Jules Feiffer’s impact on American comic strips is comparable to Lenny Bruce’s impact on stand-up comedy or Philip Roth’s impact on the American novel. Feiffer used the form to communicate the anger, resentment, and assimilationist experience of first- and second-generation American Jews, exploring these subjects with acidic wit and a brilliant sense of detail. He’s no less a satirist than Bruce or Roth—his commentary on American life and politics is as stinging as his observations of Jewish family life. Started in 1956, Feiffer’s weekly comic strip for the Village Voice (which at one point ran under the name Sick, Sick, Sick) brought a new, distinctive voice to cartoon dialogue—a mix of deliberate exaggeration and emotional candor that helped to create characters who were at once satirical archetypes and relatable individuals.
After a few scenes depicting the couple’s courtship, Patsy takes Alfred to meet her family. The ensuing dinner scene demonstrates some of Feiffer’s best writing, as Patsy’s parents prattle on like the most memorable of the cartoonist’s vapid authority figures. The dialogue here is pointed, as the parents’ banal statements barely hide their passive-aggressive efforts to control their daughter. Vincent Gardenia, who plays the father, gives a hyperactive performance that recalls the Theater of the Absurd, while Elizabeth Wilson, who plays the mother, provides a more realistic foil to his work. Alan Arkin, who directed the film after staging the play off-Broadway, employs long takes that gives certain scenes the quality of a stage performance. This strategy also grants the different performance styles the required room to interact with each other and make the tone more complex.
