Politics & Power Quote by Art Buchwald

Buchwald’s gag works because it weaponizes the most beloved tool of sober authority - statistics - to expose how easily we misuse it. The line starts with a cozy piece of American mythmaking: the buffalo as looming, shaggy menace, a holdover from Western iconography and tourist-shop kitsch. Then he punctures it with a data point that’s technically true and totally beside the point. Of course cars kill more people than buffalo; one is a mass, daily system and the other is an occasional animal you’d have to go out of your way to meet. That mismatch is the joke, and it’s also the critique.

The intent isn’t really to rehabilitate buffalo PR. It’s to mock the way we perform rationality while avoiding the harder question: what risks are structurally baked into modern life, and which ones are just vivid stories? We fear the dramatic, cinematic threat (a charging beast) and normalize the routine slaughter of the commute because it’s familiar, economically convenient, and politically unsexy. Buchwald slips that indictment in under a chuckle.

Context matters: as a mid-century columnist satirizing American common sense, Buchwald specialized in pointing out how public discourse can sound factual while remaining conceptually illiterate. His punchline also anticipates today’s data-driven punditry, where numbers can be used less to illuminate reality than to launder a conclusion. The buffalo is just a stand-in for whatever we’re currently panicking about; the automobile is the danger we’ve agreed not to notice.