thedrifter
03-07-07, 08:34 AM
Art Buchwald's Final, Final Column
Al Eisele
(Editor's note: I was among the 550 or so people who attended a memorial service for Art Buchwald in Washington on March 5. I decided he wouldn't mind if I penned one last column for him. I got to know him nearly 30 years ago when I asked him to contribute some jokes for Vice President Mondale's speech at a Gridiron Club dinner.
It was one of the few times Mondale was hilariously funny.)
That was quite a sendoff they gave me at the Kennedy Center the other day. They billed it as a celebration of my life. They showed a couple of videos and 10 people gave eulogies, including my kids Joel and Jennifer, my old pal Ben Bradlee, my fellow 'Blues Brother' Mike Wallace, Tom Brokaw, Dave Barry, Ethel Kennedy, and even the doctor who saw me through my final days on earth. They all called me Artie and said nice things about me.
I haven't had so much fun since I was dating Brigette Bardot and eating on an expense account at the best restaurants in Paris. Kay Graham and Bobby Kennedy and I -- Jack and Jackie were attending a party for former presidents down by the Pearly Gates -- laughed so hard we thought we'd die. Well, maybe I should rephrase that.
We got a big kick out of hearing Ethel tell about the time she asked me to be the Jewish godparent for her son Maxwell, and I panicked when the priest asked me, as Maxwell's stand-in, if I renounced Satan. "Artie lost it," she recalled, explaining that when she found me collapsed on a folding chair in the back of the church and asked what was wrong, I said, "I'm not ready to renounce Satan!"
Even Dick Nixon and Spiro Agnew laughed at that one, although they were watching from a different place.
I liked Dave Barry's eulogy, even though he made fun of me by saying I often sounded like I had a family of hamsters living in my mouth. "He talked funny, he wrote funny and damned if he didn't figure out a way to die funny." That almost made me forgive him for thinking he's a better humor columnist than I was.
But I got an even bigger kick out of seeing some of the people who turned up to pay me homage, especially because Ed Bennett Williams and I knew - we know things in advance up here - that Scooter Libby was going to be found guilty in the CIA leak case the next day.
There was the Dark Prince, Bob Novak, who started this whole mess by reporting that Valerie Plame was a secret CIA agent but wasn't charged with anything. And Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, who knows more secrets than God, and Matt Cooper of Time, whose testimony really did Scooter in. Sure wish I was still around to write a column about so many people who couldn't remember a thing.
Thought you'd like to know when I arrived here, Saint Peter asked me what I did for a living. When I told him I'd spent the last 45 years trying to make people laugh about what their government was doing to them, he said, "Come right in. You've suffered long enough."
Got to go now. I've got a halo-tossing contest with Mother Teresa, a joke-writing seminar with Bob Hope and a cookout with some Marines who didn't make it out of Walter Reed. And then a lecture by Tom Dewey, who says he's going to explain why Rudy Guiliani will win the White House in 2008.
I wouldn't want to end this without admitting how flattered I was by all the warm eulogies at my memorial service. But as I told Albert Einstein, "That's the problem with Washington. When everybody says nice things about you, you know you're living in a parallel universe."
Ellie
Al Eisele
(Editor's note: I was among the 550 or so people who attended a memorial service for Art Buchwald in Washington on March 5. I decided he wouldn't mind if I penned one last column for him. I got to know him nearly 30 years ago when I asked him to contribute some jokes for Vice President Mondale's speech at a Gridiron Club dinner.
It was one of the few times Mondale was hilariously funny.)
That was quite a sendoff they gave me at the Kennedy Center the other day. They billed it as a celebration of my life. They showed a couple of videos and 10 people gave eulogies, including my kids Joel and Jennifer, my old pal Ben Bradlee, my fellow 'Blues Brother' Mike Wallace, Tom Brokaw, Dave Barry, Ethel Kennedy, and even the doctor who saw me through my final days on earth. They all called me Artie and said nice things about me.
I haven't had so much fun since I was dating Brigette Bardot and eating on an expense account at the best restaurants in Paris. Kay Graham and Bobby Kennedy and I -- Jack and Jackie were attending a party for former presidents down by the Pearly Gates -- laughed so hard we thought we'd die. Well, maybe I should rephrase that.
We got a big kick out of hearing Ethel tell about the time she asked me to be the Jewish godparent for her son Maxwell, and I panicked when the priest asked me, as Maxwell's stand-in, if I renounced Satan. "Artie lost it," she recalled, explaining that when she found me collapsed on a folding chair in the back of the church and asked what was wrong, I said, "I'm not ready to renounce Satan!"
Even Dick Nixon and Spiro Agnew laughed at that one, although they were watching from a different place.
I liked Dave Barry's eulogy, even though he made fun of me by saying I often sounded like I had a family of hamsters living in my mouth. "He talked funny, he wrote funny and damned if he didn't figure out a way to die funny." That almost made me forgive him for thinking he's a better humor columnist than I was.
But I got an even bigger kick out of seeing some of the people who turned up to pay me homage, especially because Ed Bennett Williams and I knew - we know things in advance up here - that Scooter Libby was going to be found guilty in the CIA leak case the next day.
There was the Dark Prince, Bob Novak, who started this whole mess by reporting that Valerie Plame was a secret CIA agent but wasn't charged with anything. And Watergate reporter Bob Woodward, who knows more secrets than God, and Matt Cooper of Time, whose testimony really did Scooter in. Sure wish I was still around to write a column about so many people who couldn't remember a thing.
Thought you'd like to know when I arrived here, Saint Peter asked me what I did for a living. When I told him I'd spent the last 45 years trying to make people laugh about what their government was doing to them, he said, "Come right in. You've suffered long enough."
Got to go now. I've got a halo-tossing contest with Mother Teresa, a joke-writing seminar with Bob Hope and a cookout with some Marines who didn't make it out of Walter Reed. And then a lecture by Tom Dewey, who says he's going to explain why Rudy Guiliani will win the White House in 2008.
I wouldn't want to end this without admitting how flattered I was by all the warm eulogies at my memorial service. But as I told Albert Einstein, "That's the problem with Washington. When everybody says nice things about you, you know you're living in a parallel universe."
Ellie