AB: I'm not sure. I mean, we're talking about something that--all I
can tell you is what happened to me. What happened to me was there was no
pill. I had these terrible depressions, they lasted four months or six
months, no more than six months. And out of it I got relieved of
tremendous amounts of hang-ups. I got relieved of guilt.
I had therapy with it. I had a lot of therapy. So I'm grateful how
it came out for me, and I'm also grateful with--you see, the biggest
danger obviously of a humorist when he goes into a depression is he'll
never be funny again, and that causes more depression. But I personally
give credit to my depressions for making me a better writer and a better
person. And it would be a danger if I became a professional
antidepression person. But there's a big interest in it though, what you
are saying. You guys can survive just on a depression magazine.
PT: That's for sure.
AB: This book liberated me. I can now do serious pieces and not
worry about them. I did a column the other day where I go to the
Holocaust Museum. It's the year 2005, and I've got a little boy with me.
Only it turns out in the first paragraph that it's not the Jewish
Holocaust Museum, it's the Bosnian Holocaust Museum. I give him a
tour--the women who were raped, the women who were killed. And all the
kid keeps saying to me is why didn't we do anything?
And that's the whole story, and I've always thought of Bosnia as
being another Holocaust. So I wrote it and then I saw where they're
moving out tanks from Sarajevo, and I decided to hold it because the
United States in the column doesn't come out too good. So the hell with
it.
But all my subject matter--I have one now that I'm gonna write
today. And this is why I don't have to work too hard. I just read in the
paper that Clinton wants to tax the poor to pay for the poor! Wait a
minute, you think I'm bullshitting you. Yeah, he wants to tax the poor to
pay for the poor. So I'm going to do a column on the poor people sitting
around discussing what might be tax deductible for them. And I've been
doing this kind of thing for forty-four years.
But you have to took at it from my standpoint. I am not making
judgments on these things. I am looking at them and saying, "Do you know
enough about this story for me to make fun of? That's all I'm doing.
Because I'm not a judgmental person. I have my own ideas about when
somebody's lying.
PT: Do you feel a pressure to be funny?
AB: No.
PT. Do you feel any pressure at all?
AB: Not really. I mean-you want to know what causes an anxiety
attack? It's being in Chicago and O'Hare Airport being shut down and me
realizing I'll never get out for the rest of my life. Transportation is
my biggest problem these days.
PT: Next to the phone company.
AB: The phone company is something else again. I'll only tell you
two guys this: If you know anybody whose got telephone stock, tell them
to get rid of it. And when you hear of its downfall, you'll know it
started here.
PT: When are you going to launch your attack on the telephone
company?
AB: I have to figure out how to do it. First of all, it's not a
telephone company anymore. There's ten thousand telephone companies! And
they're all making money, and they're all going out of the phone
business--and they're going into Paramount Pictures!
*EDITOR'S NOTE: Buchwald sued Paramount Pictures over the film,
claiming the plot was plagiarized from a script he had written, and
won.
PHOTOS: Art Buchwald
PHOTO: January 1969 Psychology Today with Art Buchwald on the
cover
Tags:
Art Buchwald,
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depression,
downfall,
executive branch,
gizmo,
hillary,
human voice,
humor,
joe blow,
law offices,
life,
lobbyists,
money problems,
noon pt,
paramount pictures,
planes,
scoundrels,
state of the union,
telephone company,
twenty five years
