Fiero is a retired Ph. D. and former teacher of drama and playwriting at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. In this essay he examines Oh Dad as parodic satire using the techniques of what Kopit himself, in the play's subtitle, called "a bastard French tradition.''

More than any other commercially successful American play identified with the Theatre of the Absurd, Arthur Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad exemplifies a widely-held belief among experimental playwrights: the social and political climate of America in the early-1960s was inhospitable to the reputed nihilism underlying the tragic farces of European playwrights of the absurd like Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, and Eugene Ionesco. What was clearly missing in the post-World War II American consciousness was the pervasive existential despair and pessimism left in the wake of the war's death...