Funny Business: The Legendary Life and Political Satire of Art Buchwald

by Michael Hill, Christopher Buckley (Foreword by)

Overview

“A delightful and entertaining book about one of America’s greatest humorists.”—Seth Meyers

This “absorbing, illuminating” (Jon Meacham) biography of the legendary political humorist reveals the life behind his must-read Washington Post columns, featuring never-before-published photos, documents, and interviews.

Before Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Doonesbury, there was Art Buchwald. For more than fifty years, from 1949 to 2006, Art Buchwald’s Pulitzer Prize–winning column of political satire and biting wit made him one of the most widely read American humorists and a popular player in the Washington world of Ethel and Ted Kennedy, Ben Bradlee, and Katharine Graham. Dean Acheson, former U.S. Secretary of State, called Buchwald the “greatest satirist in the English language since Pope and Swift.”

Drawing on Buchwald’s most memorable columns and unpublished correspondence with other famous people, Funny Business shows how Art Buchwald became an American original. Like Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, and James Thurber, he satirized political scoundrels, lampooned the powerful, and “worshipped the quicksand” that ten presidents walked on, as Buchwald joked. “The key to Buchwald’s style of humor, he once stated, was to “treat light subjects seriously and serious subjects lightly.”

But there was a darker, more serious side to Art Buchwald. A childhood spent in foster homes taught him to see comedy as a refuge. Buchwald also struggled with depression, a secret he kept from the public for nearly thirty years.

This revealing book is studded with stories of Buchwald’s friendships with Humphrey Bogart, John Steinbeck, Irwin Shaw, William Styron, Erma Bombeck, Frank Sinatra, Adam West ("Batman"), Robert Frost, and others. Throughout his career, Buchwald wrote about such historical events as the Vietnam War, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Watergate, and the 9/11 terrorist attack. Featured here are stories of Buchwald’s nonstop one-liners, known in his day as “Buchshots.”

Entertaining and absorbing, Funny Business looks back on Buchwald’s brilliant gift for humor and satire, which will once again bring readers a comedic respite from troublesome times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593229514
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/07/2022
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	658,132
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Michael Hill is a historical researcher who has assisted acclaimed authors including David McCullough, Jon Meacham, Senator John McCain, and Michael Beschloss. He won an Emmy Award for his work as a co-producer on Ken Burns’s PBS series The Civil War and served as a historical consultant on the HBO miniseries John Adams. A graduate of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Hill also served as a press assistant to former vice president Walter F. Mondale.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

“Plastered in Paris”

Early Years and the Comic Charms of Paris (1948–52)


It is a strange force that compels a writer to be a humorist.

—Dorothy Parker


In the spring of 1948, high school dropout Art Buchwald was having the time of his life. After being discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps at the end of World War II, he had enrolled at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles as a “special student” under the GI Bill. “I’m having a ball,” the new college man wrote his sisters, Alice, Doris, and Edith, back home in New York. “All your predictions about what would happen to me if I goofed off in high school have not proven true. USC sees something in me that you girls never did—a promising brain surgeon, a future member of the Supreme Court or, at the very least, a Nobel Laureate in literature.” Art took great pleasure in writing to his father and sisters about his “charmed life” in California. “I have never been happier in my life. . . . I wear a cotton sweater that could be taken for cashmere, and nobody gives me a bad time or tells me what to do,” he wrote home with glee. “As soon as I mail this letter I am going out to buy saddle shoes and get a date with a Trojan coed—Jewish, of course.”

Art lived with thirteen other students in an off-campus boardinghouse run by an odd woman named Mrs. Liebschen, who, according to Buchwald, seemed to possess a deep-seated hatred for anyone not of the Aryan race. Although she never displayed any open hostility toward Buchwald as a Jew, he always found her fondness for a “German newspaper with a swastika on the front page” a bit unsettling.

As a “special” non-degree student, he was the “envy” of his classmates since he could enroll in any course that caught his fancy. “When asked what I intend to do with my life,” he told one of his sisters, “I reply, ‘I’ll probably be a writer for the cinema, or start a book on the corrupt athletic programs in our university system.’ ” In an effort to hone his skills as a writer, Buchwald took courses in drama and creative writing. “Foreign languages and the sciences interested me as much as nuclear waste,” he later said. In one of his writing classes he wrote a theme paper titled “A Short Report on Satire,” an ironic bit of foreshadowing in which he claimed that humor and satire can act as a “civilizing agent” on society, tempering its political and cultural excesses. “The satirist is always at war with society,” he wrote, “but I think it’s a worthwhile fight.”

