The Great American Column
Rosenblatt, Roger
The Great American Column Laughingstock Ever since I was first told that he was a funny man, I have been trying, earnestly, to laugh at Art Buchwald. In the beginning I would take his stuff...
...In terms of the size of his audience, it is a prominence equal to Mark Twain's, Mr...
...This is what Beckett would call the risus purus, the laugh which laughs at itself in the supreme act of criticism...
...I had hoped the momentum would carry me...
...Who knows...
...Being down, we could safely occupy ourselves by devising secret handshakes and sniggering our heads off at those who are up...
...It would kill the time, all right, but the laughter would be hollow, and I doubt if it would raise our prospects much...
...They have stalked the national history like the best of our private eyes, knowing if they stuck close enough to the big people, the big movements and ideals, that the big laughs would be sure to follow...
...In the beginning I would take his stuff straight, moving down the column line by line, deliberately gearing the lower part of my face for the intellectual chuckles which a professional humorist and social commentator is supposed to generate...
...Eventually I'd have to restrain myself from whipping the children...
...They laughed us into submission...
...It is funny, therefore, that we don't say what we mean about our liberalism...
...It is the laughter of the side of the mouth and trembling chest, the one which emerges more like an idea than a reflex, out of the bondage, or boredom, of our complacency...
...It needs a kick in the pants and a pie in the face - one long razzberry...
...they are real...
...I would begin to wheeze and think of sad times...
...It is sad enough that there isn't an hysterical high school humor magazine editor in the country who couldn't have guessed this, who couldn't have finished the thing himself, but wouldn't, fearing the exercise to be sophomoric...
...What puzzles me, however, is how Buchwald has achieved a position of such singular prominence...
...If we learned to make fun of our liberalism, we might eventually retrieve it...
...I had assumed that the unspent money would be returned to the contributors, but I was mistaken...
...No, we no longer admit the easy titular authorities, the authority of presidents, parents, generals, teachers, or cops...
...When that approach failed, I would try laughing ahead of time, revving up my hilarity to a terrific roar, like a Marx toy motorcycle, long before opening the newspaper...
...Dooley loose on the Spanish-American War, he was deadly serious...
...The problem is us...
...As long as that action or idea comes from a fellow biped and sounds sincere, we seem to feel there must be something to it...
...Nothing he goes after is funny any more, if it ever was, because it is not important, not worth a titter...
...At best his targets are pathetic or undeniable, phantoms and straw men you can knock over with a feather...
...It can be argued, I suppose, that one only laughs at oneself from a position of strength, that it takes a certain security of mind and character to be able to look yourself in the eye and howl...
...But when I finally came to Buchwald, all laughs wound down...
...The proper question, I suggest, is how we have been able to contain ourselves all these years...
...We, too, are laughable for the things we avoid hearing about and dealing with...
...I realize that at this point I am probably only addressing the two other flabby liberals who read this publication, but to them, to the three of us, I contend that we hold within our flabbiness the humor of the age...
...People unable or unwilling to live up to their self-proclaimed expectations, high vaulted expressions of ethics and common good brought low by fact - this is the stuff of humor, the richest of material...
...That's a gas...
...When Langston Hughes levelled Jesse B. Semple at racial bigots, he was wielding a formidable weapon...
...All it takes to get rolling is an agreement on what we are willing to laugh at, that is, to know, about ourselves...
...Democracy itself, mishandled, has served as a first rate set-up...
...It is at bottom a violent laugh, the riot, the scream, which is exactly what our graceless liberalism needs...
...The problems are not funny...
...We are all pro-authoritarian these days, and in a subtler and more foolish way than Buchwald's...
...that be a laugh...
...Or: what are you smiling at, buddy...
...Buchwald pokes fun at the Mitchell family, the Pentagon, all the obvious stuff...
...It is our befuddlement which is funny, the gracelessness of our liberalism...
...It is funny that we told ourselves we did...
