Jim Knipfel, a fedora-wearing writer who balanced absurdity and despair in his long-running Slackjaw column and memoirs, which described a chaotic life in which he lost his vision, was confined to a psychiatric ward, shoplifted, drank too much and had rage seizures, died on Oct. 7 at his home in Green Bay, Wis. He was 61.
His sister, Mary Adrians, said the cause was bile duct cancer. He was writing until two days before his death.
Mr. Knipfel (pronounced Kuh-NIP-full) — who initially had little ambition to write — recounted his picaresque life in Slackjaw, which first appeared in 1987 in Welcomat, an alternative weekly in Philadelphia. Seven years later, it moved to The New York Press, another alt-weekly, and over the past two decades was available on websites like Electionpress and Patreon.
“Every time we did an annual readers’ survey, Slackjaw was the most popular feature of the paper,” John Strausbaugh, who edited Mr. Knipfel’s columns at The New York Press, said in an interview. “It was Jim’s life from week to week for 40 years. If you got into that, you got way into that. He had a fanatical following.”
In 1992, when he was in a particularly foul mood, Mr. Knipfel wrote, “It is possible to live without friends, without art, without beauty, without happiness — but it is utterly impossible to live without pain and misery. That much I can see clearly now that it’s about done — my work here, that is. Nothing’s clicking anymore. Maybe it makes sense. Maybe all that needs to be said’s been said.”
He expanded the columns — and other articles — into a memoir, also called “Slackjaw” (1999), which the famously private Thomas Pynchon praised as “maniacally aglow with a born storyteller’s gifts of observation, an amiably deranged sense of humor, and a heart too bounced around by his history, and ours, not to have earned Mr. Knipfel, at last, an unsentimental clarity that is generous and deep.” Mr. Pynchon also extolled “The Buzzing” (2003), one of Mr. Knipfel’s novels.
He followed “Slackjaw” with “Quitting the Nairobi Trio” (2000), his account of his six months in a psychiatric ward in a Minneapolis hospital after the most recent of attempts to die by suicide, which began in his teens. The book opens with him strapped to his bed in the hospital’s intensive care unit, having awakened himself by gutturally “screaming Nietzsche in rhyme.”
Accepting that he had gone insane, Mr. Knipfel wrote, “That epiphany filled me with relief. I’d be able to spend the rest of my days in an institution, saying funny things.”
In her review in The New York Times, the critic Daphne Merkin called the book “a zany lark of a read, written by someone who seems to have a hard time taking his own existential despair seriously.”
James Murray Knipfel was born on June 2, 1965, in Grand Forks, N.D., where his father, George, served in the Air Force. His mother, Janice (Gaustad) Knipfel, was a bookkeeper. The family moved to Green Bay when Jim was young.
He studied physics briefly at the University of Chicago, and then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1987. He moved to Philadelphia, without much of a career in mind, but found work at Welcomat.
Derek Davis, the weekly’s arts editor at the time, said that Mr. Knipfel had been attracted to a column he’d written about his musical dislikes, including Joni Mitchell’s voice. Mr. Knipfel’s voice became clear soon enough.
“Jim was looking for truth,” Mr. Davis said in an interview. “He understood how the world worked and usually put a negative stance on it.”
After several years there, Mr. Knipfel was hired as a receptionist at The New York Press, where he continued to write his column. Mr. Strausbaugh, his editor, recalled his first sighting of Mr. Knipfel at the paper’s office.
“He was wearing his crumpled old fedora, black trench coat, his bicycle half-gloves, smoking like a furnace and taking sips from a bottle of schnapps,” he said. “It was performance art and we knew it.”
He was also dealing with seizures, caused by an inoperable brain lesion, and going rapidly blind from retinitis pigmentosa. In “Slackjaw,” he described shopping for his first cane to navigate the world. But he was disappointed with the cane he bought, which collapsed into four sections.
“I couldn’t very well beat any of my assailants to death with it,” he wrote. “I could whack somebody but it would just go flubbity-flubbity-flubbity, and my assailant would say, ‘Hey, cut that out, you!’”
Mr. Knipfel began wearing a fedora in his teens, hoping that it made him look like Humphrey Bogart. But Ms. Adrians, his sister, said that the brim also shielded his sensitive eyes from the sun.
Despite his diminishing vision, he remained a prolific writer, who continued to work on a computer by increasing the onscreen font size or using an app in which he spoke his words.
He wrote a third memoir, “Ruining It for Everybody” (2004), and several novels, including “Noogie’s Time to Shine” (2007), in which Noogie, an overweight would-be filmmaker who restocks cash in ATMs at bodegas, steals $5 million and goes on the run. In 2024, the novel was adapted into a film.
Mr. Knipfel also wrote a book of short stories for adults — “These Children Who Come at You With Knives, and Other Fairy Tales” (2010) — which featured characters named Stench the Crappy Snowman, Rancid the Devil Horse and the Maggot in a Red Sombrero.
His serialized story, “The Utterly Useless Quest of Bleary Mufflehead,” about a rabbit, is awaiting an airdate on WFMU Radio’s “Double-Dip Recess” children’s show.
In the last few years of his life, Mr. Knipfel wrote about movies, books and music for the progressive website Truthdig and won first prize in online commentary in 2025 from the Los Angeles Press Club.
“Jim was in full form in his definitive annotated obituary of B-movie director Roger Corman and could speak for hours about the postwar production politics of Japanese monster movies,” Alexander Zaitchik wrote in a tribute on the site. “His unwritten but long-planned book about Godzilla is a ‘what-if’ the world will have to live with.”
In addition to Ms. Adrians, his sister, Mr. Knipfel is survived by his mother. His marriages to Laura Koenig and Julie Intrieri ended in divorce.
One of Mr. Knipfel’s final works was his own obituary for the Simply Cremation website. He expressed “a thousand regrets, failures, mistakes, traumas, tragedies, bad decisions and humiliations, but no complaints.”
When Ms. Adrians read it, “I asked him, ‘Where is the kindness?’” she said in an interview. “He was the kindest man. But he said, ‘I don’t want people to know that about me. I only want you to know.’”
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