Pekar’s Legacy
by Jeet Heer
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Some of Pekar's best work can be found here.
I’ll have more to say about Harvey Pekar in a future post, but my immediate thoughts on his death can be found in this National Post obituary. An excerpt:
Harvey’s early stories, especially the ones that Crumb drew, remain his best work. With an impressive fidelity to reality, they capture the daily texture of office life, the bickering common to marriages and transient moments of exultation and despair. Thus, a typical story describes the frustration of “standing behind old Jewish ladies in supermarket lines.” This might almost be a stand-up comedian’s routine, but goes deeper when Harvey’s prejudice against “old Jewish ladies” is tested by an unexpected turn of events. Part of what makes these stories so great is Pekar’s fine-tuned ear for all sorts of American dialects, ranging from the many gradations of immigrant accents to African-American slang. Few American writers in any medium have been so responsive to the richness of American speech.
Labels: Harvey Pekar
While I treasure the Pekar/Crumb collaborations, my favorite Pekar collaborators were Greg Budget and Gary Dumm, usually working as a team, though not always. They didn’t necessarily have the technical “chops” that Crumb had, but there was something quite special about their contributions. There was an almost Curt Swan quality to the faces they drew that was entirely appropriate to the tone of the stories. In my mind’s eye, if I imagine Pekar, it’s Pekar as drawn by Budget and Dumm.
Nice piece in the post.
As an aside: I would dispute this:
“David Letterman show (where his tart tongue eventually cost him his semi-regular gig).”
Pekar was on the Letterman show because of his “tart tongue” as I see it. Letterman saw him as an odd-ball character to be patronized for comedic value.
What “cost” (remember Pekar turned down the opportunity to create a TV talk-show pilot) his gig on Letterman was Pekar going after G.E. the parent company of NBC, and one of the worlds largest players.
It was fascinating to see Letterman genuinely unnerved when Pekar began speaking text and verse G.E.’s regrettable behavior in Ohio.
It was transparently obvious that Letterman was desperate to talk over, and obscure what Pekar was trying to say, despite the fact that the audience reacted as if it was part of the act.
This was reinforced when Pekar was brought back for a final time. Pekar started in again, bringing up the previous appearance, and Letterman’s attempt to stifle Pekar’s message.
This resulted in an even more heated response from Letterman than had been seen on the previous occasion.
This always struck me as odd. On both occasions the studio audience was laughing as if watching a skit.
Letterman would have been delighted to encourage Pekar’s tart tongue, as long as the topic was the lack of donuts in the guest room.