Those Conformist Fifties: Jules Feiffer

In 1956, Jules Feiffer started doing a weekly cartoon in the Village Voice titled "Sick, Sick, Sick." Feiffer is still alive today, and so is the work he did back then. The drawing is deceptively casual; he was able to take a type of person and create a highly distilled, vivid caricature with a minimum of ink. And the writing is just as timeless as the art—the subjects may in some cases have changed, and the mores of the culture have changed as well, but the human situation is what Feiffer addresses.

The title "Sick, Sick, Sick" was a reference to the culture he found himself in, and he scrutinizes everyone: government officials, business leaders, artists, swingers, parents and children, everyday people. Today, much of what passes for satire is actually just snark: it ridicules other people. Feiffer's work still resonates because it ridicules us; it ridicules the less admirable traits and attitudes in everyone. One cartoon shows a guy angrily despairing over the successful launch into orbit of Russia's Sputnik satellite. "What's the use?" he says. "We have committed the worst of all possible sins—" he says, walking out of the frame, diminishing before our eyes. "We were second," he says in the last frame. It's about Sputnik. But it's also about the tendency in every Olympics, say, for American broadcasters to act as though a failure for some media-darling athlete to get a gold medal is a crushing defeat, as if winning a silver medal in the Olympics is a bad thing, an ignobly diminishing sad event in one's life. We still think that dominating everyone else is the only worthwhile thing. This attitude is, of course, insane—it's sick. And that's why Feiffer is timeless and relevant when people who merely mock others they don't like without seeing the big picture rarely find an audience fifty years after their brief time on the scene.

Feiffer's cartoons from the Fifties aren't just relevant today, they're funny (sometimes grimly so) and aglow with a warming humanity. They're also still available here and here; and check out Feiffer's website. Just one more example of why I do this "Those Conformist Fifties" category: The Fifties were not the boring, bland decade they've been pilloried as, that's just plain wrong, and just plain wrongness is, well, just plain wrong.