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Hill, Michael, Funny Business: The Legendary Life and Political Satire of Art Buchwald. New York: Penguin Random House, 2022, 280pp., $28 (hardcover) ISBN: 9780593229514 Reviewed by Richard M. Fried, Professor Emeritus, History, University of Illinois Chicago, USA, rmfried@uic.edu
Michael Hill’s Funny Business is an engaging biography of Art Buchwald that offers up a generous slice of the humor in the famed columnist’s life and writings. For a half-century, in Paris and later Washington, he offered a sidesplitting take on politics and society, regularly pricking balloons of the mighty. He was a much-sought speaker; collections of his columns sold well; his comedy ran 105 nights on Broadway; his screenplay inspired a movie.
Buchwald’s was a Horatio Alger story, plus belly laughs and an undertone of sadness. In his youth, though both parents were alive, he was functionally an orphan: his mother entered a mental institution soon after his birth, and the Depression landed him in an orphanage and foster homes. Buchwald overcame this fractured childhood, yet wounds remained. Dark depression dogged him throughout life.
Quitting high school at sixteen, he lied his way into the Marines, cajoling a wino to give his “parental” OK. After the war, he aimed to be a writer. In 1948, the GI Bill funded a sojourn in Paris. Not literary skill but chutzpah landed him a job at the fabled Paris Herald Tribune.
Though a novice, he learned fast. His columns and book Paris After Dark became a vade mecum for the surge of American tourists seeking the delights of Paris restaurants and nightlife. The New York Herald Tribune picked up and syndicated his column—eventually it ran in 550 papers. His popularity mushroomed. His piece explaining Thanksgiving (“Le Jour de Merci Donnant”) to the French, reprinted annually, would join cranberry sauce as a holiday staple.
By 1962, drawn by the Kennedy dazzle, he tackled the challenge of relocating to Washington. The move brought increased emphasis on political commentary and less attention to cultural matters. He became an insider at New Frontier frolics, a regular at Bobby Kennedy’s Hickory Hill. Later presidents, left or right, all produced fodder for his thrice-weekly satire.
His fortunes soared until the 1990s, when his marriage unraveled, his wife died, and his health suffered: a stroke, diabetes, and kidney failure. Refusing dialysis, he entered hospice, where he defied odds by outliving predictions; soon, he was back to giving interviews, summering on Martha’s Vineyard, and writing Too Soon to Say Goodbye, which became, in fact, his endearing farewell. He died much mourned in early 2007.
Hill’s is a vivid portrait. His focus is highly epistolary. Numerous letters recount the gags volleyed between Buchwald and his pals. Hill traces the badinage between Buchwald and William F. Buckley, Jr., over who attained higher status with Hertz Rent-a-Car. Another focus is on the “touches of Hemingway and Walter Mitty in his life” (25)—running the bulls in Pamplona, a white hunter gambol in Africa, and a trip to Moscow in an American luxury car. George Plimpton was with him in Pamplona. Might Buchwald’s escapades have inspired Plimpton’s own participatory journalism (viz. Paper Lion)?
Buchwald’s rollicking life is amusing, but how he lived at times upstages how he wrote. Passages from exemplary columns dot the book, but more analysis of Buchwald’s comic technique would profit us. Thus, he often stretched premises to “logical” extremes. When Jimmy Hoffa proposed unionizing pro sports, Buchwald foresaw a wide receiver dropping passes—having already reached his “quota.” Or Buchwald inverted premises. The periodic dispatch of officials to study progress in Vietnam prompted him to posit South Vietnam sending some our way and their reporting that our government was in no danger of falling and the
National Guard, now schooled in Southeast Asian “know-how,” could bring “Americanization” to our campuses.
Hill’s Buchwald is a liberal. He was an inveterate skeptic of the Vietnam War. (He traced the “domino theory” to a buffet at Sam Domino’s residence in Forest Hills, where the first person in line fell backward and toppled those behind him. [50-51]) Others of Buchwald’s views could use more attention. His take on the feminist movement caused some women readers to feel patronized. He gave short shrift to student militants or their academic appeasers.
Hill puts Buchwald in a select pantheon of humorists, including Mark Twain and Will Rogers. He is doubtless correct, but the proof is often his celebrity fans and the rarified circles in which he moved. His influence merits more attention. Hill notes that the National Security Agency put him under surveillance. So did the FBI, he might have added. (The author details a column arguing that J. Edgar Hoover did not exist. It caused an uproar—and brought no laughter to the FBI.) While admirers remarked on the gentleness of his jabs, Buchwald’s pen was barbed. He was his generation’s top speaker of truth to power. He was a virtuoso of kindly but acid wit conveyed through newspapers from that medium’s peak years through its incipient decline. He mastered other media, as the author points out. One wonders how he would have fared in the current age of Facebook, talk TV, and shuttered dailies.
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