Jules Feiffer, Satirical Cartoonist, Dead at 95
Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist known for his satirical comic Feiffer and his screenplays, is dead at 95. His wife, JZ Holden, confirmed to the New York Times that he died of congestive heart failure. A Pulitzer Prize winner, Feiffer’s work satirized postwar anxieties among the neurotic New York set. “With his obsession with politics and psychology, his wry wit and stylized drawings, he’s the link from Lenny Bruce to Larry David, from Walt Kelly and James Thurber to Garry Trudeau and Art Spiegelman,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in 2010. Feiffer won his Pulitzer in 1986 for Editorial Cartooning in The Village Voice, where his cartoon Feiffer ran from 1956 to 1997. His winning work was stylistically focused on monologues, in which his characters would drone their way into political ridiculousness. “If I do cartoons about men and women, it’s usually about what’s not working and how it falls apart,” Feiffer told the Comics Journal in 2011. “And it has to be succinct, it has to be pithy, it has to make a point, and it better be fun. And it’s got to be in six panels.”
Outside Feiffer, Feiffer was a celebrated playwright and screenwriter. His animated film Munro, about a 4-year-old boy accidentally drafted into the army and based on a comic Feiffer wrote while in the army himself, won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1961. His plays include Little Murders (’67) and Knock Knock (’76), which was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play. He wrote the script for Mike Nichols’s 1971 film Carnal Knowledge (which netted Ann-Margret an Oscar nomination) and Robert Altman’s 1980 film Popeye. He also illustrated the 1961 book The Phantom Tollbooth. His autobiography, Backing Into Forward: A Memoir, came out in 2010. In her review of the book, Kakutani called both the memoir and Feiffer himself “funny, acerbic, subversive, fiercely attuned to the absurdities in his own life and in the country at large.”
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