Word: feiffer
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Dates: during 1959-1959
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...contemporary scene to Mr. Feiffer can be best beheld from the windows of the Voice--big ones that look out on a wide prospect of Greenwich Avenue. His vision is far from universal: when he is not looking at his urban, liberal, Freudian, cultural (if not always cultured), ostentatiously enlightened milieu, he is looking at other things from its viewpoint. Anyone who belongs to this milieu, or who can temporarily or permanently assimilate into it (which is easy, after a few years at Harvard), will find both books full of old friends sensitively observed and old enemies devastatingly put down...
...moon--no kidding." But though the "friends" from Sick, Sick, Sick are missing, except for George, the enemies are the same: Madison Avenue types, organizational tyrants, and the entrepreneurs of the hydrogen bomb. (By making this distinction between "friends" and "enemies," I do not mean to suggest that Mr. Feiffer coddles the phonies, the sedulous non-conformists, the trend-hoppers, the self-conscious psyche-searchers, and the various other types who populate his world. But though he exposes them, he does it from within; they are "us," while the groups I have called "enemies" are "them...
...with subtly-observed scenes from daily life among the in-group than with smashing examinations of institutions (Hollywood, the Army) and issues (the H-bomb). Both elements are present in each book, but they were better balanced in the earlier one. And the general absence of people whom Mr. Feiffer can regard with understanding affection is complemented by the lack of individuality of those there are. The small boys in Sick, Sick, Sick, and in some of Mr. Feiffer's subsequent Voice pieces have problems, and sometimes genuine pathos, of their own. Four-year-old Munro, of the second story...
...there are some marvellous things in the new book. The title story, about a frumpy lady chimney sweep who is turned into a "beautiful, glamorous movie star," covers familiar ground wtih unfamiliar dexterity; if we must have more jokes about Method acting, let us by all means have Mr. Feiffer's image of "The Inner Me Acting Academy." His ear for catch phrases and talent for parodying them are as precise and effective as ever; in the story entitled "Boom!" he reproduces a dialogue of two generals discussing their progress: "This is last year's bomb. We thought...
...influenced by Robert Osborn than his dialogue and narration are by anybody I can think of. A picture of Passionella in her swimming pool, with a vast expanse of bosom floating before her, says more than a thousand "Will you mammary me" jokes about America's breast-fixation. Mr. Feiffer uses a flexible combination of text and pictures thoroughly intermixed; nobody's else is quite like it, and no quotations simply of words will get across its effect. Even people not in the in-group, even (God save the mark) people who approve of H-bomb tests, might buy Passionella...