When not in the classroom, Buchwald enjoyed the time he spent as managing editor of the campus humor magazine, Wampus, and as a columnist for the Daily Trojan newspaper, both of which provided an early outlet for his brand of humor and satire. “USC was my training ground before I went out into the world and stuck pins into the rich and powerful,” he later wrote.

He even tried his hand at a comic theatrical production, once writing a musical play based on the “atomic experiments at Bikini Island,” called No Love Atoll. Despite its catchy title, the play closed after a campus run of only four days.

Then, during his third year at USC, Buchwald struck gold. One morning over coffee he learned from a fellow student about a tuition benefit program under the GI Bill that would permit him to study in Paris—the “Mecca of writers” and the city of romance—where, he told friends, the “streets are lined with beds.” His “dream was to follow in the steps of Hemingway, Elliot Paul, and Gertrude Stein,” he declared. “I wanted to stuff myself with baguettes and snails, fill my pillow with rejection slips, and find a French girl named Mimi who believed that I was the greatest writer in the world.”

After bidding goodbye to his friends and the peculiar Frau Liebschen, Buchwald hitchhiked from Los Angeles to New York, where he booked a one-way ticket to France on a former troop carrier. As the ship hit the open seas, Art had no doubts that he had made the right decision, and he was as happy as ever.

During the long ocean voyage to France, Buchwald spent evenings out on the deck reflecting on his past. “I started adding up everything that had happened to me since my birth,” he later wrote. “My life had been a series of zigs and zags. Soon after I was born, my mother was confined to a mental institution, where she remained for thirty-five years. With my three sisters, I was placed in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York, and then boarded out with foster parents . . . in eight different kinds of homes with God knows how many strangers.”

Because his father, Joseph, a struggling curtain salesman in New York, was unable to afford the expense of his wife’s hospital bills and the cost of supporting a family, he had been forced to give up the care of Art and his three sisters to foster homes in and around New York City. Although his father came to visit as often as he could, Art felt abandoned. “I didn’t belong to anybody,” he later said of his childhood.

While the majority of Art’s school years were spent at PS 35 in Hollis, a middle-class neighborhood in Queens, his real education came from experiencing life on the streets, where he quickly developed a reputation for being a “bold and street wise” young man. Art traveled all alone on the subway into the city, where he wandered into coffee shops and hotel lobbies, fascinated by the colorful cast of characters he saw everywhere. “Later when I became a fan of Damon Runyon’s, I knew better than most people what he was talking about,” Buchwald would later recall.

But perhaps the most important lesson he learned during those sad early years was that the way to cope with the hard knocks of life was to be funny and to battle adversity with a smile. “I was the class clown. . . . I managed to get people to laugh. That was my way of getting acceptance. I learned very quickly that if you are a clown, people will be nicer to you.” Increasingly frustrated by the loneliness and anger he felt, one day he vowed to himself, “This stinks! I’m going to become a humorist.”

In 1942, a year after America entered World War II, seventeen-year-old Buchwald dropped out of high school and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps with forged permission papers. After basic training at Parris Island, South Carolina, he shipped out to a Marine airfield at Cherry Point, North Carolina, where he was inexplicably assigned to the base ordnance school, handling bombs and other lethal inventory—an unlikely post for someone who lacked any manner of mechanical or technical aptitude. During his off-duty hours, far from the airfield’s stock of high-grade explosives, Buchwald started smoking cigars, a habit that quickly became a soothing obsession. “Cigars [were] a very important part of my life. They were my pacifier, my security blanket, even my Valium. Whenever I was feeling good, I put one between my lips, and whenever I was feeling bad, I lit one up.”

After Cherry Point, his unit, VMF 113, was ordered to the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, where he saw action at Eniwetok and Engebi in 1944. In addition to his ordnance duties, Buchwald was editor of the unit’s humorous newsletter, The U-Man Comedy. In one issue, after his unit scored several impressive aerial successes against the Japanese, Buchwald published a front-page open letter to Tojo, the Japanese prime minister and head of the Imperial army, proclaiming that it was time for him to “throw in the towel.”

