Counter-culture cartoonist, playwright and screenwriter Jules Feiffer, 95, died on Jan. 16. Feiffer was best known for his humorously angst-ridden cartoons for The Village Voice, providing a voice for the beatnik and, later, self-obsessed intellectual crowds. He wrote such Broadway plays as Little Murders, Knock Knock, The Grown Ups, and The Apple Tree, and was one of the many authors of Oh! Calcutta! He also wrote the screenplays for Munro (a 1961 short which won an Oscar), Carnal Knowledge, and Popeye, among other film and TV projects. Feiffer was one of the “sick” comics of the 1950s-60s (along with Lenny Bruce, Shelley Berman and others)—anxious, brainy types who laughed at the audience and at themselves. Writer Larry DuBois aptly said, “His main concern was to explore character. It would be no exaggeration to say that his dialog is as acute as any that is being written in America today. Dialog aimed at sophisticated minds, usually with the purpose of shaking them out of sophistication into real awareness.” His daughters Halley Feiffer and Kate Feiffer are actresses and playwrights.
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