FEIFFER SURVIVING ON ANXIETY

“I’ve only wanted what all nice Jewish boys want,” Jules Feiffer was saying the other day, during a discussion of his 30-year career as a satirical cartoonist and writer: “To be honest, collect paychecks and get a few prizes, and actually I’ve done pretty well.”

Feiffer, 57, has indeed done well. Last month, he received the Pulitzer Prize for the anti-Establishment “Feiffer” cartoon that has appeared since 1956 in the Village Voice and other newspapers around the country (including Sunday Calendar). He has been showered with other honors over the years, including an Oscar for his 1960 short animated film “Munro,” and numerous awards for such biting plays about the human condition as “Little Murders,” “Knock, Knock” and, most recently, “Grown Ups.”

A special television production of “Grown Ups,” a play that ran for three months on Broadway in 1981 and that was restaged the following year at the Mark Taper Forum, is scheduled for national broadcast on public television Friday night (at 9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15, and 8 p.m. on Channel 24). Described by Feiffer as “the most directly autobiographical of my works,” the caustic comedy stars Jean Stapleton as a doting mother, Martin Balsam as a passive father and Charles Grodin as their resentful, repressed middle-aged son.

Feiffer, as reserved in person as his characters are brimming over with anxiety, said it was especially “delicious” to be recognized for his cartoons, which he has been drawing since age 5. “Especially now,” said the native New Yorker, noting that the current climate of the country seems ill-suited to the left-leaning perspective he takes on social and political policy in the cartoons. (“Grown Ups” had previously been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.)

“It’s a nice contradiction,” said Feiffer sitting stiffly in the art-filled living room of the Upper West Side apartment he shares with his second wife, Jenny, and their 17-month-old daughter, Halley. (Feiffer also has a 22-year-old daughter, Kate, from a previous marriage.)

“What I do (in the cartoons) has taken on much more importance than ever,” he said, reaching for a freshly drawn cartoon critical of the Reagan Administration’s recent attack on Libya. “And the feedback I get (from readers) proves to me that there are a lot of people out there also frustrated by the Reagan years.

“What I find most disturbing is that the Reagan Administration has moved the whole nationaldebate to the right, and almost imperceptibly and with virtually no commentary by the media,” continued Feiffer. “Issues I thought were resolved 20 years ago, such as arms control and civil rights, are not only being discussed again, but being moved in another direction.

“But there is very little editorial and op-ed page comment on all of this, and even the columnists have moved to the right. . . . it’s much sexier to be on the right just now. So the more liberal positions are being left to the cartoonists, not just because we are liberal, but because we can cast a satirical eye and grab (the readers’) attention.

“The Pulitzer certainly helps me to go on, because often you feel you’re having no effect, and that nothing will change,” said Feiffer, noting that his weekly cartoons have been canceled on occasion by individual newspapers. “Now, at least, I have won a prize. So I can continue to feel this way, and still get on with it.”

Feiffer’s also planning to get on with another play, tentatively due to be produced by the Seattle Repertory Company, and another screenplay about “the litigious society.”

Feiffer is the first to acknowledge that he has not fared so well in the commercial film world or even on Broadway as he has in the Village Voice and Off-Broadway. True to the nature of his work, he offered a biting explanation.

“The commercial pressures and the values on Broadway have very little to do with what I’m interested in doing,” he said. “What Broadway’s now interested in is the expense-account audience.

“And screenplays are not art,” he added. “Nobody, especially playwrights, would write screenplays unless it was to earn money. The better, more serious they are, the less chance they have of ever being produced,” explained Feiffer whose screenplays include “Little Murders” and the poorly received “Popeye.”

“Occasionally there is a glitch, and someone (at the major Hollywood studios) screws up, and a good script gets produced,” he said, noting that his own, best-known screenplay (“Carnal Knowledge” in 1971) was produced because “nobody could say no to (director) Mike Nichols.

“But I’ve not much right to complain,” Feiffer said, summing up. “I’ve picked my shot. I knew from the start that I’d be an outlaw cartoonist, an outlaw writer, and I’ve enjoyed it. I may have made a lot more money otherwise, but I may not have had as much fun.”