Buchwald's 'artful' column

As a newspaper columnist, Art Buchwald was a founding father of the old school. He kept his columns short, punchy, pithy and he tried to give the readers fresh information to mull over. He was often called a "humorist," but humor was just the vehicle he used. He won a Pulitzer Prize not because he was silly, but because he was sharp.

Now he has died at age 81. And longtime newspaper readers would die to read his take on his new surroundings.

The Deseret Morning News ran the Buchwald column for many years. His wry smile became a standard part of the op-ed pages here. In its eulogy of the man, the Bloomberg News quoted from a piece about death that Buchwald published in The Washington Post.

"Whether they like it or not," he wrote, "everybody is going to go. The big question we still have to ask is not where we're going, but what we're doing here in the first place."

The world knows what Art Buchwald was doing here. He was lifting the burden of others and exposing the abuses and unfair advantages that follow the powerful.

Over the years he published more than 30 books and wrote a newspaper column twice a week for 50 years. He tried his hand at writing plays and even dipped into Hollywood, but his strengths were always brevity and levity. He was famous for delivering the bon mot — a tidbit with bite. For example, when the legendary Russell Baker of the New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for newspaper columns, beating out Buchwald for the award, the old cigar-chomping pundit was asked what he thought of Baker's work. Buchwald said he must respectfully refrain from commenting — until he had read something that Baker had written.

It was classic Buchwald, complete with rim-shot.

For years his writing enlivened the pages of the Deseret Morning News and 300 other papers. And the nice thing about writing is it tends to hang around, even when the writer has gone. Buchwald's wickedly funny take on the nation and its chattering classes will likely be hanging around for some time.