The Press: Tain't Funny

Al Capp's comic strip Li'l Abner walks a dangerous rope: it often picks its topics out of the headlines, and sometimes finds its humor in the neighborhood of the outhouse. Last week, on both counts, it disappeared for a week from the columns of the Scripps-Howard Pittsburgh Press. Editor Edward Towner Leech had taken umbrage at a broad burlesque of the U.S. Senate.

In the censored strips, the Senate needed one vote to defeat a bill to put Congress on the air ("and you know what'll happen to us if the American people can actually hear us!"). The Senate's only hope...