Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer-winning cartoonist whose satirical skewerings ran in The Sunday Telegraph

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18-02-2025

Jules Feiffer, who has died aged 95, was one of America's most celebrated political cartoonists, turning a satirical eye on some of his country's most turbulent moments for nearly half a century.
Feiffer started drawing weekly strip cartoons, initially called 'Sick, Sick, Sick', later simply 'Feiffer', for The Village Voice in New York, articulating the concerns of perplexed, neurotic liberal New Yorkers and exposing the hypocrisies and pomposities of US politicians.
Feiffer explained that his work explored 'how people use language not to communicate, and the use of power in relationships'. In one cartoon, satirising the politically correct obsession with nomenclature, an old man says to himself: 'I used to think I was poor… Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was Needy… Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was Deprived… Then they told me deprived was a bad image, I was Underprivileged… Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was Disadvantaged… I still don't have a dime… But I have a great vocabulary.'
Although generally liberal in his outlook, Feiffer was an equal-opportunities satirist, skewering the antics of politicians from LBJ (seen in one cartoon telling a lollipop-sucking child: 'In the interest of freedom and in the pursuit of peace, we have today bombed…'), Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, and he became a vehement critic of the sort of liberal intellectualism that is oblivious to the violent forces that threaten social order.
Feiffer's cartoons were syndicated to more than 100 US newspapers and ran in The Observer and The Sunday Telegraph. In 1986 he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.
He combined his newspaper work with writing screenplays and stage plays in a similar satirical vein. He wrote the script for the Oscar-winning animated short Munro (1961), though his best-known screenplay was for Carnal Knowledge (1971), a comedy of sexual manners directed by Mike Nichols that followed the exploits of two old college friends (Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel) as they try and generally fail to negotiate the sexual revolution.
The film, which co-starred Candice Bergen and (a mostly nude) Ann-Margret – who received an Oscar nomination for her role as a model 'with splendid features', as the Telegraph critic put it – was banned as obscene in Georgia, though the ruling was overturned by the US Supreme Court.
According to Feiffer, its blunt honesty about male misogyny got him blacklisted in Hollywood for 10 years, though in 1980 he agreed to come up with the script for Robert Altman's Popeye, starring Robin Williams as the one-eyed, spinach-chomping sailor, whom Feiffer characterised as 'the flawed Everyman as Walt Whitman might have imagined him, Frank Capra directed him, and Samuel Beckett mixed with Eugene Ionesco hired to write his dialogue'.
Not surprisingly, the end result did not go down well with critics, while the production was dogged by rows caused in part, one reviewer noted, by 'Altman's erratic behaviour [and] the arrival of his notorious consigliere Scotty Bushnell, who revelled in creating inter-departmental tension. Altman stopped speaking to his cinematographer... Everyone, meanwhile, stopped speaking to Feiffer.'
As a writer for the stage Feiffer often had better luck in London than in New York. His first full-length play, Little Murders (1967), a response to the assassination of John F Kennedy, later turned into a film starring Elliot Gould, was a black comedy set against a backdrop of mounting urban violence. A photographer becomes so disillusioned with life that he begins to specialise in pictures of excrement. As a result he becomes a celebrity and eventually joins in the mayhem by shooting passers-by.
Hostile notices sank the New York production, but in London, staged by the RSC at the Aldwych, it was voted best foreign play of the year by London critics, the Telegraph's WA Darlington observing that it showed great 'vitality and comic power'. The only dissenting voice was that of the Lord Chamberlain, who objected to the use of the word 's--t', but found 'c--p' to be an acceptable substitute.
Encouraged by the reception, Feiffer (who claimed to be an aficionado of London parks) chose London for the public premiere of his next major play, God Bless (1978), though with less happy results. The production, again by the RSC at the Aldwych, starred Roy Dotrice as William Brackman, a wheelchair-bound 110-year-old elder statesman and presidential adviser, a one-time liberal with his eye on the main chance.
His reveries are interrupted when two radical ex-students of his at Harvard blow up the Washington Monument and invade the White House. The revolutionaries turn out to be agents provocateurs hired by a Right-wing president in an attempt to discredit Left-wing protest and foment a backlash. But as the 'revolutionaries' taste power, matters get out of hand and Brackman brokers an unlikely coalition, with disastrous results.
'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 the reviews were almost uniformly hostile, the Telegraph's critic regretting that 'the steely control of Feiffer's cartoons has not here restrained him from excesses of fancy which explode meaninglessly in the theatre.'
By his own admission, one of Feiffer's biggest earners was his friend Norton Juster's 1961 children's fantasy classic The Phantom Tollbooth, for which he did the charming, scratchy illustrations. It has sold more than five million copies and has been adapted into a film, play and opera.
As 'Feiffer' the comic strip retired in 2000 ('when I grew nostalgic over Bill Clinton, I knew it was time to go,' he joked), Feiffer reinvented himself as a children's book author and illustrator, and also wrote graphic novels.
The second of three children, Jules Ralph Feiffer was born in the Bronx on January 26 1929 to Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father, David, was a salesman who struggled during the depression. His mother, Rhoda, described by her son as 'a control freak whose control did her no good at all', supported the family selling fashion drawings to department stores.
He enjoyed drawing as a child and wanted to make it his career, but at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he attended art classes, drawing seemed more difficult than it first appeared. Finding a good caption helped, and he decided to become a cartoonist.
Will Eisner, creator of 'The Spirit', a popular crime-fighting strip (and the main feature of a tabloid-sized comic), was his great hero and, aged 16, Feiffer talked his way into working under him. 'I thought I was a finished cartoonist,' Feiffer recalled. '[Eisner] looked through my samples. He disagreed. He thought I was finished as a cartoonist.'
But Eisner allowed him to work as an unpaid 'groupie', and helped him to introduce 'Clifford', about the adventures of a little boy, a comic strip that showcased 'the sort of self-pity that made me famous'.
Drafted in 1951 into the US Army Signals Corps, Feiffer concocted a plan to fake a nervous breakdown to escape possible combat duty in Korea and spent much of his time drawing anti-military cartoons and honing what he described as his 'contempt for abusive authority'.
Discharged in 1953, he worked at various jobs, getting himself fired every so often so that he could draw the dole until he was given a slot in The Village Voice, where for the first eight years he worked unpaid.
His pessimistic view of human nature owed much to McCarthyism. In 1953 he attended the memorial service of the actor J Edward Bromberg, who had died a couple of years earlier after prolonged McCarthyist persecution. There, he saw the playwright Clifford Odets denounce the state for having caused the death of his friend – but, a week later, he was appalled to hear that Odets had supplied names to the House Un-American Activities Committee and had fingered Bromberg as his recruiter.
Hugh Hefner, who hired him to draw cartoon​s for Playboy, was the first person to pay Feiffer for his work, winning him a national audience before any of his work was syndicated: 'I was amazed at how I started getting college speaking dates within a year of appearing in Playboy.'
Feiffer's other work included several more plays, among them The White House Murder Case, in which a nerve gas is released by mistake, killing 750 soldiers, and White House staff ponder how to spin the tragedy to the voting public ahead of a presidential election. In addition he published several children's books and what he called 'novels-in-cartoons', and a 2010 memoir, Backing into Forward.
Feiffer's marriages, to Judy Sheftel and Jennifer Allen, were dissolved. In 2016, he married the writer JZ Holden, who survives him with a daughter from his first marriage and two daughters from his second.
Jules Feiffer, born January 26 1929, died January 17 2025​
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