It is tempting to say of Art Buchwald, the American humorist whose syndicated column ran for more than 60 years, that nothing so became his life than the manner of his leaving it.

Having tired of the daily routine of dialysis, made necessary after his kidneys failed, Buchwald checked into a hospice in Washington last February and cheerfully waited for death. He was, he told his readers, having the time of his life. Friends and admirers, including the French Ambassador, turned up to bid him farewell, and Buchwald received them all with his customary wide smile and sceptical intelligence. No one went away without feeling better for the experience.

Buchwald’s principal genius lay in convincing readers, not only in the US but in lands thousands of miles beyond its shores, that America was more than Uncle Sam, more than an invading army, more than Hollywood and General Motors and Coca Cola. He represented the US at its best.

He was optimistic (surprisingly so given that he suffered intermittently from depression); he was wary without lapsing into cynicism; and he realised, with that philosophical insight shared by all the best comedians, that life was no more than an intermission between two ends of a mystery that can never be solved.

His newspaper column, which began in the old New York Herald Tribune, was as much of a start to the day for New Yorkers and Parisians as the first coffee. The routine for readers was to scan the front page, check out the sports scores and the funnies, then settle into 600 words from either Buchwald or Russell Baker.

It is an irony, given that he was such a memorable columnist, that little of what he wrote is likely to survive. There are the collections, of course, a novel, and the aphorisms. Yet of the millions of words he wrote, most have returned to the word mines from which they were extracted, living on only as a kind of half-remembered chuckle.

Buchwald would not have minded that. While he took pride in his work, his ego was usually kept in check and he knew that he had had the best of things by living always in the here and now.

Arthur Buchwald was born into a Jewish family in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1925. His father made curtains for a living; his mother was removed to an asylum for the insane shortly after his birth. His early years were deeply troubled. His father could not cope with his son and three daughters and farmed them out to a succession of foster homes.

Buchwald dropped out of two high schools and ran off in 1942 to join the Marines. His war service was spent with the Marines’ Fourth Air Wing in the Pacific theatre. He was demobbed as sergeant in 1945 and took advantage of the GI Bill to enrol as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California (USC).

He became editor of the student magazine Wampus, and contributed to the rival USC Daily Trojan. He also made friends with the future President of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. But he could not summon up the discipline to take a degree and, in 1948, with $250 in his pocket, left for Paris.

The French capital in the immediate postwar years was a famously frenzied place, and Buchwald hoped to become part of that peculiar expatriate world, best exemplified by the Gene Kelly musical An American in Paris, in which everyone spent their time drinking champagne and visiting nightclubs.

He began writing for Variety magazine, but soon after took a sample column to the Herald Tribune, whose editor liked it and published it as “Paris After Dark”. Hired to the Trib, he started a second column, “Mostly About People”, before settling into his stride with “Europe’s Lighter Side”, which remained a fixture in the paper for the next 12 years.

It took Buchwald some time to learn French, but this was unimportant in the world in which he moved. He escorted Elvis Presley, then serving in the US Army in Germany, to the Paris Lido. He befriended the playwright Thornton Wilder in St Moritz. He even managed to persuade the late Prince Rainier of Monaco to offer him a personal (ie, non-press) invitation to his wedding to Grace Kelly.

When the Aga Khan came to town, Buchwald treated him and his extensive retinue to dinner at a swanky Paris restaurant, later presenting the check, for an, in those days, unheard of $150, to his hapless news editor.

He did not stint himself and travelled widely. He visted Turkey to explore the mysteries of a real Turkish bath and toured the Soviet Union in a limousine, complete with uniformed chauffeur.

By the 1950s Buchwald’s column had crossed the Atlantic, via The Washington Post, and was eventually syndicated in more than 500 papers. In 1957, anticipating a trend, he placed an advertisement in The Times, which ran: “Would like to hear from people who hate America and their reasons why.” It drew 209 replies and provided material for two entire columns.

Buchwald was by now such a fixture in Paris that Time magazine called his four-times weekly column an “institution”. One, written in November 1953 and intended to explain to the French what Americans celebrated on Thanksgiving Day, was so well received that for decades afterwards it was republished on its anniversary.

Yet Buchwald began to yearn for the larger canvas of his native America. When he was introduced to President Kennedy in 1961, he was immediately seized by the lure of Camelot and resolved to become a part of the magic.

He moved in 1962 to The Washington Post, where he quickly became a drinking buddy of the editor, Ben Bradlee, and moved from whimsy and social observation to political satire. Kennedy’s assassination affected him deeply. Later, during the Vietnam War, his columns developed a sharper edge. By the time Richard Nixon was elected to the White House he could display an almost savage wit. Nixon loathed him; but Dean Acheson called him “the greatest satirist in English since Pope and Swift”.

Buchwald’s private life was not always as carefree as his columns. He met his future wife, Ann McGarry, a practising Roman Catholic, while both were living in Paris. After a whirlwind affair, they were married (in spite of the groom’s Jewishness) in London in Westminster Cathedral. The couple had no children of their own, but adopted three in two years.

Yet the two finally separated and divorced in the 1980s. Ann died of cancer in 1994. Buchwald never quite recovered from the break-up. He wrote regular bitter-sweet columns on divorce and made his ex-wife the central character in his second volume of autobiography, I’ll Always Have Paris, in 1996.

He made money not only from his journalism, but from public speaking, becoming one of the highest-paid celebrities on the after-dinner speaking circuit. He also turned out regularly at charity fundraisers. For several years, he dressed up as the Easter Bunny at events hosted by Ethel Kennedy, widow of the murdered Robert and sister-in-law of JFK.

In 2000 he suffered a stroke, but recovered well and soon resumed his column. In February 2006, after complications arising from kidney failure, one leg had to be amputated below the knee, and it was shortly after this that Buchwald opted not to rely on dialysis.

“People constantly ask me if there’s an afterlife,” he wrote in his last column, composed in his Washington hospice. “It’s a good chance for me to philosophise. I tell them, ‘If I knew, I’d tell you’.”

He concluded, wistfully: “Whether we like it or not, we’re all going to go. The big question we still have to ask is not where we’re going, but: What are we doing here in the first place?”

Buchwald was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Outstanding Commentary, 1982; was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1986; and was created a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (France), 2006.

Art Buchwald, columnist, was born on October 20, 1925. He died on January 17, 2007, aged 81