Remembering a Legend

A celebration of the life of Jules Feiffer, the brilliant cartoonist, playwright and screenwriter who passed away at 95 in January, and lived and worked for decades on the East End, was just held at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor.

The event, “In Memory and Celebration” of Feiffer, included reflections by people who knew and loved him, with two musical performances and a multimedia presentation of photos and videos of Feiffer that included humorous comments by him.

“For me, Jules will never be gone,” said his widow, Joan Holden, an author herself, writing under the name J.Z. Holden.

Indeed, having created a huge body of highly varied and consistently superb work, Feiffer’s humor and insights will carry on.

Feiffer taught at Southampton College — his courses included “Humor and Truth” — and continued when it became Stony Brook Southampton. He lived with Holden in East Hampton and other communities in the Hamptons, and also on Shelter Island.

Indeed, after his death from congestive heart failure, Charity Robey, in the Shelter Island Reporter, wrote of how Feiffer “was amused by so much of what he saw around him. He was the keenest of observers. Those who knew him during his relatively short stay living on the island [2017 to 2022] are saddened by his death, but his wit and joie de vivre will never be forgotten.”

The event on September 28 began with Roger Rosenblatt, essayist and novelist, who long lived in Quogue, and initially arranged for Feiffer to teach in Southampton College’s Creative Writing and Literature Program, speaking of the “kindness” of Feiffer and his “first-rate imagination.”

His “body of work was astounding,” said Rosenblatt.

“Jules was the music,” he said. When Feiffer drew jazz pianist and organist Fats Waller, “you could hear Fats Waller.”

“He had macular degeneration” in his later years “and could only see out of the corners of his eyes. This would be debilitating to anybody of less spirit,” said Rosenblatt, but Feiffer handled it by “moving his head” to deal with his eyesight problem.

As an online biography relates about Feiffer, he “was an American cartoonist and author, who at one time was considered the most widely read satirist in the country. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for editorial cartooning.”

His plays and screenplays include “Little Murders,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “Grown Ups” and “Popeye.” His books for children include “The Man in the Ceiling,” which was adapted into a musical that had its world premiere at Bay Street Theater in 2017, “A Barrel of Laughs,” “A Vale of Tears,” “I Lost My Bear,” “Bark, George,” “Rupert Can Dance,” and “Amazing Grapes.” His memoir is titled “Backing Into Forward.”

Feiffer wrote more than 35 books, plays and screenplays.

Shelter Island composer and pianist Bruce Wolosoff played an original composition named “Ink and Irony (for Jules Feiffer).” And before hitting the keys, commented that Feiffer was “always committed to his creative work — extraordinary creative work.”

Journalist and writer Robert Lipsyte, also of Shelter Island, spoke of how Feiffer “would make me breakfast every Sunday morning.” And as he entered his 90s, “sometimes he could barely walk,” but he “was an inspiration to keep going.” After breakfast “we talked for two hours.”

“He was the smartest, most complex person I’ve ever known,” said Lipsyte. “He was a beacon of hope. He never gave up.”

Writer Monte Farber of East Hampton described Feiffer as “the funniest person I’ve ever known.” Farber said “when you were with him as a friend, you knew you were knighted.” You were with “a legend.”

Farber, who grew up in New York City, said he purchased the Village Voice specifically to view Feiffer’s cartoon of that week. Feiffer’s cartoons ran in the Village Voice for more than 40 years.

“I’ll miss him forever,” said Farber.

Andrew Lippa, who collaborated with Feiffer on “The Man in the Ceiling,” writing the music and lyrics for the show based on Feiffer’s novel, played a tune from it. And he spoke of Feiffer being “so warm and wonderful.”

Joan Holden told of Feiffer being “the love of my life.” She said, “first and foremost,” he was “kind, loving, opinionated, screamingly funny … and courageous.” There was “nothing he wouldn’t do for you if he loved you.”

“When our energies were combined, a third energy was produced,” she said.

She described her late husband as someone who “touched so many.”

In the “brief time” a person has “on earth,” said Holden, “how fortunate we were to have the life-changing moments that became our love and our life.”

Feiffer, Lipsyte said, was highly concerned about recent political times. Many of his cartoons through the years, especially during the Nixon administration, were sharply political. In current times, he believed, said Lipsyte, the United States was in its most “dangerous” period since the years “before the Civil War.” He felt it was vital to “find and expose the vested interests and beat them.”

Lipsyte said Feiffer “left us with the words and pictures to beat them.”

Charity Robey, in her article in the Shelter Island Reporter, wrote that Feiffer “exposed in screenplays, books, and cartoon novels the callousness beneath political and familial mores with lethal accuracy, human and deceptive informality.”

She recounted quoting Feiffer after Donald Trump “had just been elected” to his first term in office and “many people did not take the new chief executive seriously.” She wrote that Feiffer “was reminded of 20th century history he had experienced. ‘I think we’re at the scariest period in our history that I have ever known,’ he said. ‘Whatever you want to say about Joe McCarthy, he wasn’t president of the United States, and he didn’t have power beyond the groups he could influence. He didn’t have an army and navy and his finger on the button.”

Feiffer and Holden in 2022 moved from the East End to upstate Richfield Springs, where he died.

I was an adjunct professor of journalism at Southampton College when Feiffer taught there. It was a thrill being in proximity to greatness.