Dov Fedler: spiritual hitchhiker with comedic superpower

My father, Dov Fedler, loved the spotlight but abhorred grandiosity, so I’m not sure how he’d feel about being described as a “legend” or “national treasure”.

“He’s not a legend, he’s a very naughty boy,” I imagine him mimicking Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

He made people laugh. That was his superpower. Give him an audience and the plumage of his personality shone. He was a loveable Gruffalo of a man who could zap out a punchline with ferocious timing.

Humour was both his genius and shield, the way he made sense of the madness and tragedy of the world. His was an exquisitely original imagination which wrestled with life’s inexplicable paradoxes like Jacob did with the angel. He was long-winded and loud, could infuriate, inspire, entertain, but never bore. He didn’t have a financial bone in his lumbering frame.

No-one I knew had a cooler dad when we were kids. He was the key attraction at the Hobbies Fair each year at King David, where kids crowded at his elbows as caricatures streamed effortlessly from his pen. The Aladdin’s cave of his studio was a treachery of junk and treasures from which puppets, sculptures, and other astonishments materialised as if you could simply imagine something and, behold, it would appear. From this he taught me a blank page was the deepest invitation to your own soul’s calling. Listen, and it would speak back.

He painted me a poster, “Superman Loves Joanne” with Christopher Reeve flying through the sky, because oh, did I have a crush at 10. He told me to stop dieting because I’d never be a model, not with my build. “You’ll be other things,” he promised. He seemed so certain pretty and skinny were the booby prizes in life.

When I was 14, he gave me Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices, like a wizard in a fairytale might hand over a magical bean that just needs seeding in the right soil. He read my hunger, and granted me what I longed for myself before I knew what to wish for.

An effervescence of talents spilled out of him, like hidden tricks up his sleeve – cartooning, sculpting, painting, and in his later years, writing. Never without a pen and paper, he doodled and drew, read and ruminated. He collected thousands of books and movies, ever fascinated with Einstein, Van Gogh, the Coen Brothers, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

Born in Johannesburg in 1940 in the shadow of the Holocaust, to immigrant parents from Lithuania, he was obsessed with Walt Disney and comic books. His earliest memory at the age of four was of a yellow pencil in someone’s hand making a mark on a page. Right then, his hands grasped their destiny.

His mother, Chaya, a Yiddish poet, died from a heart attack just after his Barmitzvah, and his father, Solomon, a printer, remarried Dov’s Hebrew teacher who had lost her son and husband in the concentration camps. The darkness in his family home was smothering, and at 22, he fled into the arms of the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, my mother, Dorrine, a medical student.

By 30, he was father to three daughters, one with a profound hearing loss. He devoted himself to helping my sister, Carolyn, learn to speak, and my parents became active members of the Society for the Hard-of-Hearing Child.

For more than 50 years as The Star’s leader page cartoonist – sometimes meeting three to five deadlines a week – he exposed the hypocrisy and injustices of South African political history in cartoons and caricatures which were poignant, satirical, sometimes biting, but never cruel, some of which ended up in matric history exams.

Though he is best known for his social and political commentary, the truth is, he wasn’t a political beast, but a spiritual hitchhiker, a yogi before he became Lubavitch for a few years.

He remained a soul-searching mystic who believed in signs and miracles, and often spoke of a dead bird which flew from his hands just when he and my mother were waiting on a diagnosis to confirm my older sister, Carolyn, didn’t have brain damage. She went on to become the first hard-of-hearing person to qualify as a medical doctor in South Africa.

Like many artists, he was cared for by selfless women all his life – his older sister, Rae, when his mother was too ill, my mother, sisters, cousins Charlene and Sandra, and beloved domestic workers, Violet, Alexina, Nomusa, and Bridget. My mother, and then my sister, Laura, managed his financial affairs so he never had to worry about “The Money” as he called it.

Over the years, I helped him write, edit, and publish four books, including his memoir Out of Line, If You Can Write, You Can Draw, Starlite Memories and his magnum opus, Gagman, in the making for more than 35 years, about an inmate in the concentration camps who survives by telling jokes. He was absurdly creative, with more ideas than he could keep up with. He invented a comedic impressionist persona, Nolan Marx, which inspired dozens of paintings including one of Monet pissing in the lily pond, which hangs in my home. Years back, he gave my daughter, Jess, a sketchbook with the bones of a story about a magician, Shamansky, which she has now turned into a three-part romantasy trilogy.

On 23 December, I rushed from Sydney to be at his bedside as he began to slip away. I sat vigil with my sisters and his angelic carers, playing his favourite Leonard Cohen songs, whispering last words of love and comfort into the giant elephant flaps of his ears, and rubbing his size 12 feet. Even then, he couldn’t help being funny.

When the doctor asked him how he was, he responded, “I’ve been worse.”

I promised I would find a home for his massive body of work in a public-source archive so it could continue to be enjoyed as part of the commons.

“So many promises,” he said. “I just want a Coke.”

His humour remained shatterproof to the end. But after my mother died in October 2021, his spirit flailed.

“What shall we do, Dad?” I asked.

“We carry on.”

“What does ‘on’ mean?”

“I wish I could find the off switch,” he sighed.

On 11 January 2025, 10 days shy of his 85th birthday, he finally found it.

Dov Fedler, 21 January 1940 – 11 January 2025.

• Joanne Fedler is an internationally bestselling author and Dov Fedler’s daughter. Her 15th book The Whale’s Last Song will be launched in South Africa in March 2025.