Comedy On Tap Salutes... Robert Crumb By Jeff Hause

"You must thank the gods for art, those of us who have been fortunate enough to stumble onto this means of venting our craziness, our meanness, our towering disgust..." --R. Crumb

Robert Crumb has changed cartooning. His storylines are for adults. His drawings are personal and revealing. They challenge you, like good art is supposed to. Like Woody Allen in film, he shows us that a person's point of view is what makes comedy work. Both of them can turn out gags with the best of them, but they add layers to the gags to make them more meaningful and satisfying -- not to mention funnier, because they now have some real weight behind them.

On top of that, Crumb is the most fearless humorist on the planet. Why? Because he could care less about success. The rarest quality in a genius is the total disinterest in recognition (not being a genius myself, I can pursue success without facing this problem). Crumb stands head and shoulders above all other modern artists -- and the fact that he hates to hear stuff like this only proves it.

Two movies involving Crumb define this: He hates one, Fritz the Cat (based on one of his characters, but done by other people), because it is boring, stupid, and unrevealing. A glib, fast-talker popular with women, the comic book Fritz actually took his name and personality from two felines in the young Crumb's household. The movie Fritz had no sense of irony or satire (the second Fritz movie was so far removed that there was actually a sequence where Fritz was a Nazi under a one-testicled Hitler). Indignant at how Fritz was portrayed, Crumb used the Leon Trotsky icepick-in-the-head method to kill Fritz in People's Comix, 1972.

Crumb hates the other, Crumb (based on Crumb himself), precisely because it is so powerful and revealing.

Robert Crumb was born in Philadelphia, PA on August 30, 1943. He never studied art nor had any formal teaching, he began drawing at an early age. While still in his early teens, he and his brother drew single issue comics for fun. In 1962, Crumb's family moved to Cleveland and Robert went to work for the American Greeting Card Company. He married his first wife, Dana, in 1964 and began doing work for Help! magazine, where he worked with/for one his greatest influences, comic artists and Mad co-creator Harvey Kurtzman. Also during this period, Crumb began to experiment with drugs, resulting in some bad experiences with LSD and some amazing graphic work, that would change the way he drew. These cartoons and illustrations were first published in New York's East Village Other, a Greenwich Village newspaper. Robert then moved to San Francisco in 1966 and met Don Donahoe and Charles Plymell, who published his first undercround comic, Zap Comix, in 1967. Robert went on to become the star of the underground movement, and record covers, movies, obscenity lawsuits, IRS audits, and cult hero status followed

Crumb has since transcended the comic form, and is now considered one of the greatest living artists in any medium. In 1990 the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, included his work in an exhibit called "High and Low." Robert Hughes, the art critic for Time magazine, called Crumb "the Bruegel of the last half of the 20th century." New Yorker art critic Adam Gopnik describes as "virtuosic, the evolution of an out-of-date grotesque style into a realist style that registers the banal, the ordinary, the unconsciously humorous day to day stuff that fills our lives."

Crumb is intensely private -- so private that the notoriety he received actually drove him to live in France in the late eighties -- where he lives in a beautiful home he bought with six notebooks filled with his work.

He hates being recognized, and he really hates sycophantic fans. Without knowing this, I sent him a terribly filthy, terribly derivative comic book I'd created while in college, and a few weeks later I pulled a post card from the man himself out of my mailbox. It reads:

Knowing what I know about Crumb now, it seems like a miracle that he bothered to write me back. I just wonder if I made him laugh. I hope I did, if only to thank him in a small way for everything he's given me through his work.

Unfortunately if he reads this I'll never get him to write me again.

You can order R. Crumb's artwork from the family website, here!

Jeffrey C. Hause has been writing professionally (in a very amateur fashion) for fifteen years. He's written screenplays at film studios like Warner Brothers, Disney, Universal, Columbia, and Interscope; and for producers such as Ivan Reitman, Samuel Goldwyn Jr. and Ray Stark. Jeff has also written for comics and entertainers such as Rodney Dangerfield, Gabe Kaplan, Rick Dees, and Jay Leno. Here's his résumé.