Art Buchwald, the celebrated humourist who died last week at 81, delivers his own obituary on the website of the New York Times. The interactive feature, called The Last Word, features a footage of Buchwald shot last July. "I want to be remembered as someone who makes people laugh, feel better," he said. Imagining his memorial, he said: "I'd have a Blue Angel navy plane fly over the site. I'd be cremated and my ashes would be dropped all over every cocktail party on Martha's Vineyard. All the sailboats would fly their sails at half mast and everyone would say what a wonderful guy I was."

Jim Romenesko, Senior Online Reporter at Poynter reports that 10 or more video obits have been shot and edited by the New York Times so far.

Buchwald shocked his doctors by outliving their predictions that kidney failure would kill him within three weeks last February. He lived in a hospice for five months, where he defied expectations of how a dying man should act. "People are afraid of death and talking about death. They don't know what to do about it," he said. He put his friends and family at ease by making them laugh, and went on to live and write for another half year at his home on Martha's Vineyayd.

Buchwald's life-long practice of journalism and humanism helped him keep his sense of humour about death. He seems like a happy man who loved his work satirizing politicians (he says his biggest disappointment was not making Richard Nixon's enemy list). He overcame a traumatic childhood to focus on engaging the readers of his columns, first in Paris and later in Washington. Journalism can be a way of life, like humour. Buchwald was a smart guy. Lucky him, lucky us.

Buchwald wrote a "final column" in a hospice after he went off dialysis to be published after he died. Read it here.