In November 1945, three months after the end of the war, Buchwald was discharged from the Marine Corps and returned to New York. Soon feeling restless and seeking a new adventure, he abandoned New York and headed to the West Coast, setting his sights on becoming a comic screenwriter in Hollywood and, during his off-hours, making “love to Ginger Rogers.” When both dreams were quickly dashed he applied for admission and matriculated at USC. But after three carefree years of college life he was ready to move on.

Now, here he was on his way to Paris, “every young writer’s dream,” he declared to himself one night as the “ship sailed smoothly through the water” to the port of Le Havre. He “felt an unbelievable surge of happiness” about the great adventure that lay ahead. But not even in his “wildest dreams” could he have foreseen “how wonderful the future would turn out to be.”

Shortly after his arrival in Paris in late June 1948, Buchwald wrote a letter home to a former high school classmate:

I am in Paris and I got a great buy on a French beret. The sidewalk salesman told me that it had belonged to his grandfather, who posed for Van Gogh’s most famous self-portrait.

My money is still holding out. The secret is French bread and cheese. It is a banquet and all I need to keep me going. I haven’t fallen in love yet, as I’ve decided to play hard to get. If a French baroness drives by and asks me to jump into her car, I will tell her, “I prefer to walk.” And then add, “Just because I am an American student, I have no intention of going to Maxim’s and drinking a bottle of champagne with you and letting you take advantage of me in the back of your limousine.”

Table of Contents

Foreword Christopher Buckley ix

Introduction xvii

Part I From Class Clown to Our Trib Man in Paris

Chapter 1 "Plastered in Paris": Early Years and the Comic Charms of Paris (1948-52) 3

Chapter 2 Raising the Stature of Ink: Funny Business at the Herald Tribune (1953-60) 15

Part II "Down the Seine and up the Potomac"

Chapter 3 "Salinger's Folly" and "Bounties of the Banned": With the Kennedys on the New Frontier (1961-63) 35

Chapter 4 Brumus, Batman, and Buchwald "Buchshots": A Satirist in a Mad, Mad World-The Tumultuous 1960s 48

Chapter 5 Buchwald at Large: A Day in the Life of a Humorist 73

Part III The World According to Art

Chapter 6 The Great Joe Mayflower Feud: Buchwald on Broadway (1969-70) 89

Chapter 7 "Cruise Director on the Titanic": Buchwald in the Nixon Years (1969-74) 101

Chapter 8 Say Amen, Art Buchwald, Say Amen: Laughing Through the Carter Years (1976-79) 117

Chapter 9 Joining the Hertz Five Star Credit Card Club: Goodbye Carter, Hello Reagan (1980s) 140

Chapter 10 A Satirist Wins a Pulitzer, But Loses His Humidor (1982-88) 153

Part IV Tears of the Clown

Chapter 11 A Matter of Honor: Buchwald v. Hollywood-Act I (1982-88) 173

Chapter 12 Drama in Department 52: Buchwald v. Hollywood-Act II (1989-95) 183

Chapter 13 Buchwald Blues: Years of Laughter, Years of Sorrow (1991-95) 207

Chapter 14 "There's Life in the Boy Yet": Buchwald Is Back! (1997-2000) 218

Chapter 15 "I Just Don't Want to Die the Same Day as Castro": The Last Glorious Bit of Laughter (2000-2007) 228

