Amoozin' but Confoozin': Comic Strips as a Voice of Dissent in the 1950s (2009)

We will all go together when we go, all suffused with an incandescent glow ... When the air becomes uranious, we will all go simultaneous ... And we'll all go together when we go. --Tom Lehrer (1959) American children born in the 1960s grew up with Rocky & Bullwinkle, Get Smart, and Mad Magazine. were able to laugh about Soviet infiltration and the atomic bomb by the time they took their first history class. As teenagers, they may have even given new meaning to their crumbling backyard bunkers as they smoked grass in their fathers' bomb shelters. Bombed, indeed! Raised with television and rock, they were too young to have experienced the fear that gripped their nation for over a decade before they were born. Communists and mushroom clouds were ancient history. As Agent 86 Maxwell Smart would say, as he held his finger about an inch away from his thumb, They missed it by that much. Forms of expression, values and perceptions, symbolic patterns, beliefs and myths that enabled Americans to make sense of the world around them appeared contaminated following World War II by unseemly political interests as American culture polarized. Crusaders began to double their efforts not against outside enemies, but on their neighbors and associates in the hopes that somehow the brewing cold war could be won with a home field advantage. This struggle against domestic evils, generically assuming the name of anti-Communism, encouraged a rhetorical inspection of artifacts such as political criticism, films, and other artworks. Censors endorsed boycotts and books were removed from shelves. The F.B.I, kept dossiers on novelists and secretly filmed patrons leaving left-wing bookstores (Whitfield 1996, 9-10). Comic strips offered hidden transcripts and built-in alibis for the expression of dissent during the 1950s at a time when others could not. The value of their dissent was not that they fostered individual development or self-realization. tended to parody injustices over the desire to bring about change. Rhetoricians have paid relatively little attention to comic strips for the same reason they flew under the radar of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee Comic Book Hearings and the House Un-American Activities Committee--they were, after all, just comic strips. were meant to be funny. The unnoticed commitment to dissent that the comic strips offered was of national and symbolic virtue. Princeton University law professor Steven Shiffrin writes that this form of dissent is the cultural glue that binds citizens to the political community (1999, 18). Democracy needs dissent whenever authority contributes to the construction of knowledge, and the incentives to conform are great. Fun, like God, is declared dead every once in a while. According to Walt Kelly (1966, 8, 96), neither have ever really died--at times they are only unemployed. Barry Sanders claims that every time someone like Plato advises against laughing to excess because it violates decorum or morality, one needs to imagine scores of common citizens cracking up for just those reasons: No sooner than the law tightens its rope, some smart alec will twist the noose into a loophole and make a clean getaway, laughing all the way to the border (1995, xi). This article argues that by using parody and Aesopian strategies of textual resistance, 1950s comic strip writers such as Walt Kelly (c. 1913-1973) and Al Capp (c. 1909-1979) were able to poke fun at society and voice dissent when policy makers within the public forum could not. During a time when First Amendment rights were questioned, comic strips allowed their writers political cover to make arguments against the establishment, giving Americans a unique chance to examine their fears by re-enforcing rather than tearing apart 1950s values, symbolic patterns, and beliefs. The Taming of the Shmoo Al Capp became not only famous, but also rich producing the comic strip Li'l Abner for United Features. …