Cartoonist Jules Feiffer Draws Laughs At Library

On Halloween, about 50 people milled outside the locked Morris Meeting Room on the lower level of the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton, swapping horror stories about the devastation Hurricane Sandy had wreaked the day before.

When the doors opened shortly after noon, they filed in and settled into their seats, turning their attention to the front of the room where Jules Feiffer sat quietly, his hands in his lap, awaiting his introduction.

“I’ve been looking forward to this for over a month,” a woman murmured to her friend while taking out her bagged lunch.

“Me, too,” she whispered back.

Program Director Penelope Wright stepped up to the microphone.

“We’re really honored today to have a visit from Jules Feiffer—cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter and children’s book author,” she announced. “He has had a remarkable career, a creative career, turning contemporary, urban anxiety into witty and revealing commentary for over 50 years. From his Village Voice editorial cartoons to his plays and screenplays, including ‘Little Murders’ and ‘Carnal Knowledge,’ Feiffer’s satirical outlook has helped define us politically, sexually and socially.”

“Oh my God,” Mr. Feiffer breathed out, smirking.

“My words, not his,” Ms. Wright said.

The audience burst into laughter and applause, already charmed by Mr. Feiffer’s three words. “Well, now I know exactly how many people don’t have power,” he said. “And I’m one of them, which is why I’m here. Thank you for coming out. I used to attract a young crowd, but that was 70 years ago. And then, it was you.”

With that, the 83-year-old began weaving a winding tale.

He was born on January 26, 1929. The country felt such a state of shock, Mr. Feiffer quipped, that the stock market crashed 10 months later, launching America into the Great Depression. But out of the dark times came comedy, spread by way of radio, film and, of most interest to Mr. Feiffer, adventure comic strips. They thrilled and mystified the young boy, while serving a dual purpose.

First, they taught Mr. Feiffer how to read. And second, the comics wetted his cartooning appetite.

“They were my future reality,” he said. “I saw them as, almost literally in my kid’s mind, as a documentary about my future, the real life of me being a kid in the Bronx—which I hated—with a mother and father who, as good-willed as they pretended to be, never understood me, like other parents, and where the only understanding and sympathy I could get was certainly not.” He paused, “I had two sisters. Do you think two sisters are going to understand me? The only other sympathy I could get was from the comic strips. It was strangers. It was strangers who seemed to know more about me than anybody who lived close to me.”

After all, interactions with his more distant family weren’t any better, he said.

“When well-meaning relatives—when I was a teenager and trying to find work in the field and couldn’t—would take me to lunch and say, ‘You should go back to school. You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket,’ my constant response was, ‘All I have is one basket. I only have one egg,’ which was my polite way of saying, ‘Screw you.’ Because like all relatives, they were well-meaning, which means they give good advice, and I didn’t want good advice. I only wanted advice that was going to play into the fantasy, and it was my fantasy, so I was going to act it out any way I could.”

But first, an Army draft got in the way. He served from 1951 to 1953.

“Well, I was a disaster in the Army. Now you understand,” he said. “The Army used to say, ‘We’re going to separate the men from the boys,’ but they never told you which was which. And it seemed to me, always, that the boys won out and the men never got anywhere because if you were a man, you really didn’t like the army. You didn’t want to be there. It was the whole idea, the system of getting everybody to work as a unit, to work as one, and I felt that I was being crushed—and crushed happily—by these happy sadists who were above me.”

He sighed. “In fact, it so politicized me by trying to make me one of them, which I was not going to be, that it gave me the impetus and the courage to do the sort of work I would have been frightened to do, scared to do, had I not been drafted. It also taught me something I was afraid to do up until that point: it taught me how to hate in a constructive way. I was a nice Jewish boy, so everything was submerged. Being in the Army and then having a drink or two, it doesn’t say submerged very long. I became a satire killing machine.”

Mr. Feiffer landed his big break in 1956 with his cartoon strip in The Village Voice, which ran for 42 years—the first eight years of which went unpaid, he noted. Illustrating conversations he overheard among his young, urban, liberal friends, he was part of a movement, Mr. Feiffer said, For the first time, his generation looked in a newspaper and saw themselves reflected back through his contemporary cartoons, whether he was talking about friendship, family, sex or politics. They hadn’t seen anything like this in print before, he said, and now they had a voice.

In 1986, Mr. Feiffer won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial cartooning. By 1997, after many years at the newspaper, and beginning to fear he was repeating himself, it was time to move on.

“My job, I thought, was to overthrow the government, which I worked at assiduously and then decided many years later that I had actually succeeded in doing it, with very mixed results,” he smiled. “Although [The Village Voice] was now paying me handsomely, and so handsomely that they decided it was too much and fired me, I moved quite naturally from that into theater. And from theater ... I moved into children’s books, which is a form I loved working in, to my surprise.”

Now the author of more than 35 books, Mr. Feiffer has also participated in a number of collaborations, including “The Phantom Tollbooth” with Norton Juster, his former Brooklyn roommate, and kindred spirit Florence Parry Heide on “Some Things Are Scary.” Her smart captions, which include “Getting hugged by someone you don’t like is scary,” and “Being with your parents in an art museum and thinking you’re never going to see the exit sign is scary,” could have been written by Mr. Feiffer himself, he said.

But, by far, the author with whom he’s worked the most is his daughter, Kate. She didn’t heed his warning before they partnered up.

“My style isn’t sweet or innocent. I’m a little nastier than that,” Mr. Feiffer smirked. “So I told her, ‘If you want someone else who’s more appropriate, I’ll step back.’ And she said, ‘Nope, I want you to do it.’ So I had to sweeten myself up and innocent myself, which I’d only do for a beloved daughter, and was even able to do stuff like this.”

He flipped to a page of “No Go Sleep!,” which depicts a mother gazing over a crib at her sleeping baby. “How goodie-two-shoes can you get?”

Currently an adjunct professor at Stony Brook Southampton, Mr. Feiffer finds himself pushing his students to do what they think they can’t, just as he does for himself. After half a century of uncertainty, the cartoonist has finally embarked on his version of the adventure strips he loved as a child: a graphic noir novel, “Kill My Mother.”

“It’s a visual style that’s different from anything I’ve ever done, and it took me a long time to feel confident or comfortable with it. And in fact, to this moment, I’m still not,” he said, holding up a blow-up of the first page panels. “I could never draw this way before and I learned how to do it in my 80s. So it’s kind of exciting. And each page I do, I find that I look at it and say, ‘Gee, I didn’t think I could do that.’ And it’s enormous fun and an enormous boost and it’s very slow.”

He paused and concluded, “So I think I’m done talking and I’d love to hear from you. And talk loud, because I’m old and deaf.”

“So am I!” a woman yelled out. And everyone laughed.