...Now I know there is an enormous number of people who find Buchwald uproariously funny, not at all the transparent and tepid humorist I have always found him to be, so I am willing to concede that there must be more to the man than meets the eye...
...A laugh takes shape in the distance between pretense and truth...
...This investiture of authority in everything that moves accompanies the rumor, originally spread abroad by humorless people, that there is nothing in this God-forsaken, sex-degenerate, war-hungry, abortion-loving, drug-happy, race-rioting, money-grubbing country left to laugh at...
...The Promise of America, the Dream of America, or any similar delusion by which we have shilled ourselves into one or another form of false innocence, has served as a continual set-up for such men...
...Dooley's, Josh Billing's, Thurber's, and Benchley's put together, yet no one, not even Buchwald's admirers, would seriously compare him with any of these others...
...Whenever they detected something dangerous, ludicrous, stupid, or hypocritical in our actions, they laughed at us, long and hard...
...there is no criticism either, and no outrage, as there should be...
...What invention of comic fantasy or satirical exaggeration will not ultimately come true...
...That in turn, of course, takes some courage...
...Or: how could one dare to make light of the special sins of our times...
...The special sins of our times have been aching for belly laughs for close to a decade...
...Wouldn't that be a laugh...
...This, from the beginning of a November column entitled "A defense fund of $40 million": "Although the Republicans collected more than $40 million for the presidential campaign, they spent only $49.50, mostly for radio broadcasts by President Nixon...
...Take, in comparison, Buchwald...
...But the problem isn't Buchwald...
...Liberals are down this year, there's no doubt about it...
...Even if it is crazy and destructive, we give it the modern blessing for no other reason than that it arises from one of our number, who are friable creatures, after all, who have rights to our opinions, after all, who populate a morally relative world, after all, and who, thanks to Freud and Falstaff beer, are all in this together...
...These men were critics all...
...From the beginning, from the 1720s when Ben Franklin started mailing his Dogood letters to the citizens of Boston, Americans have been hounded and harassed by topnotch humorists...
...It is funny that we had no presidential candidate this year...
...Longstreet, Seba Smith, Joel Chandler Harris, and others, all understood this, for better or worse, and saw to it that the nation understood it as well...
...Yet we are funny in the same way...
...That's a joke, son...
...Furthermore, I'm goddamned tired of looking to Art Buchwald for my amusement when I could as readily, and with more satisfaction, look inward...
...Whatever that may say about Buchwald, what does it say about the times...
...Buchwald himself is funnier than his column because of the topics his column avoids...
...We were down last year too, and the year before, and unless one misreads the signs, we're going to be down for a while to come...
...But not only is there no humorous invention in the piece...
...It is funny that we make brave stands on civil liberties, and then disown the excesses, or make other stands to cover them...
...When Peter Finley Dunne let Mr...
...The piece goes on to tell how the Republican National Committee reserved the forty million to defend its staff in court...
...The column is informed simply by the desire to make a joke, and therefore is not funny...
...Muttering superannuated slogans, defining our political or ethical positions only insofar as they relate to positions less attractive, pasting our bumpers with stickers, sporting giant buttons like coats of mail, we hide from ourselves the one hilarious truth of the day worth exposing: that we do not know what the hell we are doing any more...
...Worst of all, it pretends to be anti-authoritarian when it is really pro-authoritarian, as is its author...
...It is funny that we say too much about international peace, civil rights, welfare and poor people, et...
...al., and mean too little...
...But there is a different kind of laughter, albeit nervous, which comes from shaky ground as well...
...but we do concede, more often celebrate, the intrinsic authority of any human action or idea...
...Buchwald is the premier humorist of the times...
...Humorists know that a laugh takes shape in the distance between pretense and truth, and when a man can no longer tell the conditions apart, that will provide the loudest laugh of all, indeed a career...
Vol. 6 • January 1973 • No. 4
