Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and playwright who cast a cynical eye on the personal and political anxieties, hypocrisies and disappointments of upper-middle-class urbanites, has died in Richfield Springs, N.Y,
One of the most widely read satirists in America, Feiffer died Friday of congestive heart failure, his wife, author JZ Holden, told the Washington Post and New York Times on Tuesday. He was 95.
Representatives for Feiffer and Holden did not immediately respond Tuesday to The Times’ request for comment.
Feiffer, whose syndicated strip ran for more than four decades, won a Pulitzer in 1986 for editorial cartooning. He also wrote more than 20 plays, including the Obie-winning “Little Murders,” and the screenplay for “Carnal Knowledge,” the 1971 film directed by Mike Nichols that was groundbreaking for its frank treatment of sexuality.
In recent years Feiffer focused on producing children’s books, a career that could be traced back to 1961 when he teamed up with author Norton Juster to illustrate “The Phantom Tollbooth,” a novel about a bored boy and his hilarious odyssey that became a juvenile classic. And at age 85, he took on an entirely new art form: the graphic novel. The result was “Kill My Mother,” a noir tale that leans on the nostalgia of old Los Angeles, Raymond Chandler and black-and-white cinema. In 2018, he published the third volume in the set.
Tall, bearded and bespectacled, with a somewhat bohemian air, Feiffer was a key figure in the evolution of American humor in the 1950s, when mainstream tastes favored the tame insults-and-gags comedy of Bob Hope and George Burns. A self-described “outlaw cartoonist … outlaw writer,” Feiffer was more attuned to the darker comic style of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce.
“No other cartoon in strip format was dealing on a regular basis with themes as adult as sex, politics, psychiatry,” “Doonesbury” author Garry Trudeau said of Feiffer.
His figures, drawn in thin, nervous squiggles, stood out starkly against a plain background. With a few deft strokes of his pen, he could convey the quiver of self-doubt, the swagger of chauvinism, the crush of depression. His dialogue was abundant and suffused with paradox and irony. Feiffer, the late theater critic Kenneth Tynan once proclaimed, was simply “the best writer now cartooning.”
Presidents from Eisenhower to Clinton got the Feiffer treatment along with a cast of recurring characters, including Bernard Mergendeiler, the misanthropic, chronically dissatisfied lover, and Bernard’s often victimized but resilient female counterpart, the Dancer.
Feiffer the cartoonist would regularly lampoon conformity, though he was anything but rebellious as a child growing up in New York.
Born in New York City on Jan. 26, 1929, he was the lone son of Polish immigrants who were, in his words, “politically left-leaning but terribly frightened of offending anyone.” His father, Dave, was a salesman who never recovered from the Great Depression; the breadwinner was his mother, Rhoda, a fashion sketch artist whose overbearing nature left track marks on his psyche.
He also had an older sister, Mimi, whom he described as loving but hot-tempered, and a younger sister, Alice, whom he considered the most normal in the household because “she was the child my mother overlooked.”
“I saw who had the guns,” he said in 1976, referring to his caustic mother and older sister, “so I went underground for the first 20 years of my life. I observed, registered things, but commented as little as possible.”
A self-professed “rotten student,” Feiffer began drawing when he was 6 and dreamed of becoming a cartoonist. In his teens he began training at the Art Students League and later at Pratt Institute in New York.
After high school he secured a job as an unpaid assistant for one of his idols, Will Eisner, the influential comic book publisher and author of the series “The Spirit.” Feiffer eventually took over scripting “The Spirit.” By 1949, he was drawing his own strip for Eisner called “Clifford,” about a little boy and his dog.
It was not until Feiffer was drafted into the Army at 22 that he found his voice as a cartoonist: angry, and rebellious. He hated military life so much that he refused a promotion to private first class.
