Way back when newspapers were only in the form of ink on paper, there was a comic strip that was so popular that a Broadway musical (1956 — lyrics by Johnny Mercer) and subsequent movie version were made.  It was unique in many ways, and one was its overt anti-communist message.  There is nothing like that today.  But then the Soviet Union is now kaput...or so we've been told.

The brain child of a Jewish Connecticut Yankee named Alfred Caplan (AKA Al Capp), Li'l Abner took place in a backwater hillbilly village called Dogpatch.  The drawing was superb, especially of the ladies.  But the significance of the strip was that it is concrete evidence of a broader political environment that used to describe mainstream American media.  Political correctness had not yet stifled creative endeavors.  For example, the Soviet Union, during departures from life in Dogpatch, was renamed Lower Slobovia.  In that environment, everybody was drowning in snow and living in misery.

I first learned about Capp as a person from an interview in Playboy that I read while still a college student.  Yeah, I read it only for the articles.

Another satirical departure from Dogpatch focused on the also popular (though not comic) strip Dick Tracy.  Capp's version was Fearless Fosdick.  The most memorable feature of ol' Fearless was that, when he took off his shirt, his torso was peppered with bullet holes, making him look a lot like a piece of Swiss cheese.  Go figure.

The welfare state was symbolized and satirized by the shmoo...a semi-amorphous creature that existed only to please humans.  Fry 'em up, and they taste like chicken.  Grill 'em, and they taste like steak.  They were constantly reproducing, so they were always in abundance.  Their plural, shmoos, is the Yiddish word for making small talk.

An enduring theme from Li'l Abner is Sadie Hawkins Day — a day of role reversal, when the girls chase the boys, the captured being forced into marriage.  Colleges and other venues all over America have adopted this concept more or less in perpetuity, but without the compulsory matrimony.  Matchmaking festivals, however, predate Capp's invention.  Lisdoonvarna, in western Ireland, has had a September matchmaking festival for at least the last four generations.

Capp stopped drawing the strip in 1977, after it ran for 43 years.  He died two years later.  Other strips have outlived their creators, either by recycling the archives or by being inherited by a next generation of cartoonists.  Not so for Li'l Abner.  As such, the strip kind of serves as a bench mark for American culture and establishes the point of departure from what used to be its broad-based tolerance for biting satire.  Since then, political correctness has been closing our minds.  None other than Jerry Seinfeld has warned us that comedy can be considered dead since we can no longer make fun of the "wrong" people.

A hit movie such as Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles could never be made today.  It's way too edgy for modern woke sensibilities.  Our minds have been narrowed much in the way frogs are reputed to be boiled — incrementally.  Perhaps it's been Mr. Trump who roused us out of our stupor...or just the compounding of ridiculous notions that have thus far culminated in the manufactured confusion over something as obvious as gender.

I tend to be an optimist, and there's definitely a growing hostility to the dictates of woke sensibility.  But we still tend to hide our provocative tendencies in order to more easily ooze through life without conflict.  There's really nothing wrong with that — except that's money in the bank for aspiring tyrants...of which there are way too many in our midst.

Image: A. Davey via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.