Acknowledgments 247

Notes 251

Bibliography 285

Permissions 289

Index 293

Editorial Reviews

03/28/2022

A celebrated newspaper spoofer gets a posthumous round of applause in this genial if tedious biography. Historian Hill (War Poet) recaps Art Buchwald’s career, from his stint as a Parisian nightlife columnist in the 1950s to his decades in Washington writing a syndicated political satire column. Essentially a character sketch of the wisecracking, cigar-chomping Buchwald, the anecdotal narrative is largely uneventful, with Buchwald’s political jibes stirring occasional mild furors and hate-mail flurries—the most dramatic incident being his lawsuit against Paramount Studios for stealing a treatment that he coauthored for the Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America. His depressive episodes—which precipitated crying jags and hospitalizations—are glanced at but not fleshed out. Instead, much space is given to Buchwald’s correspondences with the Kennedys—in one passage, the writer recalls JFK’s confession to Buchwald: “ ‘The only reason I read your (expletive deleted) paper is because of your (expletive deleted) column’”—and other celebrities that, while cordial and self-consciously humorous, fail to reveal much about Buchwald himself. Unfortunately, Hill’s portrait of “one of America’s greatest satirists” falls short of pulling back the curtain on the man behind the yuks. Buchwald is a colorful figure in Hill’s telling, but not an especially memorable one. Photos. (June)

Publishers Weekly

A delightful and entertaining book about one of America’s greatest humorists…Funny Business brings Art Buchwald’s charming and zany career back to life.”—Seth Meyers

“[An] absorbing biography of ‘one of America’s greatest satirists.’”—The New York Times

“In this absorbing, illuminating, and wonderfully entertaining book, Michael Hill brings the great Art Buchwald back to vivid life. Satire has been a force in political life since antiquity, and Hill’s account, based on unparalleled access to Buchwald’s personal papers, explores both an era and a man with grace and skill.”—Jon Meacham, author of American Lion

“There was a time not that long ago when Americans of all views saw political humor mainly as entertainment, not as a weapon for bashing the other side. The most beloved figure in those gentler pre-Twitter times was Art Buchwald—a fun-loving bon vivant, a sweetheart, and, above all, a ridiculously funny man whose columns made Americans, whatever their politics, laugh together. We could use him now. But if we can’t have Art, we can, through this delightful book, relive the many wonderful times he gave us.”—Dave Barry, author of Best. State. Ever.

“Art Buchwald was my first newspaper hero. I sent him a bunch of my columns from the college paper, and he wrote back to say he liked them. ‘But if you keep writing,’ he added, ‘I’ll have to kill you.’ In today’s reeking dumpster fumes of American politics, we could use a columnist as mercilessly fast and funny as Buchwald. The problem is that there will never be anyone as good, and Michael Hill’s rousing and revealing book reminds us why.”—Carl Hiaasen, author of Squeeze Me 

“Michael Hill has provided the perfect antidote to the vapidity and bile of our mean-spirited times. The story of the columnist who knew how to make a nation laugh at its own absurdities—three times a week—Funny Business is a delightful romp of a book.”—Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea

“A heartfelt tribute to one of American journalism’s most influential jesters.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2022-03-15
Scenes from the life and career of one of the 20th century’s most famous satirists.

Art Buchwald (1925-2007) once wrote, “The satirist has his job laid out. He must wake people up so they will wake themselves.” Few journalists of his time woke up readers as effectively and hilariously. His 50-year career began when he talked his way into a job at the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune even though his only experience was as a part-time stringer reviewing films and plays for Variety. At the peak of his influence, his column appeared in 550 newspapers in 100 countries and was read by Washington power brokers, including presidents. Not bad for a Jewish kid from New York who didn’t grow up in the usual political-leader demographic and who spent years in foster homes after his mother was committed to an asylum. In this affectionate book, Hill tells the story of Buchwald’s fascinating life, marked by bouts of depression that required hospitalization, through a selection of his funniest articles and speeches and previously unpublished correspondence with members of the Kennedy family, William F. Buckley Jr., P.G. Wodehouse, and others. Except for a long section on Buchwald’s legal battle against Paramount—he sued them for stealing the idea that became the film Coming to America—the book is a series of short sections that focus on Buchwald’s friendships and writings. The result is a tapas bar of a text, bite-sized snacks that add up to a satisfying whole. It’s an incomplete picture—Hill mentions Buchwald’s play Sheep on the Runway but not his absurdist English-language contributions to the dialogue in Jacques Tati’s film Playtime—yet Buchwald fans will enjoy revisiting his work. Neophytes will get a taste of his style, as in the famous article “J. Edgar Hoover Just Doesn’t Exist,” in which Buchwald claimed the former FBI director was a “mythical person first thought up by Reader’s Digest.”

A heartfelt tribute to one of American journalism’s most influential jesters.

Kirkus Reviews