“I was treated with open contempt by one form of authority or the other in the Army on a 24-hour basis,” he recalled of his service, which lasted from 1951 to 1953, “but at least I was free to hate them back, something I couldn’t do at home with my teachers or my family because the ties were too personal.”
His military experiences inspired the character Munro, a 4-year-old boy who is accidentally drafted into the Army. He developed Munro, Feiffer said, “so I wouldn’t go crazy.” After leaving the Army, he tried to sell Munro as a strip but had no luck because it was not intended for children, even though the main character was a child. He went into psychoanalysis and found work writing for the CBS kiddie show “Terry Toons.”
In his off-hours he would haunt the cabarets of Greenwich Village, hanging out with Sahl, Nichols and Elaine May, fellow members of a comic underground who made humor about such topics as virginity, Jewish mothers, the communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover.
“Time and Newsweek labeled what we did as sick humor,” Feiffer wrote in his 1982 book “Jules Feiffer’s America.” “I replied that it was not sick humor, but that society was sick, you understand? And that I was commenting on a sick society, you know what I mean? And that I hated sick jokes, you get it? I turned blue explaining myself.”
He called his strip “Sick, Sick, Sick” when it debuted in the Village Voice in 1956; his weekly satiric commentary made him a defining voice of the pioneering alternative weekly, along with co-founder Norman Mailer, the award-winning author.
The Voice could not pay him for the first several years but the exposure was gratifying. In 1959 Playboy put him on a $500-a-month retainer and magazine founder Hugh Hefner personally edited his cartoons. “A wonderful cartoon editor,” Feiffer wrote in 1982 of Hefner, “the best I’ve had.”
By 1960 his strip was being distributed nationally by the Hall Syndicate. He was proud of the occasions when it was censored, regarding the rejection as “a form of affirmation.”
During the 1960s he used his cartoons as a forum for his political views. He attacked hypocrisy, whether in the Nixon administration or in the posturing of a peacenik.
“I occupy buildings … raid files … scream obscenities … throw rocks … and call all cops pigs … in an attempt to humanize this brutalized society,” a longhaired demonstrator said in one cartoon from that turbulent decade.
Prominent on the anti-Vietnam War circuit, Feiffer spoke at peace rallies to protest U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. He visited Cuba and was a Eugene McCarthy delegate at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
His characters morphed with the times. Though neutral on the Vietnam War, Bernard Mergendeiler, his victim-hero, was not isolated from it, turning violent in thoughts and small deeds through the 1960s. The Dancer was modeled after a woman Feiffer dated in the ‘50s.
“I would go to recitals with her, and just picked up on the oddness and sweetness of it,” he told The Times in 1988. “Long after I broke up with her, I came up with … the character in the cartoon,” who changed shape over the years to resemble the woman he was in love with at the time.
She appeared in Feiffer’s strip three times a year — spring, autumn and New Year’s. She was always being exploited by men but, unlike Bernard, never lost faith. She would dance, fall, get back on her feet, trip and rise again.
In the early 1960s, afraid that his cartoons were becoming “too acceptable,” Feiffer began to write plays and carried many of the concerns and much of the anger that motivated his cartoons to the stage.
His most notable success was “Little Murders,” which began as a novel and moved to the theater after Feiffer was asked to flesh out some of its characters for Chicago’s Second City troupe. But the dark comedy about family dysfunction in New York City was bleak for Broadway audiences in 1967 and closed after a short run.
Two years later it was successfully revived off-Broadway. That production, directed by Alan Arkin, was nominated for three Tony Awards, including one for Feiffer. Besides an Obi, it won an Outer Circle Drama Critics Award and was made into a movie starring Elliott Gould. Feiffer was named most promising playwright of the 1966-67 season by New York drama critics.
Among his other plays were “God Bless” (1968), “The White House Murder Case” (1970), “Knock, Knock” (1976), “Hold Me!” (1977), “Grownups” (1981) and “Elliot Loves” (1989).
His plays were hardly light entertainment.
