Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer prize winning cartoonist and playwright dies at 95

Beneath the amiable, bearded intellectual figure lay a mind as sharp and cynical as that of any political pundit. But the talents of the American Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and playwright Jules Feiffer who has died in Richfield Springs, N.Y at the age of 95, lay in the scratchy immediacy of his drawings which exposed the angst and hypocrisies of the New York urban elite and the pragmatic liberalism of its political leaders.

His first weekly cartoon strips in the Village Voice in New York were called “Sick, Sick, Sick” before the moniker “Feiffer” sufficed. Just as they described liberal neurotic self-indulgences, they also exposed the hypocritical pomp of US politicians during the turbulent years of the 20th century.

In fact few escaped the mordant wit of his skinny, angular figures, more like squiggles on a blank paper background. What was so unusual about his talent was that ability to convey depression, self doubt, chauvinism within those bleak strokes of his pen. The irony was there, plain to see. Drama critic Kenneth Tynan pithily described him as “the best writer now cartooning.”

Jules Feiffer could be described as a therapist for America’s mental and emotional ills. But he did not mollycoddle his patients. As he exposed their self doubts and narcissism, he told them the home truths many would have preferred not to hear.

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, who was more comfortable with the darker comedic style of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce.

He sought out US presidents from Eisenhower to Clinton, and most prominently Richard Nixon, described as an archetypal Feiffer character, on whom to launch his typical Feiffer attack, conveyed through his recurring cast of characters, including Bernard Mergendeiler, an anguished, self-deluded liberal attempting to stay neutral n the Vietnam War, and his often victimized but resilient female counterpart, the Dancer, who was based on 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,” She morphed over time into many other women with whom he had fallen in love over the years to resemble the woman he was in love with at the time, and appeared in his strip three times a year. In all her guises and exploitations, she epitomised the resilience of women,

Feiffer said his work “explored how people use language not to communicate, and the use of power in relationships.” He was, himself, liberal in outlook fervently promoting equal opportunities, satirising those who downplayed it.

Four decades of his syndicated cartoon strip earned him a Pulitzer in 1986 for editorial cartooning. They were syndicated to more than 100 US newspapers and were published in The Observer and the Sunday Telegraph.

But, concerned that his comic strips were losing their bite, he also wrote more than 20 plays, including the Obie-winning “Little Murders,” and the controversial screenplay for “Carnal Knowledge,” the 1971 film directed by Mike Nichols that won plaudits and criticism for its frank sexual content. The film co-starred Candice Bergan and Ann-Margret, was banned at first in Georgia, although that ruling was later overturned by the US Supreme Court. The caricaturist’s hand was present in his drama, too.

He had better luck in London with his stage plays. Little Murders (1987) was his first full length stage play, about the assassination of John F Kennedy.Its London RSC production was voted best play of the year by London critics and it was praised by the Telegraph as showing “great vitality and comic power”.

His next play premiered at the RSC again at the Aldwych, God Bless, has a convoluted plot, but almost anticipates the 2021 American election which Donald Trump tried to overthrow . It portrays two students, hired by a right wing president to blow up the Washington Monument and invade the White House.

“I was trying to show what our heritage of pragmatic liberalism has brought us in the last 20 years,” Feiffer explained. “I wanted to do a political play ..of the Cold War and Vietnam and how innocent people, nice people, can become murderers.”

But that play was less well received. 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). In a different medium they elaborated on the concerns he had begun to develop in his cartoons.

“Grownups,” describes the neurotic Jewish family of a New York Times journalist, and is described as the most autobiographical of his plays, heavily influenced by his mother’s death in 1974. On the day of her funeral, Feiffer developed bronchitis and absented himself for three months. He wrote the play, he said, as “an act of exorcism.”

Jules Feiffer was the second of three children and the only son born on January 26, 1929 in the Bronx, New York, to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, Polish immigrants who were, in his words, “politically left-leaning but terribly frightened of offending anyone.” The Great Depression had left its mark on his family. His father, Dave, was Rhoda nee Daniels, a fashion designer.

"She'd go door to door selling her designs for $3," recalled Feiffer. But her role as the breadwinner, however, created an "atmosphere of silent blame" in the home. Feiffer began drawing at the age of three. "My mother always encouraged me to draw", he said. Rhoda described her son as a control freak whose control did her no good at all. But he, himself, did not consider himself a rebellious child.

He saw his older sister, Mimi,as affectionate but hot-tempered, while his younger sister, Alice, was, in his view the most normal in the household because “she was the child my mother overlooked.”

“I ent underground for the first 20 years of my life. I observed, registered things, but commented as little as possible.”

From an early age he loved drawing and wanted to make it his career. In his teens he began training at the Art Students League and later at Pratt Institute in New York, but there a shock awaited him. He discovered drawing was much more difficult than it seemed, It was then that he opted to start creating cartoons.

A the age of 17 he became assistant to cartoonist Will Eisner, helping him write and illustrate his comic strips, including The Spirit. In 1956, he became a staff cartoonist at The Village Voice, producing the weekly comic strip titled Feiffer until 1997. His cartoons became nationally syndicated in 1959 and then appeared regularly in publications including the Los Angeles Times, the London Observer, The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, and The Nation. In 1997, he created the first op-ed page comic strip for The New York Times, which ran monthly until 2000. The innocent, baby face of his youth changed as he matured into a tall, bespectacled man with a beard and a certain bohemian energy. Feiffer was a prominent figure in the evolution of American humour in the 1950s, emerging from the easy gags of Bob Hope and George Burns. He regarded himself as an “outlaw cartoonist ... outlaw writer,”

His first of many collections of satirical cartoons, Sick, Sick, Sick, was published in 1958, and his first novel, Harry, the Rat With Women, in 1963. In 1965, he wrote The Great Comic Book Heroes, the first history of the comic-book superheroes of the late 1930s and early 1940s and a tribute to their creators. In 1979, Feiffer created his first graphic novel, Tantrum. By 1993, he began writing and illustrating books aimed at young readers, with several of them winning awards.

In 1961 he joined author Norton Juster to illustrate “The Phantom Tollbooth,” described as a hilarious odyssey that became a juvenile classic. It inspired Feiffer to focus on producing children’s books. At the age of 85 he launched his latest art form: the graphic novel with his noirish “Kill My Mother.” In 2018, he published the third volume in the set. Endlessly prolific, he wrote more than 35 books, plays and screenplays.

Feiffer’s first two marriages, to Judith Sheftel in 1961 and to Jennifer Allen in 1983, ended in divorce. He married the writer JZ Holden in 2016. He is survived by Holden and his daughters Kate, from his first marriage, Halley and Julie from his second, and two grand-daughters.

Jules Feiffer: born January 26, 1929. Died January 17, 2025