I’m too shocked for words. Practically. None of my goodread friends has read any Feiffer???! Unbelievable. Don’t you all know that this Pulitzer prize winning, Academy award winning cartoonist is the daddy of modern humour in the US? From Feiffer comes Trudeau, from Feiffer comes Seinfeld, it is that wide-ranging. It was Feiffer who took the neuroses he saw in society and turned them into ‘Sick, sick, sick’ the name of his cartoon strip. It was Feiffer who tried to show white liberal America what it was:

Baby boomers had a habit of falling in love with satirists a few years older than themselves who disliked the counter-culture. When Woody Allen poked fun at “Just Like a Woman” in Annie Hall his audience forgot they loved Bob Dylan for a few moments. Robert Crumb preferred quiet blues to rock n’ roll though he is most famous for his cover of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills. Jules Feiffer was of a similar make, but his satire went well beyond a dislike for Dylan. He was deeply critical of the sexual revolution well before it began in strips he wrote for the Village Voice in ’50s and, when it was well underway, in his screenplay for Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge (1971). He spent more energy attacking his white liberal neighbors for their complacency during the civil rights movement than Southern bigots for their brutality. He was terrified of the bomb. Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove saved his cruelest jokes for George C. Scott’s psychopathic General Buck Turgidson or Peter Sellars’s neutered president. But Feiffer, in his comic story “Boom!” (1959), focused as much on a populace that was disturbingly complicit in ensuring its own nuclear annihilation as on the demons with power. (Paul Morton, bookslut)

He saw the sexual ‘revolution’ as the vehicle for the continued sexual exploitation of woman…as indeed it was.

Interalia he makes an indirect observation about some of the major liberal US magazines attempts to interfere with the artist’s free expression. From Paul Morton’s interview with him:

“The Lonely Machine” was published in Playboy. But you were so against everything that Hugh Hefner stood for in that magazine.
Well, apparently. But Hefner was terrific about it. [He didn’t:] try to shape me to the demands of his publication as every publication except for the Voice generally did. Whether you were working for Esquire or Harper’s or the Atlantic or the New Yorker they wanted you to be like them, with their sensibility. Hefner, when he sent me back notes, he sent me back richly-detailed notes, panel-by-panel breakdowns of what he liked and what he didn’t like. And it was never to change my point-of-view to his or to the magazine’s. But it was to make my argument stronger by strengthening what he thought was a weakness. And in many cases he was right.

I can only assume, my goodreads friends, that you must surely in your life sometime have seen Feiffer without even knowing: if not Carnal Knowledge then Little Murders starring Elliot Gould, Altman’s Popeye for which he wrote the screenplay or Kill Bill 2 where I gather Tarantino steals some of his thoughts on Superheroes.

His cartoons are timeless and insofar as liberal first world complacency (I don’t see that the US should shoulder all the guilt) needs to be relentlessly criticised, this applies even to his political cartoons. Still, it is his social observations that I have picked for your perusal here.

The cool people:






Conformity in rebellion:





Mother:





The illusion of freedom:



Therapy:



Oh and I love this:



You'll find his books for practically nothing at your local secondhand bookshop (that is, if you still have one....I can't speak for the Oxfam monster) as he is evidently completely unfashionable although timeless. A peculiar contradiction. Get one. PLEASE!!!!!

( )

I’m too shocked for words. Practically. None of my goodread friends has read any Feiffer???! Unbelievable. Don’t you all know that this Pulitzer prize winning, Academy award winning cartoonist is the daddy of modern humour in the US? From Feiffer comes Trudeau, from Feiffer comes Seinfeld, it is that wide-ranging. It was Feiffer who took the neuroses he saw in society and turned them into ‘Sick, sick, sick’ the name of his cartoon strip. It was Feiffer who tried to show white liberal America what it was:

Baby boomers had a habit of falling in love with satirists a few years older than themselves who disliked the counter-culture. When Woody Allen poked fun at “Just Like a Woman” in Annie Hall his audience forgot they loved Bob Dylan for a few moments. Robert Crumb preferred quiet blues to rock n’ roll though he is most famous for his cover of Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills. Jules Feiffer was of a similar make, but his satire went well beyond a dislike for Dylan. He was deeply critical of the sexual revolution well before it began in strips he wrote for the Village Voice in ’50s and, when it was well underway, in his screenplay for Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge (1971). He spent more energy attacking his white liberal neighbors for their complacency during the civil rights movement than Southern bigots for their brutality. He was terrified of the bomb. Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove saved his cruelest jokes for George C. Scott’s psychopathic General Buck Turgidson or Peter Sellars’s neutered president. But Feiffer, in his comic story “Boom!” (1959), focused as much on a populace that was disturbingly complicit in ensuring its own nuclear annihilation as on the demons with power. (Paul Morton, bookslut)

He saw the sexual ‘revolution’ as the vehicle for the continued sexual exploitation of woman…as indeed it was.

Interalia he makes an indirect observation about some of the major liberal US magazines attempts to interfere with the artist’s free expression. From Paul Morton’s interview with him:

“The Lonely Machine” was published in Playboy. But you were so against everything that Hugh Hefner stood for in that magazine.
Well, apparently. But Hefner was terrific about it. [He didn’t:] try to shape me to the demands of his publication as every publication except for the Voice generally did. Whether you were working for Esquire or Harper’s or the Atlantic or the New Yorker they wanted you to be like them, with their sensibility. Hefner, when he sent me back notes, he sent me back richly-detailed notes, panel-by-panel breakdowns of what he liked and what he didn’t like. And it was never to change my point-of-view to his or to the magazine’s. But it was to make my argument stronger by strengthening what he thought was a weakness. And in many cases he was right.

I can only assume, my goodreads friends, that you must surely in your life sometime have seen Feiffer without even knowing: if not Carnal Knowledge then Little Murders starring Elliot Gould, Altman’s Popeye for which he wrote the screenplay or Kill Bill 2 where I gather Tarantino steals some of his thoughts on Superheroes.

His cartoons are timeless and insofar as liberal first world complacency (I don’t see that the US should shoulder all the guilt) needs to be relentlessly criticised, this applies even to his political cartoons. Still, it is his social observations that I have picked for your perusal here.

The cool people:






Conformity in rebellion:





Mother:





The illusion of freedom:



Therapy:



Oh and I love this:



You'll find his books for practically nothing at your local secondhand bookshop (that is, if you still have one....I can't speak for the Oxfam monster) as he is evidently completely unfashionable although timeless. A peculiar contradiction. Get one. PLEASE!!!!!

( )

A classic of neurotic humor. Feiffer' characters are the everyperson of early 60's America with all of their fears and desires. I have read these books over and over. I have even memorized my favorite strips that become the parables of life in America. Reading them now is a time trip that I still find entertaining. Anybody under 30 can get a better understanding of the boomer generation through these pages. And they are all still very funny. ( )

Early cartoons by the unique Jules Feiffer. I think I like the earliest ones best; they're almost nostalgic. ( )