Jacek Fedorowicz (b. 1937, Gdynia), "Solidarity - 500 first days," comic strip, circa 1984

Literature
published by Zespół "4R", 1984-1985

Biography
Satirist and actor. A painter by profession. He was born in Gdynia, in a family of Varsovians working in the Polish maritime industry. As a seven-year-old child, he survived the Warsaw Uprising. He graduated from the Painting Department of the Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdansk (he received his diploma in 1960). He was one of the founders (with Zbigniew Cybulski and Bogumił Kobiel, among others) of the Bim-Bom student theater in Gdańsk (in 1954-1960). He belonged to the acting lineup of this theater (the main role of the Good Spirit in the first program entitled Achaaa). While still a student, he began working with the Gdansk radio station as an author and actor, and as an author and cartoonist with the local and national press, i.e. "Dookoła świata", "Po prostu", "Dziennik Bałtycki", "Szpilki", "itd" and others.
In the second half of the 1960s, he appeared on Polish Television, where he co-created, among others, with Jerzy Gruza, the entertainment programs Let's Get to Know Each Other, Perfect Marriage, Career and Round. In the 1970s, he co-hosted the radio (Program III) satirical magazine 60 Minutes per Hour, where he appeared in more than a dozen roles, creating characters such as Fellow Manager and Fellow Cook. He also hosted morning talk shows on the radio. Together with Piotr Skrzynecki, he hosted the first Polish Song Festival in Opole. In the 1960s and 1970s, he often appeared on stage, first in the Wagabunda Cabaret (with Maria Koterba, Mieczyslaw Czechowicz and Bogumil Kobiel, among others), then in the Popierajmymy się program (with Bohdan Lazuka, Tadeusz Ross, Piotr Szczepanik and Ryszard Markowski), and later, until martial law, in individual author's evenings.
In 1980, he joined "Solidarity" and worked with Radio "S" of the union's Mazovia Region. At the beginning of martial law, he broke off all contacts with the state media. Together with his wife Anna, he became involved in the activities of the Primate's Committee for Aid to Persons Deprived of Liberty and Their Families. He performed mainly on church grounds, there he also held exhibitions of his caricatures and opposition-supporting drawings, and appeared with readings as part of the Weeks of Christian Culture. Then there were broadcasts (audio and video) distributed on cassettes in the so-called "second circulation" (Radio Free Europe also broadcast them). One of his ideas from those days was to ridicule the regime's TV news. In 1989 he co-authored pre-election broadcasts of the Civic Committee, in which, among other things, he discussed the rules of voting.
Since 1989, he has continued to make appearances in the form of author's evenings. Since 2006, he was for a time the host of the Z przymrużeniem kamery screenings shown on Kino Polska TV. Since 1999, he has published weekly satirical columns - until 2008 in "Gazeta Telewizyjna" (a supplement to "Gazeta Wyborcza"), then in the Wednesday cultural supplement of "GW". He is a columnist for the Polish edition of "Runner's World."
In the 1990s, he began to host the Television Journal program on TVP, which then underwent a metamorphosis from a political program to an entertainment program. In 2005, the program was renamed SEJF (Subjective Express of Jack Fedorowicz) for a few months. In 2006, the satirist left Polish Television. In 2010 and 2015 he was a member of the committee supporting Bronislaw Komorowski before the presidential election.