Humorist Art Buchwald dies at 81

updated 9:30 p.m. ET Jan. 18, 2007

WASHINGTON - Satirist Art Buchwald, who made dying fun, is dead.

Buchwald’s son, Joel, who was with his father, disclosed his death at age 81. He said his father passed away quietly at his home late Wednesday with his family.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author chronicled the life of Washington with an infectious wit for four decades, then cheated death and laughed in its face in a richly lived final year that medical science said he wasn’t supposed to get.

Buchwald had refused dialysis treatments for his failing kidneys a year ago and was expected to die within weeks of moving to a hospice on Feb. 7, where he held court as a parade of luminaries and friends came by to say farewell. But he lived to return home and even write a book about his experiences.

“I’m having a swell time,” he said of his dying. “The best time of my life.”

“The last year he had the opportunity for a victory lap and I think he was really grateful for it,” said son Joel Buchwald. “He had an opportunity to write his book about his experience and he went out the way he wanted to go, on his own terms.”

Neither Buchwald nor his doctors could say how he survived in such grave condition, and he didn’t seem to mind. “Nobody’s been able to really explain what’s going on because I’m not taking dialysis,” Buchwald told The Associated Press in May. “I have to thank my kidneys.”

He described his earlier decision to forgo dialysis and let himself die as a liberating one. “The thing is, when you make your choice, then a lot of the stress is gone. Everything is great because you accept that you are the one who made the choice.”

But when death didn’t come nearly as quickly as expected, Buchwald wrote that he had to scrap his funeral plans, rewrite his living will, buy a new cell phone and get on with his improbable life. “I also had to start worrying about Bush again,” he deadpanned.

'Wit of Washington'
Buchwald was called the “Wit of Washington” during his years here and his name became synonymous with political satire. He was well known, too, for his wide smile and affinity for cigars.

Among his more famous witticisms: “If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it.”

Jack Valenti, former chairman and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, recalled Buchwald’s humor. The two had been friends since 1964.

“What Art had was the gift of laughter — that’s a rarity today,” Valenti told AP on Thursday. “He could take simple ordinary things and make you laugh. God knows all of us need that. I’ve been with him in all kinds of situations, good and bad, triumph and tragedy but Art always was able to see a little wisp of humor in everything.”

Ben Bradlee, former Washington Post executive editor and a friend of Buchwald for 60 years, said in an interview that Buchwald was “the humorist of his generation.” Buchwald was a Paris nightlife columnist in the 1950s when he met Bradlee, whose paper carried Buchwald’s columns in later years.

‘The Mark Twain of our time’
Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts said in a statement: “Art was the Mark Twain of our time.

“For decades there was no better way to start the day than to open the morning paper to Art’s column, laugh out loud and learn all over again to take the issues seriously in the world of politics, but not take yourself too seriously,” he said. “The special art of Art Buchwald was to make even the worst of times better.”

His syndicated column at one point appeared in more than 500 newspapers worldwide. It appeared twice a week in publications including The Washington Post and was distributed by Tribune Media Services.

In a 1995 memoir on his early years, “Leaving Home,” Buchwald wrote that humor was his salvation. In all, he wrote more than 30 books.

“People ask what I am really trying to do with humor,” he wrote. “The answer is, ’I’m getting even.’ ... For me, being funny is the best revenge.”

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