The American press has had a long tradition of humour and wit, bordering on the sarcastic. Mark Twain and H L Mencken were among the pioneers (they both wrote on India, with the Mencken take being the more biting). James Thurber had a gentler touch. Art Buchwald was the Baker counterpart at The Washington Post. They both traversed more or less the same ground, with Buchwald being the more conventional humourist. Now Dave Barry of the next generation keeps the flag flying at The Miami Herald.
Baker stands out even in this exalted company. He celebrated the ordinary and the everyday life, championing the little men and women considered of no consequence by the system. He found the world abounded in absurdities, be it government procedures or forms, pompous and opaque ways of social and political organisations, airs of superiority assumed by purveyors of haute cuisine and uber fashions, pageants such as beauty contests and post-season football bowls, not to speak of high literature that few read and even fewer understood.
He was at his best critiquing politicians who never walked their talk. The post-Kennedy era of American politics was a fertile ground for his imagination, especially the Nixon presidency and its handling of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate break-in. One of my all-time favourites from this period is his “Dance of the Hemlock Drinkers”. He had imagined a meeting of sombre Republican bigwigs worried about their likely win with Nixon. They hit upon nominating Spiro Agnew as the vice-presidential candidate, whom they considered a sure-fire loser. The title alluded to Socrates willingly drinking poisonous hemlock as his punishment after he was convicted of corrupting the minds of the young and impiety in ancient Athens. I borrowed that title recently to comment on our own political scene after the November-December state assembly elections.
Baker is supposed to have remarked that whenever he was stuck for an idea for a column, all he had to do was to look at the headlines of papers. That was, of course, becoming modesty for one who had the sharpest eye for spotting the abnormal in what is otherwise considered routine. He stuck to simple prose, eschewing the then fashionable use of polysyllabic words and long sentences. He called his columns ballets in a telephone booth, since he had to pack all his punch in the inviolable confines of 750 words and work with the tight schedule of thrice weekly appearance. The seeming artlessness of his writing was in fact the work of a great wordsmith. His colleague at The New York Times, William Safire, the word maven nonpareil (who coined Agnew’s infamous “nattering nabobs of negativism,” recently recycled by Arun Jaitley), acknowledged this.
Baker was to the American print media what R K Laxman was to the Indian press. Laxman ploughed the same field under similar compulsions of deadlines and space. His ever-mute common man’s bemused expression said it all about incongruities of our lives and times.
How significant were Baker’s contributions? He was the first humour columnist to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his columns. He set the trend; Buchwald and Barry were also similarly honoured later. But Baker insisted that he was not a humourist; he was a serious writer who observed humour in the absurdity of politics and pretension.
The author is an economist
