Theater is much closer to real life and real involvement than a cartoon--and much more dangerous. When it was done in Los Angeles, we had people getting up out of their seats and screaming at the actors. I don't think my cartoons can inspire that kind of violence. Although people do clip my cartoons out and send them to me with notations how they think the cartoons should have been written.

Crimson: Do you ever get ideas from their suggestions?

Feiffer: Oh, it's not that kind of "suggestion." It's usually very anti-Semitic, anti-black blathering, and sometimes very obscene.

Crimson: Do many people find your work offensive?

Feiffer: That's changed too. At the Boston tryout of "Little Murders," part of the play was offensive to many parts of the audience. There's a feeling that I struck some chord or other that disturbed them. There are particular scenes that bothered them. In one speech, for example (remember, this is a long time ago) the very word masturbation would drive six to ten people out of the theater. Or when Kenny picks up the gun, they sensed that something they didn't want to see was going to take place. But that's a long time ago. Now "Little Murders" is a charming little domestic comedy with overtones of documentary.

Crimson: Which do you like better to do, your plays or your cartoons?

Feiffer: In writing "Carnal Knowledge," I was doing what is most interesting to me. In the fight scene between Bobby and Jonathan, I wanted to get at something I had never gotten into in the theater (I wrote it originally as a play) in a fight scene. When people have stage confrontations, it is usually the theme for the play; you know, the first time they are telling the truth. But virtually every time I had a fight, it's been with incredible heat and passion over telling nitpicking things, but not what the fight is really about. Our lives are controlled--the fires are banked--by some tiny details.

But my cartoons dramatized make very little sense. Playwriting comes naturally to me--just like the novel doesn't seem to be an extension of me. But there is a difference in writing play dialogues and cartoon dialogues. There are conversational subtleties that just aren't all that appropriate to cartoons.

People ask me "When are you going to give up cartoons now that you're a playwriter?" But I don't think I am going to be able to give them up. I like writing them and I usually work on a system of avoidances.

Crimson: Avoidances?

Feiffer: Avoiding things I don't want to do. I'm a much too lax employer of myself.

Crimson: Well, how do you work generally?

Feiffer: Once every two weeks, two cartoons have to be delivered to the syndicate 4 1/2 weeks before they are to be printed. And then I have ten days to do something else. The other work I do has no real deadline. I don't have to get an advance any more to live on, so I confess I don't work every day. If TV didn't exist, I'd turn out three times what I do now.

Crimson: Do the things you watch on TV feed your cartooning?

Feiffer: They don't that much. I watch a lot of junk and I read a lot of junk. Newspapers and books feed it more because they help give me some longer range vision. But news programs do give me ideas. Watching Ford address the farmers, I could get 20 cartoons. Like the one I just did with Bernard and the plateful of bullets and his mother telling him to bite the bullets slowly and not to eat them too fast.