Word: buchwald
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...away from the podium, during an early morning chat with reporters, Buchwald spoke more thoughtfully--and seriously--about the candidates. He thinks people are just plain bored with them all: 'It's gotten to the point now where I just get the feeling people aren't that interested," Buchwald lamented. "To write humor you've got to have people interested in the subject to start with, and you find in this campaign that whatever humor there is is in the fact that nobody likes either candidate or gives any emotional investment to any of the candidates. That's what...
...Buchwald said he tries to avoid writing too many of his columns on the campaign not only because people aren't that interested, but also because the candidates simply don't have much potential for humor. The ideal candidate--and president--for comic exploitation was Richard Nixon, Buchwald recalled wistfully. "He was my favorite, my Camelot," he sighed, eyes misting over. Reminiscing about the days of Watergate, Buchwald said, "Everbody was lying. It was a running story. It ran for over a year. It was just beautiful--you didn't have to make anything...
...thinks the comic value of his work rises and falls to some extent with the material he's satirizing. "If the people are up on something and they're interested in it, then the humor of it works. If they're not interested, then the humor doesn't work," Buchwald explained. "It's like Johnny Carson--he'll tell a joke, and if the people don't know what he's talking about, it just lies there flat. And then he'll mention something about Billy Carter or something and he'll get applause. So when...
...Buchwald hasn't always concerned himself with making people laugh. He was a student once. After a brief stint in the marines, young Art decided he should go to college. But because he hadn't graduated from high school, he wanted to find out from a university what kind of high school courses he should take to prepare himself for the heady world of higher academics...
...went to the University of Southern California and stood in line with thousands of other registering students. When he got to the front a woman handed him a card to fill out. "She said, 'What do you want to take?' and I said, 'I don't care,'" Buchwald recalled during his K-School speech. "She said English, and I said that was good. Math? I said, 'Why not.' She said French, and I said O.K. So I went to the next desk and the man stamped it and I was in college...