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Since then, Buchwald has produced four compilations of his columns that together have sold more than 100,000 hard-cover copies, and a novel. A musical revue loosely based on Buchwald columns is now playing to good crowds in London.
By ordinary journalistic standards, such success is mystifying. Buchwald's humor is of a formless sort that vanishes in excerpts and paraphrase, and has its off and on days. The answer may lie in the fact that Art Buchwald is a combination of good journalist and good guy. Millions of his stay-at-home readers warm to the columnar image of an expatriate but ordinary American hobnobbing with royalty and living the Continental life without turning snob. Buchwald's accounts of celebrity lunches are interspersed with columns about his wife and his three adopted children—who can lure him away from duty for bus rides to the end of the line.
On the job, Buchwald's manner is so ingenuous and old-shoe that the subjects of his interviews are soon disarmed into chattering away like old friends. "The fact is that Mr. Buchwald is practically a blank." says French Playwright Marcel Achard. "Most of the time he is simply looking at you with large eyes." Though seemingly artless, Buchwald's interviews usually make his subjects seem more amusing than they are, and though he may protect them from their indiscretions, he avoids both puffery and malice.
He intends to return to the U.S. shortly to test whether the presidential election can be taken lightly in print. In the last weeks of the campaign, this may require an excess of valor.