Word: column
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hustles to his typewriter and strums a slightly self-pitying ode to his own death by vegetable. In this column, he imagines an Associated Press report ?POTATO MASHES MAN?and broods about his friends saying "Poor devil, he never knew what hit him." "What did hit him?" "Haven't you heard?" Baker's high-wire act has never been snappier. He finishes typing and thinks about making himself a drink. ? John Skew...
...past 17 years, Baker has written "Observer," a 750-word humor column that appears in the New York Times and 475 newspapers that subscribe to the Times News Service. This year Baker won the Pulitzer Prize, journalism's highest award, for commentary. It was the first time a writer who is considered basically a humorist received the commentary award since it was established as a separate Pulitzer in 1970. Previous recipients have included the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Marquis Childs, the New York Times's William Safire, the Washington Post Writers Group's George Will and other sober, important...
Baker is something less than that, and something more. His column walks the high wire between light humor and substantive comment, a balancing act so punishingly difficult that in the entire country there are not a dozen men and women who can be said to have the hang of the thing. Of these good humor men and women, Baker is consistently the most literate. What impresses Pulitzer judges and other journalists about Baker's high-wire heroics is not simply the talent that they require, though the requirement is very high, but Baker's extraordinary range...
...open. Says Humorist S.J. Perelman, whose fine, loopy wit has, almost unassisted, maintained The New Yorker's franchise as a funny magazine over the past couple of decades: "You can rely on Baker for honesty in his laughter and his anger. He has the courage to write a serious column when he's angry...
That courage sets Baker a little apart from the long and distinguished line of American newspaper humorists who preceded him, a line that is older than the nation itself. The first regular humor column in the New World appeared in Boston's New-England Courant in 1722 under the byline "Mrs. Silence Dogood," a pseudonym for young Benjamin Franklin. In one typical effort, Dogood/Franklin needled Harvard for turning out budding scholars who were "as great blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited." Well, it seemed funny at the tune...