WITH HIS wide smile, big glasses and big cigar, Art Buchwald would have made a great model for a friendly cartoon bullfrog. He barely had to speak to get a chuckle.
It was the perfect face for a man who spent most of his life making people laugh.
He started making jokes as a kid, struggling to survive in foster care (his mother was in a mental hospital). At 17, in World War II, he joined the Marines, and he kept making jokes.
After the war, he went to Paris to study under the G.I. Bill and started learning to be funny on paper, writing for Variety and then the Herald Tribune. Pretty soon, he was one of the best known and funniest Americans in Paris. Then he moved his act to Washington, and his career took off.
For several decades, Buchwald was the leading political satirist in the nation, writing columns that made people laugh, even in the darkest times. He was still writing his column last year, when he let his readers know that he was living in a hospice and had decided to stop kidney dialysis. Later, he was able to share another joke with them — without dialysis, his kidneys had gotten better and he was going back home.
And the jokes continued.
His impending death made great material.
Not long before Buchwald died, his friend Ben Bradlee said, he was telling people, “I just don’t want to die the same day Castro dies.”
But he thought about more than how much play his obituary would get in the nation’s papers.
“I have no idea where I’m going,” Buchwald said, “but here’s the real question: What am I doing here in the first place?”
He was here to make the world laugh.