To Our Readers

By ELIZABETH VALK LONG President

/ The British writer G.K. Chesterton once offered this tongue-in-cheek theory of human origins: "If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head." In light of the comic outrages and tragic absurdities of almost any given week of news, it's hard not to agree. Which is why the best news editors know that when taking stock of events, a little wit is no less important than a proper fund of sober intelligence. That's certainly the working philosophy of Bruce Handy. As the new senior editor of TIME's Chronicles section, Handy masterminds the pages that open each issue with an overview of the week that's part David Brinkley, part David Letterman.

The path that brought him to us took Handy, 35, through two famous training grounds for American satirists of his generation. In 1987 he began writing for Spy magazine, the acid monthly known for "its witty, savagely elegant deconstructions of the hype, venality and sheer short-fingered vulgarity that marked the past decade." (That quote comes from the Milestones item that Handy wrote last month about Spy's folding after seven years of nipping at the heels of power.) From there he went on to write Weekend Update for Saturday Night Live. That, says Handy, gave him good practice at one of his chief tasks in Chronicles: "To look at the week's events and try to find offbeat angles."

Offbeat angles are what you might expect from somebody who has been known to surprise his staff by sliding his 6-ft. 3-in. frame down the middle of a conference-room table to get a closer look at a layout. Consider Zhirinovsky Beat, a semiregular Chronicles department that follows the undignified doings of the Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Like Charlie Chaplin's lampoon of Hitler in The Great Dictator, it deflates a truculent buffoon without losing sight of the fact that some windbags blow up with a bang. "Bruce is a first-rate journalist whose work has a witty bite to it," says assistant managing editor Jim Kelly. "He lets the irony and absurdity grow out of the news, instead of just imposing jokes on what happened last week." And like the Supreme Court, which last week paid unanimous tribute to the usefulness of parody, he also knows that humor is an essential part of the national discourse. "A good joke can shed light on events," says Handy. "If it's funny, it's funny for a reason -- you're telling a truth." Which is, in one way or another, what TIME is in business to do.