public? How do you explain the popularity of television series such as The Beverly Hillbillies?

[A] Capp: Simple. Hillbillies seem so ignorant that the sight of them makes even TV viewers feel smart. But there's nothing ignorant about the producers of those shows. They've been resourceful enough to rummage through my old wastebaskets for stuff I didn't have the guts to use in Li'l Abner.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think of Gomer Pyle and Petticoat Junction?

[A] Capp: They've been rummaging through The Beverly Hillbillies' wastebaskets.

[Q] Playboy: Do you agree with the critic who charged that these three shows are "intellectual atrocities"?

[A] Capp: If it's intellectual atrocities you're after, turn off your TV set and open a copy of The New Yorker. As primitive as the stories in Gomer Pyle and The Beverly Hillbillies are, they do have vitality and comprehensibility--two qualities The New Yorker clearly regards as intellectually atrocious. But possibly I'm not being fair; The New Yorker has risen to a level above that of mere disposable reading matter. A copy of The New Yorker is now furniture, a quietly elegant piece which when placed on a coffee table is the sign of an aware, liberal and genteelly gay home.

Everybody picks on The Beverly Hillbillies and Gomer Pyle, but you realize what immense quality the worst of commercial television has when you look at the best of educational television. Then you find out that even the most paralyzing "entertainment" shows are works of art by comparison. Commercial television is bad because it has to be; if it isn't, the sponsors won't pay for it. But educational television is bad because it chooses to be. It could be original, intelligent, startling, informative, courageous, muscular. Instead, it prefers to be tiresome and timid, flabby and faggy.

[Q] Playboy: Will your own projected program, The Capp-Buchwald Report, fall into the category of educational television?

[A] Capp: Naturally. The purpose of The Capp-Buchwald Report will be to explain The Huntley-Brinkley Report.

[Q] Playboy: What will you report on?

[A] Capp: The great issues--like the brutal treatment of minority groups.

[Q] Playboy: Such as Negroes?

[A] Capp: I've already fought for the Negro--when it wasn't as fashionable as it is now, when it wasn't as safe. Others have taken on that fight--and so I've turned my attention to another minority that's being treated with increasing brutality: the police. There are less of them than there are of us nonpolice. And they look different from other people. They're colored blue. And so they aren't treated like other people. They're despised, avoided and mistreated. One out of every ten policemen in this country was violently attacked last year. Eighty were killed. They get the most dangerous and menial jobs at the lowest pay. There is no other minority group in America that's been treated so brutally.

[Q] Playboy: Will any other minority groups get coverage on The Capp-Buchwald Report?

[A] Capp: Yes. Parents. Parents are another vastly underprivileged minority group. I picked up a copy of The Washington Post the other day and read at least seven different articles telling parents how to understand their children--but not a single piece telling children how to understand their parents. Nobody cares enough to take the trouble to point out to kids how revolting they are to us. That's why they grow into savages. The only reason we don't murder them in their teens is that we're willing to wait for a crueler revenge--the day when the little bastards become parents themselves.

[Q] Playboy: Is there anyone else on your list of persecuted minorities?

[A] Capp: Yes. Junkyard owners. Everybody complains about how unsightly junkyards are, how they're cluttering up the highways and making America ugly and all that. Not me. I find a junkyard one of the most reassuring evidences of American superiority. We throw away things that would be prized possessions in any other country. I think the sight of an immense mountain of automobiles rusting away, some of them just ten years old, must have been the most impressive thing Khrushchev saw in America. We were throwing stuff away that they couldn't yet even hope to attain.

[Q] Playboy: But must these junkyards line the highways?

[A] Capp: Where else can they do more good? If you leave a pile of junk unguarded long enough, Andy Warhol will come along and sign it. Instead of lugging our junk piles away, have them signed by pop artists and call them outdoor exhibitions of modern art. As I see it, the freedom to live in this beautiful country also includes the freedom to destroy its beauty, and we're taking full advantage of it. I think I was the one who launched the first nationwide campaign to preserve the natural beauty of our billboards. I had Abner decide to take a trip with Daisy Mae to visit a great scenic wonder. They arrived at the road that was supposed to look down upon this lush, magnificent valley, and there it was, all right--behind unrelieved miles of road signs. Abner ripped them all up, and then he said, "America shore is somethin' to see, once yo' kin see it." Gangs of kids instantly sprang up all over the country, uprooting billboards by the thousands. I claimed they were inspired by love of beauty. A few misanthropes claimed they were inspired by love of destruction. But in the end it didn't matter; those kids abandoned beautification and went on to stealing hubcaps and mugging, That's the sort of issue The Capp-Buchwald Report will come to grips with.

