Buchwald’s medium, a syndicated column, had no central chokepoint. It ran in 550 newspapers. A single daily might balk at a particular column or even drop the series, but his entire readership was not at risk. It was an advantage to be transmitted by newsprint, not via the airwaves.
Since his day, that advantage has shrunk as newspapers have winked out. Buchwald himself witnessed that market’s contraction. With it has coincided a thinning of the ranks of humor columnists. We have no Buchwald, no Russell Baker, no Art Hoppe, no Erma Bombeck. Dave Barry ended his column in 2005 at least partly because of newspaper economics.
In his heyday, Buchwald was our go-to humor columnist. He did not begin as one. In 1949, the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune hired him to review movies, assess restaurants, report on nightlife and interview visiting showbiz stars. Soon enough, humor crept in. He turned interviews into skits that entertained their subjects as well as their readers. He once had Gary Cooper ask the questions, while he, “Coop”-like, answered “Yup” or “Nope.”
He conveyed oddities of French culture to his English-speaking readers. Tourists learned how to tip (or not), how to ride in Paris taxis (the smallest passenger was to sit on top — and pay the fare) and how to battle French bureaucracy.
And he explained America to the French. His franglais rendition of Thanksgiving (“Le Jour de Merci Donnant”) reappeared annually for 50 years. His explanation of the game of baseball translated “shortstop” as “petit arrêt.”
The Buchwald most of us remember dates from 1962, when he came home to try his hand at political satire in Washington. His column’s syndication soon ballooned. When first lady Jacqueline Kennedy gave us her famous tour of the refurbished White House, he followed with one of his Aunt Molly‘s New York flat, with its “early Truman” bedroom.
The jabs sharpened. He skewered government strategy and rationales for the war in Vietnam, often using the device of a simple reversal. Thus, he listened in as two South Vietnamese couples discussed the failures of “pacification” over America’s long hot summer of urban rioting in 1967. One of the four rationalized that the U.S. was a young country, long a British colony and so unschooled in resolving differences peaceably. Vietnam should send no troops but only advise Americans, while pressing them to “hold elections.”
He often resorted to reductio ad absurdum. A story about making weapons portable took him to a miniaturization lab where he viewed a fingernail-sized H-bomb. It went “pop” and produced a teacup-sized mushroom cloud. It could be delivered by a pocket-sized missile with a range of a hundred yards. Similarly, he dispatched the problem of nuclear overkill: Now that weapons had outgrown their targets, the solution was to increase the size of the targets.
He also created amusement by looking at events from the other end of the telescope. Thus, he reported on a foundation study of the “generation gap” that yawned in the 1960s: It concluded that students were being too permissive with their parents.
Richard Nixon offered a target-rich environment. It wasn’t a question of writing satire, he said; he simply reported it. When Nixon enthused about photos of what he assumed were craters on the moon, his diplomatic factotum Henry Kissinger explained that they were products of U.S. bombing in Vietnam. Buchwald proposed that the anniversary of the Watergate break-in be made a national holiday. As pranks, people might tape open each other’s doors or tap their phones.
Buchwald was an equal opportunity fun poker. No leader, no political party or tendency, no social fad, no foible of youth, midlife or dotage evaded the acid of his pen. He joshed Democrats, Republicans, even the undecided; bureaucrats; warmongers, campus radicals; and Bourbon racists. Though a liberal Democrat himself, he avowed that satire granted no one a get-off-the-griddle-free card. When his host at a 1993 soiree insisted Buchwald sheathe his rapier now that Democrats ran Washington, he protested and finally left in a huff.
His touch, however pointed, was light. Targets often remained — or became — friends. Despite Buchwald’s advocacy of gun control and frequent jabs at the National Rifle Association, the organization’s star spokesperson, actor Charlton Heston, could josh that he had wangled a gig for Art to script a new “Ten Commandments” screenplay that would include automatic rifles. Barry Goldwater, a frequent target in 1964, declared: “You have no idea of how important your writing and sayings are to the people of America” and especially to the political class.
Today’s satire — bundled in TV monologues or blogs rather than 650-word columns, and more blunt than deft — might not have been to his taste, but he would surely have defended it. Free speech came foremost. When campuses in moral pique shunned speakers tainted by Watergate connections, he warned of parallels to McCarthy-era blacklisting.
In the absence of Buchwald’s perspective today, we are poorer.
Richard M. Fried is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Illinois Chicago and the author of five books, including “A Genius for Confusion: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Politics of Deceit.” Fried is working on a biography of Art Buchwald.
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