He Left Behind Joy

A favorite humorist, Art Buchwald, is dead at last. See NY Times, Art Buchwald, 81, Columnist and Humorist Who Delighted in the Absurd. He was like the Goodyear bunny -- he just kept going, even after the doctors gave him a few weeks to live almost a year ago.

As the Huffington Post recalls, R.I.P. Art Buchwald: Gently Into That Good Night, Finally:

[B]eloved Washington Post columnist, author, humorist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Art Buchwald has died at 81, after a long and protracted kidney illness that even he was surprised to have survived. Buchwald checked himself into a D.C. area hospice last February 2006, forgoing kidney dialysis and expecting to die any day — instead, his hospice room became a salon for the best and brightest (and funniest) of D.C.'s political and media elite, and he not only survived his health crisis but lived to return to his home on Martha's Vineyard, where he completed his final book, Too Soon To Say Goodbye, about his time in the hospice.

"For most people, dying is a milestone. For Buchwald, it was fresh material," is how the Washington Post, Humorist's Legacy Endures, described him, adding:

We've lost a great American Dreamer, the sort of self-invented, self-made success this country holds the patent on. Buchwald's adult life was an endless improvisation on American themes in both major and minor keys -- resourceful Ben Franklin on one shoulder, desperate Jay Gatsby on the other, fizzy with glamour today and dark with depression tomorrow.

Dan Rubin's blog provides the perfect touch, Art Buchwald, 1925-2007:

He gained attention in the 1950s when President Eisenhower's spokesman called a NATO press briefing to debunk one of the owlish writer's columns, denouncing it as "unadulterated rot."

What spokesman James Hagerty failed to understand was that the column was a spoof.

The writer replied, "Hagerty is wrong. I write adulterated rot."

He was once printed in more newspapers than any other columnist. His column explaining Thanksgiving to the French, is a holiday tradition in many families. He won a Pulitzer for commentary in 1982.

His line with the longest legs:

"If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it."

See also NPR, Columnist Art Buchwald Leaves Us Laughing, for a remembrance and links to interviews with Buchwald. NPR quotes:

Mike Wallace recently asked his friend about his legacy. "He virtually shouted it," Wallace recounted. "'Joy! That's what I'm going to leave behind.'"

Tags: Art Buchwald