(3 of 9)
The original citizens of Dogpatch—Li'l Abner Yokum, his unbathed parents, and that delectable hill filly, Daisy Mae Scragg —are human enough to have their own poor but burning ambitions and prejudices. They are also so incredibly innocent that they can be duped by a child. The man or woman who does not gain some sense of superiority from their gullibility probably does not exist; and millions of red-blooded young men have clenched their fists with exasperation at Abner's failure to respond to the lovesick Daisy Mae.
Capp's characters speak in odd dialects. Dogpatch folks do not talk like real hillbillies but as Capp feels a hillbilly would probably talk if he lived near the Skonk Works all his life; his Lower Slobbovians speak a language flavored with Bronxian gutturals.
Idiot's Delight. The triple-headed chauffeur (a creature with strains of Martian blood) who transported Li'l Abner from Earth to El Passionato in a flying saucer furnished Capp with a straight man for some fine Panglossian dialectic. After taking a certain amount of triple-headed needling, Li'l Abner cries: "Yo' claims us earth-folks is in th' Idiot Era. Wal—ef we is sech IDIOTS, HOW could we whomp up [pointing earthward] a factory like THET?"
"What does it make?" asks his friend, Tripledome.
"ATOMIC BOMBS, to blow each other UP, natcherly," replies Abner. "Purty soon ALL o' us—east an' west—will have 'nuff of 'em t' blow up th' WHOLE DAWGONE EARTH!"
Many an Abner fan can still recite the poem with which Liddle Noodnik, the shivering infantile princeling of Lower Slobbovia, welcomed Senator Phogbound to his wretched kingdom:
"Welcome, Hammericans, from
Across the Sea
'You hotts are in the right places,
You gung to make happy liddle Kits like me—
And put smiles on our pinched liddle faces!!
Stinkers you're not, nor are
You louses,
You wouldn't riffuse us a few rotten
bocks
Not even a crust brad we Got in our houses— If you dun't come across we all are dad docks!"
Who Ate Pappy? Unlike most comic artists, Capp seems to attract readers in well-defined layers, each stratum as distinct as the segments of a pousse-café. Not all of them love him—some of the most virulent prose of the last decade has come from outraged Abner readers who have written to complain that he is undermining 1) the U.S. mind, 2) the nation's morals or 3) the Constitution itself.
On occasion, the editors and publishers who buy his strip also become bitterly critical. A few, like the editor of the Seattle Times, who kept Abner out of the paper because he seemed to be eating Pappy (in reality he was eating chicken), object to Capp's taste. But more of them criticize his political opinions, observable or suspected, as being out of place in a comic strip. Capp's reaction to such censors is violent. He is apt to cry that neither Mark Twain nor Will Rogers would be allowed to say a word today, and that any man who jokes about anything but his own idiosyncrasies risks being tarred, feathered, dissected by a bribed autopsy surgeon and buried in quicklime.