[Q] Playboy: Would you say that your program will be an effort to elevate the standards of television?

[A] Capp: Mainly it will be an effort to elevate our incomes. I don't know what all this talk about elevating standards is supposed to mean. The public gets what it asks for. Somebody once asked me if the Government should subsidize "needy artists." What an outrageous idea. Boston, my city, for example, supports exactly the art it wants and enjoys. It supports Doris Day movies. Boston supports those arts in which Boston is interested. I think it would be outrageous to tax all Bostonians to support a form of art which only a handful enjoy. Who is to decide whether the choreography of a basketball game is a baser art than ballet? Imagine a community in which rodeos and ice-skating shows are considered cultural events by the elite, but the masses prefer opera and Hindemith concerts. Would you tax those people who prefer to spend their money on concerts and operas to provide funds for the support of ice-skating shows and broncobusting because a tiny group of taste makers has decided that these are art? And while we're on the subject of art, why don't you ask me how I'd define that catch phrase "needy artist"?

[Q] Playboy: How would you define that catch phrase "needy artist"?

[A] Capp: A needy artist is a guy who stubbornly continues to produce something that the world doesn't need enough to pay him for. Suppose this guy handmakes agonizingly uncomfortable bicycle seats which no one will buy; yet he refuses to do something useful for a living to enable him to indulge in this macabre hobby; is the public compelled to subsidize this pest? If a private patron wants to support "artists" who frame used paint rags and build plaster replicas of Brillo boxes, that's their aberration--but I can't see allowing the Government, in the name of culture, to tax the bejesus out of people who don't want this kind of crap.

[Q] Playboy: Is all of it crap?

[A] Capp: A lot that's palmed off as art sure as hell is. And that brings us to Picasso. He isn't nearly as high-principled or talented an artist as Chester Gould, who draws Dick Tracy, and to be fair about it, he doesn't get as good prices. There was young Picasso, burning with ambition--to get rich. And yet his best--those "academic" paintings that are now reverently offered as proof of his early greatness--was plodding and third-rate. Well, Picasso was a sensible kid. He knew he couldn't go any further--not along the traditional classic path, where talent was measured by the classic standards of truth and beauty. So he beat out another path--a crazy, crooked one, leading nowhere; and despite the jeering of the art world, he kept at it, turning out more and more balmy and offensive stuff every year until the art world began wondering if it hadn't made a mistake, if there wasn't something secretly good in stuff that looked so bad. The answer, of course, is that they were right in the first place--and history will someday make that judgment. But I'm sure Picasso couldn't care less. He's loaded. And the world's galleries are loaded with his fakery.

[Q] Playboy: Are there any so-called serious contemporary artists whom you admire? Jackson Pollock, for example?

[A] Capp: That's what happens when you don't teach a kid to clean up his messes. He grows up to make other people's homes unlivable.

[Q] Playboy: How about De Kooning?

[A] Capp: Isn't he the same guy? And aren't they both Mark Rothko? It's all the same thing, no matter who signs it. Some people dismiss abstract artists as frauds. I don't. I think quite a few are perfectly sincere, as sincere as those mystics of another great society--those Romans, I mean, who read augurs and portents into a slit lamb's intestines. The only difference is that our mystics splash and splatter paint until they create something as distasteful as a lamb's intestines--and we read augurs and portents into their messes.

[Q] Playboy: If abstract art is as worthless as you say it is, why has it endured so long?

[A] Capp: Because it's one of the very few rackets anybody at all can get into these days, and make a buck.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think there's any art of genuine worth being created today?

[A] Capp: Masses of it. Only you won't find it in the galleries; you'll find it mainly on the comic page. Comic strips are possibly the best art being produced in this country today. The only reason most people don't realize it is that they've been brainwashed into thinking that if you draw a picture in comic-strip size, with pen and ink, it isn't art. But if it's big and you do it in oil, it's art. That's self-swindling snobbishness. A work of art is a work of art, regardless of form or materials. I've seen ads for Chrysler cars that were finer works of art than a lot of the stuff hanging in the Metropolitan. There are murals covering entire walls that haven't a fraction of the craftsmanship of cartoons covering three square inches in the newspapers. I judge comic strips by the same standards I apply to Daumier or Michelangelo. And by those standards comic-strip art is damn good.

