HOLD ME
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Out of this anxiety-riddled determination to pretend that all was right with the world–our world, anyway–came a brand of humor that defied the complacent party line and sought to expose it for the hypocrisy it was. Slyly hinting at the emperor’s nakedness and jeering those who refused to acknowledge it, Lenny Bruce established the identity of the humorist as hip prophet that continues to this day. Jules Feiffer’s talky intellectual cartoons are more compassionate in their ridicule, but they too expose the absurdity of a populace smothering in peace and prosperity while wondering why it is scared and unhappy. Feiffer is still at work, but his descriptions of grace under tension have a distinctly 50s point of view. Whatever his subject and whenever his deadline, his world has remained populated by the disenfranchised faces in the crowd who strive for conformity but are nagged by doubts that are only intensified by the efforts of the powerful to ease them.
All of which made Hold Me, a comedy revue based on Feiffer’s creations, rather quaint in 1977 when it opened in New York at the Subplot Cafe space at the American Place Theatre as part of its series featuring American humorists. Feiffer’s button-down, whisky-swilling organization men and zipped-up, pill-popping housebound women seemed unnecessarily repressed and self-conscious to a generation that had thrown open the doors of skeleton-crammed closets a decade earlier. A husband and wife who attribute the stability of their marriage to mutual indifference were a flagrant example of the status-quo-at-all-costs mentality that led to Watergate. A Little League player who engages his father in a lengthy staring contest was a gross illustration of oedipal conflicts. And the husband who accuses his wife of making trouble when she refuses to be anyone but herself was a distasteful reminder of the days before women’s liberation. To audiences of the 70s these characters were grotesque memories, pathetic but vaguely obscene pictures of all that they had rebelled against.
