Word: humorously
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...interviewed several of Baker's colleagues at the New York Times, close friends like NBC Anchorman John Chancellor and Author David Halberstam, and a number of other leading humorists, including S.J. Perelman and, in a sense, Benjamin Franklin. (Franklin was the nation's first regularly published humor columnist, and Rudulph dug up an early example of his work.) "Everybody was happy to discuss Baker," says Rudulph. But no one was more pleased than Syndicated Columnist Art Buchwald, Baker's colleague in the American Academy of Humor Columnists, a select and wholly frivolous group. Summed up Buchwald: "Russ...
...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...
...Humor is his usual vehicle, but he can also write with a haunting strain of melancholy, with delight or, as in his 1974 meditation on inflation-pinched old people shopping timidly at the supermarket, with shame and outrage: "Staring at 90-cent peanut butter. Taking down an orange, looking for its price, putting it back... Old people at the supermarket are being crushed and nobody is even screaming...
Indeed, "Observer" is an island of mirth in one of the world's most authoritative?and dullest?newspapers. "He adds humor to the Times, "says A.M. Rosenthal, the paper's executive editor...