Inhuman Man

In the middlebrow Atlantic Monthly, the highbrows' lowbrow Cartoonist Al Capp confessed last week to a secret ambition--"to get published in something that won't be used to wrap fish in the next morning. And so, the other day, I was Writing a book." Its title: I Remember Monster. ("The first part" explained Al "is a memoir of my early days as assistant to a well-known cartoonist.") Under its tomfoolishness, Capp's article in the February issue of the Atlantic (cover by Capp) was a perceptive essay on Charlie Chaplin,

Al Capp and what makes people laugh.

"All comedy is based on man's delight in man's inhumanity to man" wrote Capp. "I have made 40 million people laugh more or less every day for 16 years (on that formula)." The only way to top this was to carry man's inhumanity to man "to its ultimate absurdity--namely the inhumanity of men other men have been inhuman to," the cruelly of the victim who victimizes somebody else. People who laugh at this are not "heartless wretches," wrote Capp, but "normal human beings, full of self-doubt . . . full of a desperate need to be reassured."

It was the same way with love. Observed Capp: "No lover is anything but disappointed, since the greatest of all disappointments is the final triumphant possession of the love one has dreamt of having. It's never as wonderful as your dreams . .. No confused, despondent lover ever saw a Chaplin picture who wasn't cheered up ... We knew that no girl would ever want him, and that emphasized the fact that some girl would or did want us . . ." Capp has improved on the old master: "I try to make a disappointed lover feel better by having Li'l Abner never know what to do about a succession of eager, luscious girls who throw their juicy selves at him ... Compared with Li'l Abner [the disappointed lover is] Don Juan. It makes him feel fine to be Don Juan. So he feels fine about Li'l Abner."

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