Word: capps
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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ALONG Broadway this week theatergoers were pushing their way into packed houses offering an assortment of musical comedies that ranged from the sparkle of George Bernard Shaw to the gurgle of Al Capp (see color pages). Despite the absence this season of such magic names as Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hammerstein, the box-office boom for a show with a lilting tune and a hearty joke has continued to thump as loudly as ever...
Billing himself as "An Evening of Culture at the Corcoran," chain-smoking Cartoonist Al (Li'l Abner) Capp strolled into the Washington museum, ripped joyfully into modern art while his listeners choked, fretted and guffawed nervously. Capp's special quarrel was with the pure abstractionists-"that small group of the unbalanced who sell shameless products through a larger group of avaricious and unprincipled to an enormous group of the totally dazed." Aren't the abstractionists' products good for anything? Sneered (Ugh!) Critic Capp later: "They'd make good neckties for Elks' conventions...
There is no excuse to review The World of Li'l Abner. As John Steinbeck says in his introduction, "It is my claim that Capp is probably the greatest contemporary writer." Everybody who has followed Li'l Abner through the years knows this, and the rest don't deserve to. So the idea of an introductory volume is inherently ridiculous...
...Although Capp planned the volume to have hard covers and dignity, this edition has soft covers and dignity. On the front cover set against a picture representing Sadie Hawkins Day musical note appears which apparently refers to the musical comedy Li'l Abner, for which there are also a few words of advertisement. On the back cover there is a picture of Al Capp grinning. Inside are Dumpington Van Lump, P. Fangsgood Droolsby, Big Barnsmall, the outside man at the Skonk Works, Joe Btfsplk, the world's greatest jinx, and Fearless Fosdick, all of whom have their imitators in life...
...each of the ten archetypal adventures, Li'l Abner and his friends are wriggled out of one difficulty only to fall into another. Victim of Capp's slightest whim, even Li'l Abner's pig must (barely) wriggle out of being turned into the Ecstasy Sauce that Bounder J. Roundheels must have for the Roast Rump of Tree Dwelling Elephant that will get him into the Gourmet's Club. From the first Sadie Hawkins' Day episode in which L'l Abner wriggles out of Daisy Mae's arms into those of a jackass, to the last where he is "hopelessly...