[Q] Playboy: What do you consider the best comic strips being published today?

[A] Capp:Steve Canyon by Milton Caniff, Juliet Jones by Stan Drake, Abbie 'n' Slats by Rae Van Buren, Miss Peach by Mel Lazarus, anything Mort Walker does, Dick Tracy by Chester Gould. I'm awed by the draftsmanship of On Stage and Dr. Kildare. I'm furious when Walt Kelly isn't as good as he can be, which is better than anybody. People say there aren't many good political cartoonists anymore, and that's true, but two of the few we have--Herblock and Bill Mauldin--are better than any ever were. Then there's Walt Kelly and Pogo. Walt, when he chooses to be, is one of the funniest men in the world.

[Q] Playboy: How about Peanuts?

[A] Capp: I find Peanuts not as exciting as some people do. It's a trick that's wearing thin--having kids speak like adults. It is damn well drawn, however. I also enjoy everything Jules Feiffer does; he's a hell of a better artist than anyone gives him credit for being. He doesn't draw elaborately, but he draws with truth and pity.

[Q] Playboy: As you know, Feiffer recently wrote an article for Playboy called The Great Comic-Book Heroes, in which he reminisced about his childhood fascination with such legendary characters as Batman, Superman and Captain Marvel. Did you have any cartoon heroes of your own as a boy?

[A] Capp: Many--Mutt and Jeff, Maggie and Jiggs, Barney Google, Happy Hooligan, and all of Rube Goldberg. There were many great comics in the newspapers, but, frankly, the comic books bored me. That's why I was disappointed in Feiffer's piece. I thought he deified a lot of dreary old comic-book characters who don't deserve it. Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel--these guys were the Alan Ladds of the comic book. Feiffer's nostalgia for them is sentimental.

The strangest character Feiffer recalled from the golden age of comic books was Dr. Fredric Wertham. The doctor, however, was no creature of pen and ink; he was as real as any old Salem judge who ever ordered any Salem granny burned alive as a witch. His book Seduction of the Innocent fearlessly put the blame for crime and corruption where it belonged: on ten-cent comic books! He pointed out that big, muscular Batman lived with a little boy named Robin and frequently wore a dressing gown! Wertham needed no further proof that this was a homosexual relationship--and neither, to its credit, did the public. Wertham's book was bursting with such revelations, and it wasn't long after it came out before the nation was banning and burning comic books. I remember a TV show on which I defended Wertham's attack on Li'l Abner. He claimed that Abner's devotion to his mother was a pure and simple case of incest, and a depraved example for the young. Then, after the show was over, he asked me for an autograph for his little grandson. Li'l Abner was the child's favorite comic strip. I asked Wertham if his daughter had ever had any trouble with the kid. He said not at all; he was a sweet, loving child. Nonetheless, the hysteria launched by critics like Wertham finally killed the comic book. Time was when only a well-heeled kid could have his own library. The inexpensive comic book had made it possible for all kids to create little libraries of their own with adventure yarns, science-fiction fantasies, nature stuff, Bible stories, condensations of the Stevenson and Henty classics. This new branch of book publishing was beginning to develop its fine writers, and fine illustrators--and then it was destroyed.

[Q] Playboy: Weren't you once accused by a New York State investigating committee of peddling pornography in Li'l Abner?

[A] Capp: Yes, and that was an experience so incredible that if I had used it as a sequence in Li'l Abner, readers would have been convinced that Capp had finally gone off his rocker. If I'd drawn politicians in my strip as cheap and mindless as those I met in the course of this nightmare, I'd have been denounced for attempting to undermine the democratic system. At the peak of Wertham's campaign against comics, the New York State Assembly voted a substantial sum to a committee of assemblymen to "in-vestigate pornography in comics." None of us doing newspaper comic strips paid the slightest attention to it, of course, because newspaper comics are the most carefully laundered of all mass literature. First, the cartoonist is his own most merciless censor; he knows that the slightest hint of hanky-panky in his stuff will wreck him and his career. And so before he sends his work to his syndicate, he examines every word, every drawing, for anything that anyone, no matter how warped, could possibly interpret as anything but clean fun. Even then we don't quite trust our own judgment. Our strips are sent to our syndicates about five weeks ahead of publication. There, once again, they are subjected to thorough study by several suspicious and short-tempered editors, all with full and freely given authority to make any changes. Once approved, the strips usually arrive at newspaper offices three weeks ahead of publication, and once more are scrutinized by each individual publisher, each with the right to refuse to publish anything he might consider even remotely borderline. Any newspaper comic strip that has survived this tortuous process and finally appears on a newspaper comic page has been given a clean bill of health by the world's sternest jury.

