I know this came up last year, but the trend is getting more an more
obvious. This year's winner was Bob Newhart, a fine and long-running
comedian known for gentle and cerebral humor. He joins past honorees such as
Whoopie Goldberg, Carl Reiner, and Richard Pryor. These are all people who
have made us laugh, and that's nice. It also centers on one aspect of
Twain's work and utterly ignores the rest.

    By an interesting contrast, last week, on the day before they caught the
sniper, my wife and I went to the movie "Bowling for Columbine," a
documentary by Michael Moore on the climate of gun worship in America. At
times the movie was drop-dead funny, sad, unbearable (the security cameras
of Columbine matched with the 911 calls coming in), and poignant (Moore took
two Columbine survivors with bullets lodged in their bodies to the home
offices of K-Mart, where the bullets had been bought). Moore took the
cameras to Canada to take a light-hearted look on why our neighbor to the
North only loses a couple hundred people a year to guns, compared to more
than 11,000 here. This is funny, with the kind of biting satire that Twain
would have loved, but clearly, Moore will wait a long time to collect this
award.

    What's next for the Mark Twain awards? I see Robin Williams, Steve
Martin, Seinfeld and Jim Carrey waiting in the wings.
Maybe Dave Barry. That's fine as far as it goes. All of those people have
made me laugh. However, they really should rename the Mark Twain Award the
George Burns Award.

Terry Ballard
Quinnipiac University