Laughing on the Outside

His gold-rimmed glasses could belong to a bank clerk. Narrow-faced and long of jaw, he could pass for a wholesome Woody Allen. But the small smile and nonbiting wit behind it belong uniquely to Gerald Nachman, 38, newest arrival in the small world of syndicated humor columnists.

With a home base at the U.S.'s biggest newspaper, the tabloid New York Daily News (circ. 1.9 million), Nachman in three years has picked up 80 clients and several million readers. He still trails far behind Art Buchwald (434 papers) and Russell Baker (400), but editors find him a useful Middle American alternative to the Big Two, who tend to joke from within while Nachman joshes from outside events.

Nachman created the Trendys, who changed their lives through seminars at est, and zup ("What's up is zup and what's down is down"). Fenton Trendy takes up pot smoking but cannot get the idiom right. "We got rocked out of our minds," he brags. Nachman also records Superman's complaint that when "I round up a bunch of thugs now, I first got to read them their rights under Miranda."

Nachman has been honing his printed humor since his student days at California's San Jose State University, where his pieces in the campus paper landed him a job at the San Jose Mercury before he graduated. Later he signed on at the New York Post. He borrows a Robert Benchley line to describe the experience: "I was one of the worst reporters in New York, even for my age. Once I was assigned to cover a fire and covered the wrong fire." Switched to the show-biz beat, he was happier, but not for long. "When I'd interviewed Merv Griffin three times," he says, "it was time to leave."

Back West he went, to the Oakland Tribune, where his drama reviews and show-business reporting quickly won him a following. His freelance articles in the Sunday New York Times and TV Guide caught the eye of Daily News Managing Editor Michael J. O'Neill, who hired him to write that trickiest of all specialities, a humor column.

Under O'Neill's guidance, Nachman shifted his focus from show business to news. "I must be the only apolitical Jew in America," says Nachman, explaining why his topical work--unlike Buchwald's and Baker's--rarely has a partisan twist. One recent column was an interview with Dr. Winslow Smerck, author of Smilin' Through History: From Teddy Roosevelt to Jerry Ford and Back. Said Smerck, agreeing that Ford is a first-rate smiler: "Ford does smile a lot --we measured it with a light meter and he has almost as much wattage as Carter, but Jerry lacks that all-important crinkle factor." Nachman has also taken on Amy Carter and reporters: " 'Amy didn't mean it when she told the press to buzz off,' smiled Ms. Carter's appointments secretary. 'She just hadn't had her nap yet.' "

Readers are understandably uncertain where fact ends and fiction takes over in Nachman's world. An indignant housewife called him from Michigan to complain about the homes for wed mothers that Nachman invented. The clients were pregnant wives who felt guilty about defying the Zero Population Growth movement; they felt better after watching Cheaper by the Dozen.

Nachman complains that a normal childhood in Oakland deprived him of the trauma that propels other writers. He is even happily married, to Mary McGeachy, a movie critic for NBC radio. Nachman is writing Playing House, a book about his ten years of marriage.

Ideas and Martinis. Trauma enough for a columnist is the never ending search for ideas. "I tend to think in long rectangles," says Nachman. He reads and reads, stares at TV for desperate hours on end and goes to cocktail parties where he drinks little but inhales ideas over other people's martinis.

From one of Nachman's infrequent visits to Washington and lunch at Sans Souci with Art Buchwald came a correspondence in which Baker and the San Francisco Chronicle's Art Hoppe happily joined. It involves the American Academy of Humor Columnists, whose sole purpose is to devise awards for its four members. At the academy's first awards dinner--still unscheduled--Jerry Nachman may well find himself saluted as Best Apolitical Humor Columnist Living East of the Hudson River. The vote should be unanimous.

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