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Memories of my last presentation at the East Liverpool Area Community and Learning Center apparently have faded because my friend Mike Parkes asked me to do it again.
"Do you have a subject in mind?" he asked. "I need a title for the list."
It took me only a few moments.
"The Greatest Columns Ever Written," I said.
"And I suppose these are your columns?"
"Bingo."
My purpose today, however, is not to ruminate about my own favorite columns, but my favorite syndicated humor columnists: Art Buchwald, Mike Royko and Dave Barry.
Royko wrote for the Chicago newspapers, always taking the side of the downtrodden, the little guy, and fearlessly blasting the corrupt and powerful, especially Mayor Daley. His humor matched the personality of the town: pointed, gritty and delivered like a punch to the ribs. He loved the Cubs and wrote often about the Curse of the Goat that kept them from getting to World Series after 1945. And the Yankees?
"Hating the New York Yankees," Royko wrote, "is as American as pizza pie, unwed mothers, and cheating on your income tax."
A publisher made the mistake of sending Royko a copy to review of Yankees catcher Thurman Munson's memoir. Royko said he knew it was a literary work of great weight because the book made a dent in the drywall when he threw it across the room. When Chicago proudly unveiled a 50-foot cubist statue by Picasso in Daley Plaza, Royko thought it captured perfectly the soul of the city. He called it a "big, homely metal thing" with "a long, stupid face" and looked "like some giant insect that is about to eat a smaller, weaker insect. It has eyes that are pitiless, cold, mean."
Interested in politics and weaned on the satirical humor of Mad Magazine, I was primed to fall in love with Art Buchwald when I started reading his columns in The Review in the late 1960s.
Nixon, he said, "looks like the man you wouldn't buy a used car from." Hubert Humphrey "looks like the guy who bought it from him." George Wallace "looks like the guy who wants to steal it."
Buchwald burst upon the Washington scene in 1962, skewering powerful politicians with such clever, good-natured humor that he was instantly popular and beloved, insulating him from censure.
When Nixon tried to refashion his image into a kinder, gentler person, Buchwald imagined a conversation between the Old Nixon and the New Nixon. "Everyone thinks," the New Nixon said, "that I am the cheap, petty, scheming rotter that they always thought you were."
My style of humor is closer to that of Dave Barry, finding something funny in regular people and our own flaws and missteps. He made up silly facts, such as "The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates."
He blamed biology for men's aversion to asking directions: "This is why it takes several million sperm cells… to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin."
As a teenager, he said, he didn't ask girls out because the humiliation of rejection would have doomed him to life in the woods as a bark-eating hermit. He made frequent use of the term "boogers," and compiled endless lists of absurd phrases such as "The Cotton-Eating Moths of Australia," and "Shark Puke," always adding, "That would be a good name for a rock band."
Dave Barry's column appeared weekly in 500 newspapers. He began writing in 1983, and ended it in 2005, producing about 1,100. (Hmm, I started writing my weekly column in 1983 and ended in 2007, but started again in 2019 and am also at 1,100 and still counting. My column, however appears in only one newspaper.) Boredom, perhaps, caused Barry to shelve the print column and turn to writing for books, movies, and the internet.
Buchwald and Royko each were syndicated in 500-plus newspapers and wrote more than 8,000 columns. Producing good copy in a daily column (daily!) for 30 years wore heavily on Royko. He said that writing never got easier and that "blood drips out of my fingers every single time." He died after aneurism surgery in 1997.
With political news providing an endless source of material, Buchwald effortlessly churned out three funny columns a week to the end of his life. After a leg amputation and kidney failure, he discontinued dialysis and entered hospice, expecting to die. Then his kidneys regained partial function. He remained for months in hospice, with no restrictions on visitors or his diet. Friends and admirers including Ben Bradlee, the Kennedys, and Tom Brokaw came daily to talk and bring food. He held court from his bed, having, he said, the time of his life. He wrote about it in "The Man Who Wouldn't Die," but he did die finally, in 2007.
Well, Buchwald, Royko and Barry are gone now, but you still have me. ("Wait! I'm not dead!" objects Barry.)
Those who attend my talk on Nov. 17 should keep their expectations in check. The community center is located on Maine Boulevard. The U.S.S. Maine, you may recall, blew up and sank.