Pied Feiffer

The spotlight shows a girl and a man. They lean toward each other, foreheads squidged in sympathy. "Do you know how long it's been since I've had a meaningful relationship?" asks Dorothy. "How long? How long?" says Bernard. She tells him two years; he tells her never. The air is charged. They seem on the verge of something meaningful. But they worry: Does "meaningful" merely mean "making out"? This would be bad. "You take sex out of context," Bernard goes on gloomily, "and it's just hell." After a few more exchanges, he observes earnestly: "We'll just have to watch ourselves every minute." The light fades,

This short scene, which might be described as a grey-out, is the work of Jules Feiffer, 32, who was once slyly described by Critic Kenneth Tynan as "the best writer now cartooning." Tynan obviously overlooked James Thurber, but Feiffer appears to have taken the hint. His first stage work, a revue called The Explainers, which is running at Chicago's new Playwrights cabaret theater, in some ways recalls Broadway's A Thurber Carnival, but it has a wry. gentle note all its own. It is also part of a growing Chicago school of humor (although Feiffer himself is a refugee from Greenwich Village). The focus of infection formerly was a group of improvisers called the Compass Players, celebrated for bringing forth Mike Nichols. Elaine May and Shelley Berman; currently it is a cabaret and theater called Second City (TIME, March 21, 1960). Dozens of satirical revues now inhabit the cellars of Chicago's Near North Side, but the Feiffer view of the '60s is one of the best.

Bubble Gum Drama. In his cartoons, Feiffer's squiggly figures smother in clouds of language. Transplanted to the stage, they are long-wounded blabbers, who talk about themselves in cocktail party words that taste like the 14th anchovy. A few of Feiffer's targets have been pocked heavily by other satirists, and one blackout aimed at the telephone company, a monolith that fascinates all of the new comics, uses a punch line similar to one of Nichols' and May's. But it is not safe to smile comfortably as the actors poke fun at Freud, advertising or the CIA. Feiffer's models are the very sort of people who think it is fashionable (the in word is "in") to dig Feiffer, and often the audience is laughing uncomfortably at itself.

In one of the revue's best sketches, a little girl babbles cheerfully of her experience with market research: "So I was standing on the corner waiting for somebody to cross me because I'm not allowed to cross by myself. And this lady comes by, and she says, 'Here is a bubble gum sample. Do you chew this brand?'" A clever jape at advertisers becomes a brief bit of high comedy as the listener realizes that what the moppet is describing is a human being going mad from the shame of having to ask little girls questions about bubble gum.

The Late Late Pumpkin. Two longer fables are also memorable. The first is a Cinderella-and-tonic tale called Passionella, in which a forlorn chimney sweep named Ella sits by the TV set one night when her "friendly neighborhood godmother" turns her into Passionella, a gorgeous movie queen. But the spell works each day only between the first commercial of Huckleberry Hound and the last blab of the Late Late Show. The other playlet, George's Moon, is an astringent parable of faith, hope and hostility. George is a worried little man who lives alone on the moon, counting craters, drop-kicking rocks and looking for something to believe in. He tries believing in himself, then in rocks, finally in craters. But all this is inadequate. At last he notices space, and decides to believe in that. Then rockets erupt from Earth. At first George is happy; he will have friends, and be the greatest moon expert in the universe. But inevitably, doubts sneak up. Earthmen will patronize him, and give him their bags to carry. Whipping himself into a meaningless fury, he decides to fight: "I don't care how many rocks they have. I know the terrain."

With the moon parable, The Explainers has come a long way from cafe humor. Probably because he is an Explainer himself (he is apt to say such things as, "The third act is an affirmative commentary on society in general"), Feiffer knows that he is writing to an audience of Georges. What is more remarkable, each George, as he watches the fable, feels the futility of a crater counter, and is half convinced that he is all alone on the moon.

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