And so the newspaper-comic-strip world was stunned when the committee issued a report, in the form of a book, that its investigators discovered pornography in a popular newspaper comic strip--namely, Li'l Abner. We obtained a copy of the report and it was indeed full of filthy Li'l Abner drawings--all forgeries. Photostatic copies of Li'l Abner strips had been made and tampered with: phallic symbols had been drawn in, figures from one strip combined with figures from another strip in obscene positions. These were then rephotostated and mailed to the investigating committee by a nonexistent member of a nonexistent branch of the Parent-Teacher Association. The investigating committee, without investigating the authenticity of the drawings, or even of the P.T.A. branch that sent them, had rushed muck into print with a stern rebuke to newspaper publishers for being so careless as to let this depraved stuff get by.

Well, the head of my syndicate, my lawyer and I summoned the head of the investigating committee to a meeting at the Waldorf Towers, where we confronted him with the evidence of his idiocy. He begged us not to publicize our findings about him, in return for which he'd bury the report with his "findings" about Li'l Abner. We were satisfied to drop the whole squalid thing. However, the National Cartoonists Society pursued it. They unearthed the forger, and I have no hesitation in giving his name. He was Ham Fisher, the creator of Joe Palooka. I'd worked for him as an assistant when I was a kid, and he had never forgiven me for leaving him and whomping up something of my own. A committee of the National Society, including Milt Caniff, Walt Kelly. Bill Mauldin and Rube Goldberg, voted to expel him. Fisher committed suicide.

[Q] Playboy: Beyond the general self-censorship you mentioned a moment ago, are you forced to observe any specific sexual taboos in preparing Li'l Abner?

[A] Capp: There is only one sexual taboo: If there's anything sexual, it's taboo. But I don't feel limited. It's a privilege to contribute something wholesome and ennobling for kids to come back home to after their parents have sent them off to see Harlow, Seduced and Abandoned and Steve Reeves' Roman rapes.

[Q] Playboy: Some commentators say we're drifting toward an asexual society as the roles of men and women are becoming increasingly indistinguishable. Do you agree?

[A] Capp: If there is, I don't see anything to be alarmed about. It's an exhausting profession, being a girl. For instance, from the age of 12, no really nice girl admits she has bowel movements. Well, maybe it's come time for girls to drop the simpering, complicated, degrading Girl Act, and to enjoy being human beings for a few centuries--and for men to take over the role of peacock. But as for boys and girls becoming indistinguishable, our exploding population figures are proof that they can still tell which is which.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel, as some critics do, that America is going through a period of "moral decay"?

[A] Capp: Change is often called "decay." Our moral values are changing, that's all. I think the most shocking thing I ever saw in my life--I couldn't have been more than 10 or 11 years old--was a woman smoking. I was positive I'd seen my first prostitute. But a few years later my grandmother was sending me out for packs of cigarettes. I remember when the sight of a woman's calf was enough to snap a man's mind. Yet today parents proudly watch their little drum-majorette daughters parading half naked down Main Street.

[Q] Playboy: Many of these same critics say the sexual revolution may change the institution of marriage.

[A] Capp: Marriage, like all social institutions, needs to be changed. But I suppose it'll have to do, as it is, until we come up with a more sensible arrangement. Maybe marriage licenses should expire every two years, like automobile licenses.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about adultery?

[A] Capp: I feel that there must be some other plot for Doris Day movies.

[Q] Playboy: To return to Li'l Abner. It's been said that most of your readers are male. Is this because of the pretty girls in the strip?

[A] Capp: Whether most of the readers are male or female depends on when the survey is taken. If it's taken at a time when the strip involves the activities of Honest Abe, the child, the readership rises to better than 60 percent women. But during a Fearless Fosdick sequence, I lose 20,000,000 women. They stop reading right away and the men start.

[Q] Playboy: Might this be because of some difference between the male and female sense of humor?

