Arts and Manners

Li’l Abner and Big Capp

At Toots Shor’s, a Manhattan restaurant where Broadway characters gather, not so much to eat as to digest their day’s heavy food for thought, Mr. Al Capp enjoys the reputation of a Swift. There he is considered to be even wittier than Mr. Milton Berle. In fact, some of my best friends are Capp lovers. This, I suspect, is due to a hidden guilt complex: outrageous nonconformists otherwise, they greedily welcome an opportunity to be just as common as the next man. The clever Mr. Capp draws his comic strip, “Li’l Abner,” with such conscience-ridden nonconformists in mind. It pleases him to add these stray birds to his forty million common readers.

WS

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William S. Schlamm

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Li’l Abner and Big Capp

At Toots Shor’s, a Manhattan restaurant where Broadway characters gather, not so much to eat as to digest their day’s heavy food for thought, Mr. Al Capp enjoys the reputation of a Swift. There he is considered to be even wittier than Mr. Milton Berle. In fact, some of my best friends are Capp lovers. This, I suspect, is due to a hidden guilt complex: outrageous nonconformists otherwise, they greedily welcome an opportunity to be just as common as the next man. The clever Mr. Capp draws his comic strip, “Li’l Abner,” with such conscience-ridden nonconformists in mind. It pleases him to add these stray birds to his forty million common readers.