Even after more than 25 years of writing a syndicated column three times a week--and tussling occasionally with the State Department--Buchwald said he doesn't think he's become stale. "The most dangerous thing about anything you do for awhile is predictability, and the worst thing you want to happen to you is for the reader to know what you're going to say before they read the column; and that's why I try to mix up my columns so much and I won't necessarily stick with political stuff because people can get tired of that," Buchwald explained during one of his serious moments.

In the years since his Paris days some outrageous and inflamatory--and sometimes dull--680-word satires have rolled off his typewriter. But Buchwald thinks the news that appears in the papers every day is much stranger than anything he creates. Some examples:

"Take Jimmy Carter's interview in Playboy in which he said he had lusted after women in his heart, but God had always forgiven him--I could not make that up. We now have a bumper sticker in Washington that says, 'In his heart, he knows your wife.'"

Or: "Take the FBI's recent sting operation when they caught Congressman Kelly of Florida with a bagload of money in the trunk of his car, and his explanation for this was that he was hoping to catch the person who gave it to him--I could not make that up."

And finally: "Consider what happened a couple of years ago when Senator William Scott of Virginia was listed in the magazine New Times as the dumbest senator in Washington. Now, New Times has a circulation of about 40. But Senator Scott called a press conferenced to deny it--which made him the dumbest senator."

If truth is wilder than Buchwald's fiction, then some of his ideas approach the ludicrousness of reality. He predicted, for example, that by next year "the Post Office will deliver mail only one day a year. It'll be called mail day and it'll be a holiday like Christmas. And you'll decorate your post boxes with holly wreathes and mistletoe, and we'll all come down in the morning and open our bills together."

After so may years of coming up with ideas like that--5000 columns, a novel and a play--Buchwald has no desire to write something serious: "I find that whatever you can do seriously, you can do humorusly and make the same point. The thing that has saved me I think, is that I've refrained from getting on the soapbox, though may times I'd like to."

And so, he still enjoys his job, which he called the best in the newspaper business. "I don't live in fear of somebody taking a dislike to me and saying, 'Get rid of him.' I have a better job than Fred Silverman--and safer...You've got to add about $150,000 a year onto that--being your own boss--it's great."