Martin Williams on Al Capp and L'il Abner

Billy DeBeck (and his successor, Fred Lasswell), in moving his strip out of the horseracing and hustling world of Barney Google and into the hills of Snuffy Smith, studied the speech and the ways of real mountain folks. He made affectionate fun of them without ridicule, and never offended them. Capp made no such efforts, and, we are told, did offend them, and they said so.
Capp really knew nothing of hill people or their ways, and he didn't seem to care to learn anything. Capp's hillbilly dialogue tended to be an amalgam of vaudeville hick, phoney Southern and soundtrack Western, with a few New England maritime archaisms thrown in. He even confused the southern "yo" (vour) with "ya" (you) and repeatedly used the plural "you all" (or "y'all") in the singular. (The southern and southwestern "you all" and the New York "Youse" or "Yiz," like the colloquial effort to make a plural where none seems to exist.) His nearby village was Pineapple Junction. (Pineapple in the Ozarks? Imported canned pineapple at the general store maybe.)

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It is wrong to call Capp a satirist, it seems to me. Whatever a true satirist learns from the traditions and conventions of his art, he must take as his true subjects the people and the life around him. Capp did not observe the people and the life around him so much as he used the common stereotypes of broad low comedy. For all that he was a clever and intelligent man, Capp's fictional world was almost as unreal as the third-hand world of a Three Stooges two-reeler. It had little or nothing of the keen, simple, but telling observations in the low comic world of the Marx Brothers or E.C. Segar. Furthermore, Groucho Marx's social-climbing, hustling businessman or Wimpy's self-centered mooch were never delivered at anybody else's expense, and always implicitly acknowledged that after all, we are all vulnerable. Capp, like the disdainful Lenny Bruce and some of the Saturday Night Live comics, flattered both himself and his readers at the expense of his characters and their ways.
It should have surprised no one when Al Capp took out after the hippies and peacenicks in the 1960s and 1970s. Those who were most offended had assumed that Capp was some sort of populist liberal, and that he basically loved that simplistic (and non-existent) entity usually called "the common man." But in his strip Capp loved no one.