[A] Capp: Yes. Men enjoy Fosdick's bad aim, for example. In order to scare off a guy who's selling balloons without a license, Fosdick will shoot three or four innocent housewives through the head--all in the line of duty, of course. Men enjoy this sort of humor; but housewives don't seem to see anything funny about it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you set out to aim for any particular segment of the population when you're working on the strip?

[A] Capp: When you're writing for 80,000,000 readers, you can't aim for any special reader. I've never avoided using any idea because I thought kids wouldn't understand it, or because I thought it would be too childish for Ken Galbraith. All I do is make anything I'm saying as clear as I can. There is nothing you can say about the human condition--oh, I hate using phrases like that--that won't be understood if it's clear enough.

[Q] Playboy: Can you tell us how you work, how you go about preparing the strip?

[A] Capp: I work in a studio near Boston. It's always a crashing disappointment to anyone who saw that Jack Lemmon movie, How to Murder Your Wife, in which he plays a rich cartoonist with a lush triplex pad. Mine isn't. It's just a grubby place with about three rooms where I sit around with a couple of very wealthy men who are my assistants and who begrudge every moment they have to spend in such squalor. One has been with me 31 years. The new boy came in 27 years ago; we haven't decided yet whether he's permanent. They both sit solemnly and listen to ideas of mine, and every now and then they'll give me a profound critique like, "That's a lot of crap." Then I know I'm on the right track. But to tell the truth, I won't go ahead on an idea without their approval. Finally we agree that one idea is less stomach-turning than the other.

At that point, I'll sit down behind my desk and start improvising dialog. I'll take all the roles and recite them out loud. Every now and then one of them will throw in a line or suggest a change. In this way, I'll write a week of strips at a time. Then I'll transfer the dialog onto the strips themselves, draw stick figures of the action, and ink in all the faces. Then it'll go to my assistants, to develop and complete the drawing and inking. By now we've developed something called the Al Capp style--an arrangement of my errors in drawing which my assistants have mastered.

[Q] Playboy: Is it hard work?

[A] Capp: It gets harder, damn it, every year. You know the legend is that once a cartoonist has made it, he turns the whole job over to a little Arab boy, never works again, and the public never knows the difference. That's a snare and a delusion! After 32 years, I've finally discovered who the little Arab boy is: It's me. The reader does know if the creator leaves the strip, no matter how cleverly he's imitated. The reader can't put his finger on any specific difference; it's simply that the total effect on him is different--and he drifts to a different comic strip.

[Q] Playboy: Where do you get the ideas for your characters and situations?

[A] Capp: I try to hit upon some secret, universal dream--or dread--and make it come true in the strip. A while ago, for instance, we had General Bullmoose develop a sports car for kids. It was excruciatingly uncomfortable, smelled terrible, it was expensive, and it was like traveling in a cement mixer. It was the most agonizing, noisy, useless, dangerous automobile ever invented, so Bullmoose says, "Let's charge the kids $8000 apiece for them." It only cost $400 to make them, but this has every possible inconvenience built in, so naturally every kid will demand one. Bullmoose knows he's got the biggest seller of all time--until Slobbovia comes out with a car called the Coldsmobile. It's made of solid ice; it costs nothing to make and nothing to run. It runs off the power generated by the trembling and shuddering of the driver. It sells for $1.29, and it's even more uncomfortable than the Bullmoose car. What's more, it's foreign. Consequently, it's completely irresistible to American kids. A lesser man than Bullmoose might be ruined. But he knows the teenage mind. He has one of his ad agencies flood the country with a campaign endorsing his rival, the Coldsmobile--testimonials such as "Your father and mother want you to drive the Coldsmobile," "Guy Lombardo prefers the Coldsmobile," Your police chief recommends the Coldsmobile." The result is that no self-respecting kid would be found dead in one, and Bullmoose makes billions on his $8000 monstrosity.

[Q] Playboy: Most readers regard Bullmoose as a heavy. Do you?

[A] Capp: No, I like the son of a bitch. He's so completely heartless; he thinks he knows more about everything than anybody else. And he's magnificently horny.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't your Kigmy character the opposite of Bullmoose? It's been called "the epitome of masochism."

[A] Capp: Yes, the Kigmy is the universal scapegoat. Every state trooper should carry one with him so that a guy who gets a ticket can let off steam by kicking it. Not long ago I revived the Kigmies. Factories started turning them out. That's not the only Abner character, of course, that's been manufactured. Aside from all kinds of Li'l Abner products, there's Kickapoo Joy Juice, a new soft drink that does no lasting harm--except to me. Soon as we started flooding the country with it, Joan Crawford snubbed me. Turns out she's the front man for a rival drink called Mountain Dew.