In “Grownups,” for instance, Feiffer examined the world of an unhappily married reporter for the New York Times and his neurotic Jewish family, who drive him crazy with their expectations. The most autobiographical of his plays, it grew out of his mother’s death in 1974. On the day of her funeral, Feiffer developed bronchitis and a high fever and was out of commission for three months. He wrote the play, he said, as “an act of exorcism.”
Frank Rich, writing in the New York Times, praised “Grownups” as Feiffer’s “most moving and provocative work” but blanched at its painful content. The playwright was “out for blood, and he won’t quit until he gets it,” Rich wrote. Similarly, Los Angeles Times critic Dan Sullivan noted that the play “would like to forgive its characters through laughter, but the laughs keep coming up bitter.”
A persistent theme from critics was that Feiffer’s plays were too much like staged cartoons.
This assessment frustrated Feiffer, “not because of my feeling for cartoons — I adore the form — but because Americans can’t say ‘cartoon’ without a note of condescension,” he told Newsweek after critics panned “Elliot Loves,” which ran off-Broadway in 1990.
“Carnal Knowledge” had started out as a play in 1970, but his friend, director Nichols, convinced him it would work better as a movie. The film starred Jack Nicholson as a lecherous woman-hater and Art Garfunkel as his morally confused friend who lusts after a “good girl” played by Candice Bergen. It reaped critical praise and made money despite complaints that it was hostile to women. Banned by Georgia’s Supreme Court because of nudity and profanity, it became a test case on obscenity laws before the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1974 ruled on the side of the filmmakers.
Feiffer had won an Oscar in 1961 for an animated movie based on Munro, his angry 4-year-old character. He also wrote the script for the 1980 movie “Popeye,” which was directed by Robert Altman and starred Robin Williams as the spinach-eating cartoon sailor. Few reviewers or movie-goers liked it.
He continued drawing cartoons while discovering what he called a “joyously accidental career” as a children’s book author.
He wrote and illustrated 10 children’s books, beginning with “The Man in the Ceiling” (1993), about a boy cartoonist and his dysfunctional family. He also collaborated on three books with his eldest daughter, Kate Feiffer.
The atypical themes Feiffer chose turned off some parents. For instance, “I’m Not Bobby,” published in 2001, concerned a boy who ponders eating his parents. Other books showed a warmer, more playful side, such as in “Bark, George,” about a dog that meows.
“I never think of these books as cautionary tales or moral lessons,” he told the Kansas City Star in 2002. “The last thing I want to do is a message book. I don’t like books that preach to children, and I think children don’t like books to preach to them. … My books come out of whatever is left of the kid in me, or whatever I observe in my own kids that connects to the kid in me.”
In 1995, Feiffer quit the Village Voice after a salary dispute with the weekly’s new managers. His work continued to appear in newspapers across the country, from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times.
In the post-9/11 era, however, disillusionment took hold of him. “It seems to me what made me a serious political artist was that I always believed that what I did, along with other cartoonists, could effect change in some way,” he told the New York Times in 2003. “I no longer have that illusion.”
Worn out by the strains of producing a strip a week for more than 40 years, he decided, in 2000, to end the cartoon.
In one of the final installments, he featured his old friend, the Dancer.
“You’ve been my dancer for 43 years,” Feiffer told her, “so this is hard for me. In four weeks, I give up this comic strip.”
“You’re dying!” the dancer said.
“No, I’m fine,” he reassured her. “It’s not you. I’m a political cartoonist and it’s become a real problem. The material I have to work with: Al Gore … George W. Bush. … When I grew nostalgic over Bill Clinton, I knew it was time to go.”
His first marriage, to Judy Sheftel, ended in divorce. In addition to Kate Feiffer, his daughter with Sheftel, he is survived by daughters, Halley and Julie, whom he had with his second wife, Jennifer Allen. He married “Illusion of Memory” author Holden in 2013.
Woo is a former Times staff writer.
