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"God knows we could use it." Other knowledgeable readers agree. "I can't remember when the best writing in the Times was not that of Russ Baker," says U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who himself uses words with polished ease and keeps a large supply of them around the house. "There is just a lucidity and a sanity about him that is so distinctive. He writes clearly because he thinks clearly." Presidential Aspirant Eugene McCarthy once jokingly proposed making Baker U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's; McCarthy confirms that the offer is still open. Says Humorist S.J. Perelman, whose fine, loopy wit has, almost unassisted, maintained The New Yorker's franchise as a funny magazine over the past couple of decades: "You can rely on Baker for honesty in his laughter and his anger. He has the courage to write a serious column when he's angry."
That courage sets Baker a little apart from the long and distinguished line of American newspaper humorists who preceded him, a line that is older than the nation itself. The first regular humor column in the New World appeared in Boston's New-England Courant in 1722 under the byline "Mrs. Silence Dogood," a pseudonym for young Benjamin Franklin. In one typical effort, Dogood/Franklin needled Harvard for turning out budding scholars who were "as great blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited." Well, it seemed funny at the tune.
In the 1860s Mark Twain wrote a humorous column for the Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City, Nev., about a horse that tried to eat a boy on his way to Sunday school ("The boy got loose, you know, but that old hoss got his bible and some tracts ..."). Twain overheard somebody laughing at it and decided to write more columns, all just as hilarious as the first.
In the early 20th century, Finley Peter Dunne's "Mr. Dooley" carved up public figures in a thick Irish dialect and coined a few deathless epigrams along the way:
"Th' Supreme Court follows th' illiction returns," "Politics ain't beanbag."
But perhaps because those masters flourished in simpler times, they were merely funny. Baker has taken newspaper humor a step further. He has turned it into literature—funny, but full of the pain and absurdity of the age. Those qualities probably keep a few readers away. Said an otherwise admiring Jack Rosenthal, assistant editor of the Times's editorial page, when asked to cite any deficiencies in the column: "Too serious."
Much of Baker's humor is the fife accompaniment to the Sousa march of his own sturdy good sense, as when he announced in a recent column his refusal to buy a car that cost more than the house he grew up in, $5,900. When Baker expresses pain, it tends to be with only the parody of a whimper, as in a 1977 column he titled "A Taxpayer's Prayer": "O mighty Internal Revenue, who turneth the labor of man to ashes, we thank thee for the multitude of thy forms which thou has set before us and for the infinite confusion of thy commandments which multiplieth the fortunes of lawyer and accountant alike ... Grant that this sacrifice not be found insufficient unto thy auditor..."