A great writer and a great man has left us, but not before making good fun of the death process itself.
Which is not surprising. He made it his business to make fun of everything.
The newspaper that gave rise to Art Buchwald's fame, The Washington Post, reported that Buchwald recently wrote:
So far things are going my way. I am known in the hospice as The Man Who Wouldn't Die. How long they allow me to stay here is another problem. I don't know where I'd go now, or if people would still want to see me if I weren't in a hospice. But in case you're wondering, I'm having a swell time -- the best time of my life.
Great way to look at things on your way out, wouldn't you agree?
Art Buchwald was the family dogma in the liberal, grad-school-educated, government employee household I grew up in. My parents would have been nuts to be conservatives in those days, but I don't feel it's too smart or congruent for me to be a liberal now -- a political position Buchwald staunchly maintained to his dying day.
It really doesn't matter to me what someone's politics are if they can be funny about it. And in America, Buchwald was, without question, the pre-eminent political humorist of the twentieth century. I'd put Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert ahead of him in 2006, but, my God, did Buchwald have his run.
In 1964, for example, Buchwald wrote a column suggesting that President Johnson could not ask controversial and quirky FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to resign. Why? Because Hoover didn't exist. He was a figment of the imagination of the Reader's Digest (a far-right mainstream magazine with enormous power in those days).
Maybe you had to be there. But it was pretty funny at the time.
He even used humor - from the theatre of the absurd - to land his first writing job. As a World War II vet living in Paris, he conned the New York Herald Tribune into hiring him as the nightlife and entertainment columnist for its European edition... by claiming he had been a wine taster in the Marine Corps.
Now, if you don't see the humor in that, please report back to the mortuary. Immediately. The boss needs you.
Buchwald's most famous piece of writing was a column he wrote the year I was born, 1953, where he attempted (with great warmth and finesse) to explain the American holiday Thanksgiving to the French. This was pre-Bush II, when Americans with clout still considered the French human beings and even admired them for their fine food.
In that column, which gets reprinted in newspapers every year, Buchwald said that Thanksgiving was the only day that Americans "eat better than the French."
I'm sure Art Buchwald had some influence on my decision to be a writer. I can't remember an incident, a converation, or a column that led to a defining moment. But I do remember avidly enjoying his commentaries while reading the paper on the kitchen table in the house where I spent my early years.
So long, old chum. You spread a lot of light and laughter to a world that desperately needed it. You brightened my life and the lives of many, many others.
David Garfinkel
Publisher, World Copywriting Newsletter
P.S. I just found out that The New York Times posted a very well done and amusing video feature, possibly the first it has ever done of this type, which is an obituary of Art Buchwald. There's lots of humor in it -- it starts after a brief intro with the man himself saying right into the camera:
Hi! I'm Art Buchwald, and I just died!
Check it out: http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/obituaries/BUCHWALD_FEATURE/blocker.html
Oh, wow. Yeah, he was an institution -- huge in our household as well. My dad used to clip the columns out of the paper for me. This is when I was, like, ten or eleven. I didn't always get all of it, but I often got enough of it to laugh my head off. Which was the important part!
Looking forward to meeting you this weekend at the seminar.
Posted by: Elizabeth Purvis | January 18, 2007 at 03:58 PM
Thank you, Elizabeth. Looking forward to meeting you as well!
Posted by: David Garfinkel | January 18, 2007 at 05:59 PM