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