[Q] Playboy: Apart from Abner himself, what's been your most successful creation?

[A] Capp: The Shmoo. probably. When the Shmoo first appeared in the strip about 15 years ago, the excitement was so great it blotted out everything else. I just wondered what we would all be like if our prayers were answered and we suddenly had everything we wanted, and it wasn't necessary to fight or work anymore. I boiled it down to this inanely happy little creature and set it loose. After that, the story wrote itself. But the name helped: Shmoo. The "sh" is a soft, ridiculous, affectionate sound, and "moo" sounds sort of cowlike.

[Q] Playboy: Do you give that much thought to names for your other characters?

[A] Capp: We work damned hard on them. We'll spend four hours to come up with just the right name for a character who will pass in and out of the strip and never be seen again. I want a name to describe the character, as Dickens does. So when I name a girl Moonbeam McSwine, you don't need to be told that she's a beautiful and unsanitary character.

[Q] Playboy: You've gotten in trouble now and then caricaturing prominent people, haven't you?

[A] Capp: Only once. Some years ago, I received a telegram from a California lawyer claiming that my character Loverboynik, a delicious, dimpled darling of a piano player, resembled a client of his. Actually, I thought that was a hell of a thing for him to say about a client. He also stated that his client's name was Liberace. I asked showbiz friends of mine what sort of creature this guy was who was going to sue me--this Liberace. There were several theories. Somehow Time magazine found out about the lawsuit--possibly because I tipped them off--and asked me what my defense would be. I said my defense would be that there was no resemblance whatever between Loverboynik and Liberace--because Loverboynik could play the piano rather decently. Time published that and I never heard from the lawyer again. I never heard Liberace again either, but that was just luck. In any case, Liberace's was the only petulant complaint I've gotten about being caricatured in Li'l Abner. Less revered public figures--Hubert Humphrey, Ernest Hemingway, Barry Goldwater, Cary Grant--have all been delighted.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Capp: Because it is, in a macabre way, a status thing to be caricatured in Abner. Clearly, a guy writing for a public of 80,000,000, over most of the world, isn't going to use any name that isn't internationally famous.

[Q] Playboy: Does this vast readership give you a sense of power?

[A] Capp: Hell, no. The real power resides with the editors who carry your strip. Without them, I'd be about as powerful a social influence as a guy who decorates men's-room walls.

[Q] Playboy: We'll rephrase the question: With the worldwide readership editors have given you over the years, do you feel you've influenced public attitudes?

[A] Capp: I'd be a damn fool to delude myself that I have. Actually, it works the other way. Public attitudes have influenced me. Lately, for instance, I've sensed something that I'd been feeling myself taking place in the public: a growing suspicion that a hell of a lot of the help we've been giving foreign countries has developed into them helping themselves to the fruits of our labors. I tried one or two stories on that theme. The response was extraordinarily heavy and grateful fan mail. I did more. More "hurray for you" mail. So if there is now an increased national surliness about foreign aid, I didn't create it. It was already there. I just applauded it.

[Q] Playboy: The tenor of your remarks throughout this interview might lead some readers to conclude that you're a rather bitter cynic. Would they be right?

[A] Capp: Cynical, perhaps; bitter, no. Actually, I'm a rather merry old soul. As a matter of fact, I don't know anyone more cheerful than I am.

[Q] Playboy: Despite your cynicism?

[A] Capp: Not despite it, because of it. If you have no illusions about yourself, about the quality of saintliness, the quality of selflessness, the quality of patriotism, if you have no illusions about anything, then you can never be disappointed or disenchanted, and you can go on living quite a cheerful life. It's only those idealists who devoutly believe in the achievability of perfection who are shattered when they find out they can't quite make it. But cynicism alone won't give you a cheery life; you must combine it with irritability.

[Q] Playboy: Irritability?

[A] Capp: There used to be a lot of it around. But now we have to go abroad--to France--to find it. We're tolerant of those who swindle us, insult us, betray us, mug us, cheat us. There are those, in fact, who urge us to be tolerant of those who are killing us. What this country needs is less good will, and more bad temper.

[Q] Playboy: Do you follow your own advice? Are you irritable yourself?

[A] Capp: I try to be.