Gail Collins writes with good humor in her own distinctive voice and on New York Times opinion pages.
No one could or will take the place of Mark Twain's adventures of Huckleberry Finn or his friend Tom Sawyer. We won't have a contemporary Will Rogers or know the likes of Molly Ivins or Herblock. Joan Rivers at 76 isn't worried that anyone will succeed her. She's enterprising enough for a dozen followers, and with any luck will be an actress until she dies. (You should, however, see the fine documentary, "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," written, directed, produced — and brilliantly edited — by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern.) Dave Barry, author of I'll Mature When I'm Dead, is probably right. And that's just fine. He is a splendidly prolific author of adult and children's literature, as well as a newspaper columnist.
This isn't the place to plumb the difference between varieties of good humor, or between humor and comedy, much less comedy and tragedy.
So we're free simply to celebrate Gail Collins, and gratefully to read her excellent columns in the Times.
Underneath every truly successful comic is an intelligent critic. In this event, a critic skilled in combining humor and biting analysis to characterize American politics, cultural craziness and corporate ripoffs. She is especially good at deflating the pretentiousness of politicians caught in their own maze of contradictions and foibles.
Political humor or genuinely humorous political commentary is a necessary and largely lost art, but every generation seems to bring us at least one wonderful example of doing it well. Gail Collins bids fair to become that example in this second decade of the 21st century. I wish her a long and happy life.
Witness a few of the opening paragraphs of her column today, Saturday, December 3, 2011.
"It’s weird how you can lose track of our ever-changing world. For instance, until recently, I thought 'reality TV' meant games about people who were stuck on an island or locked in a house together for the summer. Then, suddenly, I noticed that there were seven different regularly scheduled shows about real housewives, three about people who bid on abandoned storage lockers and two about people who kill wild hogs for a living.
"And then there was online education. (Confession: This entire column is actually going to be about online education. I just used the wild hogs to reel you in.)
"I always thought that the only kids getting their entire public schooling online were in the hospital, living in the Alaskan tundra, or pursuing a career as a singing orphan in the road company of 'Annie.' Not so. There are now around 250,000 cyberschool students in kindergarten through high school [actually through college and graduate school], and the number is growing fast...."
She goes on to point out that behind every such ripoff there is enterprising capitalism, at least one corporation and probably several making a tidy profit off American taxpayers, in this instance including a company called K12 Inc.
She even manages to bring out the humor in David Brooks:
David Brooks: Gail, which was your favorite not-Romney boomlet? Did you like the Bachmann Spring, the Cain Supernova, the Trump Tornado or the Gingrich Comet?
Gail Collins: David, we may part philosophical company as this campaign rolls along, but I like to think we will always have Donald Trump, Presidential Front-Runner.
David: I think I liked the Cain moment the best because this was a presidential campaign predicated on the conviction that the candidate was not actually running for president. The whole campaign had a modernist “This is Not a Pipe” absurdity to it, and I’m sorry to see him collapse, though I did see a nice tweet from somebody who observed that the only thing Herman Cain knows about foreign affairs is that he denies having had any. Read more…
