Art Buchwald is still alive… There are writers who spend their entire lives arranging words so that the effect is of rotting flatulence.  This is the Art Buchwald class of literary ordure, writers who regard words as serving the function of a plate of spaghetti, to be eaten, digested, and blasted out of one's sagging buttocks without the interruption of a single thought.  I despise them more than I despise any other class of writer.

…when you're dead

It is the stuff of Readers' Digest:  anodyne humor, idiotic observations, and a flabby, chuckling mentality, but the quality most in evidence is the self-satisfaction.  It is the natural result of a tenth-rate mind asked to produce copy for the space between the gardening column and the used car ads, and the realization that you can get a certain amount of fan mail if you express banalities in a vaguely inoffensive tone.  It is a reminder that there is an audience for slurping down bland chum precisely because it is an activity easily integrated with numerous other torpid habits:  watching television, napping, breathing through one's mouth, etc.

If the newspaper is in decline, the extinction of this class of writer will be the primary benefit:

People are broad-minded. They'll accept the fact that a person can be an alcoholic, a dope fiend, a wife beater and even a newspaperman, but if a man doesn't drive, there's something wrong with him.

Yes, that Art, he is quite the comedian, isn't he?  How about this one:

A bad liver is to a Frenchman what a nervous breakdown is to an American. Everyone has had one and everyone wants to talk about it.

Not only are the jokes completely devoid of cleverness of any kind, they don't really make any sense.  Any successful comedian will tell you that a joke's effectiveness depends on its internal logic, which is why these newspaper humor columnists are always so bad at it.  They possess all the mental rigor of someone who has just nodded off after a three drink lunch, and unlike an alcoholic businessman they are that way during every waking moment of their entire adult lives.  It's quite difficult to tell if they get worse as they get older.

I was certain that Art Buchwald was dead by now – he was born in 1925 – but apparently he is still alive, after a fashion.  Even if he himself were dead, there are still a number of writers who produce the same kind of work, and although they tend to fit within Buchwald's generational cohort it will be some time before the last of these people are dead or in Alzheimer's wards.

What forced this unpleasant thought to the forefront of my mind was Raymond Chen recommending the personal musings of Francesco Marciuliano, who writes the Sally Forth comic strip.  You might remember it from its stiff illustration style when it was drawn by its original creator, Greg Howard.  Apparently this quietly uninteresting strip was handled by two writers (plus an illustrator) for a time after Howard sold the rights back to King Features.  And I thought strip artists who hired their own inkers were lazy!  How can you function with a brain that cannot fill three panels of regurgitated humor without assistance?*

But back to the point, Marciuliano's weblog is like the Zen of Art Buchwald, if such a thing can exist.  This means jokes that aren't funny, observations that aren't clever, and views that aren't extraordinary.  Keeping up any weblog of personal opinions is inherently presumptuous, but keeping up a weblog with what look like outtakes from an Elks club dinner speech goes well beyond presumption and suggests someone who drinks out of old motor oil cans.

At first I thought Marciuliano must be part of the wheezy Buchwald generation, one of those queerly sexless boobs who think a long life filled with poor decisions and no important accomplishments demands respect.  The retro stylings, retro humor, retro outlook…but Marciuliano appears to be in his thirties – another James Lileks, then.  Slightly less annoying, slightly less talented.  Chen actually warns his readers that Marciuliano has political views, but they are strictly of the "I'm a fucking retarded English major" variety and are unlikely to offend.  It's not like he's going to outwit you or anything.  As far as I can tell the only subject he shows signs of mastering is that of comics and cartoons.  There's an entire generation like that.

But Marciuliano's existence suggests that even as weblogs drive to extinction the local and humor columnist (and about goddamn time), they will also provide an alternative forum for these hacks.  Could this mean that Art Buchwald will remain a plague upon mankind in some form or another, forever?