David Colburn

Rarely in my life have the stars aligned so perfectly and yet remained so far out of reach as they have this week in my life at the Timberjay.
As luck would have it, this soul so enamored with life’s endless absurdities was up for his turn in the paper’s rotation of columnists for the April 1 edition. My office colleagues will readily confirm that I was beside myself with glee when realizing the April Fools’ Day commentary would be the playground for my irreverent mind. I was nigh on the edge of breaking out into a Sister Act 2 style chorus of “Oh, Happy Day,” but with my days as a choirboy far, far behind me, I wisely, and mercifully for my colleagues, chose to refrain from that refrain.
Nonetheless, I was tickled 20 different shades of pink to have the chance of a journalistic lifetime to follow in the steps of a personal favorite and one of the all-time great political satirists, Art Buchwald of the Washington Post. A prolific writer whose column was syndicated in over 550 newspapers at the height of his popularity, Buchwald found most of the fodder for his edgy comedic writing in the news of the day, once saying he could not make up the absurd situations he saw being reported every day. It’s a shame he didn’t live to see the past decade. Having somewhat lost his edge and countless readers in the waning years of the 20th century, he undoubtedly would’ve experienced a massive renaissance in the 2010s fueled by the seemingly endless avalanche of absurdity inside and outside the Washington Beltway.
Satire, however, is a terribly tricky thing. Beginning with a kernel of truth recognizable to most, a successful satirist has to balance their personal dive into the pool of thoughtful foolishness on the edge of a knife, walking a very thin line to create something realistically fanciful that readers still recognize as nothing more than laughable fiction.
A former editor of one of the weekly newspapers I oversaw in Kansas toppled off that edge spectacularly a number of years ago. He tried writing an edgy satirical column to fire up a cross-county school rivalry by comically trashing the opposition’s football team, school, and entire community. It was supposed to be all in good fun, but neither town found the column humorous at all. The ensuing outrage was such that three days after the column was published it was the reason he became a former, and not fondly remembered, editor.
Newspapers across the country have tackled the challenge of April Fools’ Day columns for decades and have generally escaped inflicting harm, but there are exceptions. A notable recent faux pas happened in Oklahoma in 2020, when a newspaper in Sapulpa tried using satire as a response to the closing of schools due to the coronavirus pandemic. The paper’s April Fools’ Day edition proclaimed in supposed good fun that because of the COVID closures all students would have to repeat their current grades the next year. School officials were inundated with calls from concerned and outraged parents, and the embarrassed paper had to immediately retract the story and issue an apology.
As did Buchwald, I find opportunity upon opportunity for satirical material when I scan the news, whether it be global, national, regional, or local. I occasionally tackle such things on my personal social media account, the one I’ve had for 13 years where a relatively small group of 60 or so carefully chosen “friends” on both sides of the political spectrum know me well enough to spot my attempts at satire and laugh along with me, even when my posts aren’t as funny as I think they are.
However, as I began running through numerous possibilities for a satirical gem for this week’s Timberjay I began thinking about how tedious good political satire has become. As I noted earlier, good satire takes root in a kernel of truth. But these days, agreed-upon truths have become increasingly scarce in an age where people gobble up social media memes without thought as truths, and all too readily accept willful distortions and fabrications as facts, despite all evidence to the contrary. Swimming satirical writers have always known they might encounter a shark or two, but the seas of satire today are more frequently patrolled by submarines with unreliable radar, manned by irrational itchy trigger fingers on the torpedo tubes, and skippered by captains possessing the mental health of the monomaniacal Captain Ahab of Moby Dick fame.
My aging face is challenged enough with growing wrinkles and progressively sagging skin. I need not add any battle scars to it because I glibly dove into that dangerous ocean without the proper equipment to navigate it. So, after thoughtful consideration, I reluctantly retired my initial glee and decided it would be better to leave cutting political satire to others than to risk becoming the ultimate April fool with an ill-considered humorous word or two.
But it IS April Fools’ Day, a day that demands levity of some sort or another, and toward that end I offer the following from my distant past as a young, easily humored Cub Scout:
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Red.
Red who?
Red pepper – ain’t that a hot one?
(insert raucous laughter here)
And to my satirical idol, Mr. Buchwald, wherever you are, I appreciate your talent more than ever. Carpe absurdum.