Students: Capp's Cuts

Why are students willing to pay a millionaire cartoonist $3,000 a shot to insult them from a lecture platform? "I think it's a love-hate relationship," says Al Capp, the raspy-voiced creator of Li'I Abner. "Kids want to be kicked." At 59, the onetime liberal has developed a whole new career touring campuses to trumpet his grouchy, anti-youth message. Familiarity generates deeper contempt. "The more I see of students," he says, "the more I dislike them."

Capp works in a free-flowing format, first reading off questions from a deck of file cards submitted by students (but stacked to include queries on his pet hates), then fielding questions from the floor. Laughing uproariously at his own answers, he told a Wisconsin audience: "You show me an 18-year-old humanitarian who wants to change the world he hasn't been in long enough to learn about, and I'll show you a pest." He mocks student idealism with heavy-handed wit. "A concerned student is one who smashes the computer at a university, and an apathetic student is one who spends four years learning how to repair that computer." Asked if "qualified" 18-year-olds should be given the vote, Capp says easily, "Sure, it won't do a bit of harm to have two or three more people voting."

Combat Pay. Capp compares student activists to Nazis. "They are absolutely the most ill-educated bunch the world has ever seen. They have no sense of history; that's why we have to relive the age of the Brownshirts, when students marched into German universities and took them over." Why are campus disorders spreading? "When they rip up one campus and all that happens is that their right to use the ice-cream-bar machine is revoked for one hour, what do you expect?" Should marijuana be legalized? "By all means. Also murder, rape and arson—then we could do away with all crime."

Though he ridicules the students cruelly—and unfairly—Capp so far has never been attacked on campus. "But I do demand $1,000 more for talking at Ivy League colleges," he says, "as combat pay." He alternates gibes with patriotic pronouncements, defends the flag ("It looks better waving than burning"), and offers a simplish "solution" to the Viet Nam problem ("I say shoot back"). The S.D.S., he says, should be renamed S.W.I.N.E. for "students wildly indignant with nearly everything." He handles hostile audiences firmly: when one activist leaped up at a Kentucky campus appearance and yelled an obscenity, Capp said, "All right, you've told us your name. Now what is your question?"

Cambridge Outcast. Capp denies that he has become reactionary since becoming rich. "I was making $150,000 a year while I was still in my 20s," he says. "My job as a humorist is to find lunacy wherever it exists and expose it." For years he fought McCarthyism in his cartoon strip. "But lunacy has shifted—you can't rely on it. I find it on the left now, and that's where I'm firing."