Folks like . . . Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Lily Tomlin. Ben Franklin. Amy Poehler and Tina Fay. Michael Che and Colin Jost. Tom Lehrer. Gracie Allen. Dick Gregory (who consciously chose as the one-word title of his autobiography a word that cannot be spoken these days!) Puck and a host of political cartoonists who followed. Jonathan Swift. Art Buchwald. Mark Twain. The anonymous author of the biblical book of Jonah. Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss. Heinrich Hoffmann. Geoffrey Chaucer. All wonderful folks, and obviously this is a very partial, very personal list. But one more name must be added, a name to whom millions will raise a wee dram tonight (or perhaps tomorrow night, if they intend more than a single wee dram and worry about getting to work on Friday): Robert Burns.
Years ago as a teenager, I took a family trip to Great Britain. We saw castles, abbeys, cathedrals, and ordinary small churches. We viewed museums, monuments, and mausoleums, looking on treasures old and new. We visited Oxford bookshops (from whence I brought home a first edition of The Silmarillion) and sports gear shops (from whence I brought home a pair of Franz Beckenbauer Special football boots). We went to Stratford-upon-Avon and saw various Shakespeare sites. And then we got to Scotland, and the home of Robert Burns. I brought back a souvenir from there, which gets a lot more use than the now-too-small Beckenbauer Specials and even the oft-read Silmarillion: a well-used leather bookmark, with a short little poem by Burns: The Book-worms
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