Humor, put to pasture

Copyright 2003 Ben S. Pollock

Friday, Dec. 26, 2003. Consider the retirement this month of Arkansas Democrat-Gazette humor columnists Richard Allin and Charles Allbright. It’s fair and appropriate and honest (as in honest opinion, NOT truth and NOT fact) to point out the positives in the involuntary departure.

I believe their firing — for that’s what it is, never mind they’re getting all the pension/profit-sharing/etc. due them and that they had about six months in notice — is as sad as it must be inevitable. It’s not caused by the whims of the marketplace, as executives might claim, but their evaluation of marketplace whims. We’ve lost a lot in losing Richard and Charlie. Theirs is a style of daily newspaper commentary that is not obsolete, except by the waffling standards of perceptions of marketplace wants and needs. If you like the warm reassurance of, say, oatmeal for breakfast (sweetened with your own brown sugar, not the factory’s high fructose corn syrup) and oldies radio stations (oldies now including music from the ’90s, thus appealing to all ages), you would like the consistent gentle reflections of Allin and Allbright. That nationally there essentially is no younger generation of similar columnists being published must be regretted. This would be a reversible error of judgment, if only someone could do the reversing.

The Demzette, by being steadfastly a quality, serious, journalistic enterprise, has run lots of letters to the editor bluntly critical of the termination. The management says the humorists will not be replaced but that their salaries will go toward the hiring of more reporters. Can’t complain about that; we need more information clearly presented.

There’s other positives: These gentlemen are fairly well past conventional retirement age. Wouldn’t fate have been wonderful, though, for either of these men to either choose to retire or drop dead at their work table, as did cartoonist George Fisher did a couple of weeks ago, then not be replaced. Perhaps, though, Richard and Charlie would prefer a pleasant retirement.

Fisher may have proved the exception. He was one of the journalists (yes, editorial cartoonists are journalists) who defined the goodness of the old pre-Gannett Arkansas Gazette. Shouldn’t all journalists with identities (as opposed to nameless editors and little-known, interchangeable reporters) get to share with fans the trajectory of their careers. It moves from early promise through years of fulfillment of talent toward the end times of: more duds than hits, reliance on old tricks that had worked before (at the risk of repeating oneself) and a softening of opinion. Fisher rarely was as good at the weekly Arkansas Times in the last dozen years as he had been at the Gazette previously. In Fisher’s daily heyday his work was so distinct that it could be identified if his signature was hidden. At the Times, his drawings lost those literal hard lines.

All of Fisher’s published tributes talked about how his barbs at politicians and policies were so gentle that the targets loved him. Bunk, and that’s not disrespecting the deceased. Officials just respected (feared) him, like they would any hard-hitting commentator in word or picture. They asked for the originals and often hung them in their offices, out of good-sportsmanship, for appearance’s sake, or ego’s blindness to criticism. The difference in ridicule and insult is non-existent, if delivered with sincerity, and Fisher’s was.

Yet the risk the Demzette took in putting Richard and Charlie to pasture was losing the frankly old readers who had followed them from the Gaz to the DemGaz. Can any newspaper afford to lose subscribers? But a paper must risk losing readers to improve, creating a conundrum. Newsprint is finite so why editorial pages? Why a half-page weather map in the era of The Weather Channel and its Web site? Why an astrology feature that is hokum, especially to people who seriously believe in that hokum?

Consider some of the young feature columnists the Demzette added after hyphenation in late 1991, having inherited the veterans Richard and Charlie. One man is an intellectual interested in popular culture and all the attendant ironies. Another man writes arty, funny and hip. One woman was a single writing toward the same audience. Another bachelorette wrote to single women of color. They’re all a dozen years older now, thus figuratively or literally grayer. They’re all married now, bought houses. Since they can’t be hitting the intended target audience of youth, why not replace them? But aren’t they, really, reaching the same readership they started out with, since their target audience has matured to middle age along with them? Bravo for them. Then why not the same with Allin and Allbright, to the last of their downward arc?

Nationally, we need fighter-columnists and strong, egomaniacal editors who don’t kowtow to either readers or publishers more than absolutely necessary. Columnists and cartoonists perhaps should quit while they’re ahead, while they’re sharp, but who can know that at the time? None. If a cartoonist or columnist is awful now, they might get a memorable second wind, or have value in attracting or keeping readers with softer work.

My “Mirthology” for the former Democrat was different than what I wrote a couple of years later for the Demzette. My first two years of “Loose Leaves” for The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas was far different in tone than those Little Rock efforts and different still from the “Loose Leaves” of my third and last year there. My unsigned editorials for the Northwest Arkansas Times in fall 2003 had still a different tone, to my eye. I can’t explain the evolution. I acknowledge that one or another of the sets may be awful, or that I may be getting worse as I age.

But I may be improving, or my style’s changes may be merely interesting, or just momentary. All of us periodical essayists deserve every chance to show what we are, right this moment. Not to mention audiences deserve the opportunity to someday see what we have not written yet. -30-