IN a recent column, Humorist Art I Buchwald claims that he hopped into a London taxi shouting, "Take me to your swingers." To which the cabbie replied: "Oh, you read the TIME magazine cover story too." After Buchwald failed in several attempts to find the swinging city we described (April 15), he went to the Time & Life Building on New Bond Street. There he watched correspondents watusi with comely researchers. "On each desk was a champagne bucket," he writes, "and when they saw me, someone forced a glass into my hand. 'Welcome to swinging London!' a secretary cried. I could hardly contain myself. 'Thank God, I found it at last!' "

TIME somewhat regretfully denies Buchwald's allegations about its London bureau. But we find ourselves, as we have in many other cases, laughing along with someone who is poking fun at us. For example, in San Francisco last week, Columnist Herb Caen reported overhearing Novelist Herbert Gold describe how the TIME Essay is written. Researchers first dredge up all the quotations on a subject, he explained, "after which they are fed into a computer, and then a senior editor presses the button marked 'Profound.'"

A favorite butt of early TIME baiters was the distinctive and mannered style in which the magazine was written during its formative years. In a famous 1936 New Yorker parody, the late Wolcott Gibbs caricatured that style in the classic line: "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind." Our sentences no longer run backward (or hardly ever), but the spoofs continue. More recently, The New Yorker commented on our occasional tendency to use active, colorful verbs, and claimed that people in our pages always "groan, coo, snarl, taunt, thunder, chortle, crack, intone, growl, drawl," etc. The same article suggested that the reason for TIME'S liveliness can be found in the masthead, which lists dozens of female researchers whose "pulse-quickening" presence "peps up TIME'S denizens." TIME'S masthead also fascinated Playwright William Saroyan, who had a character in his 1940 comedy, Love's Old Sweet Song, recite it (73 names then) while trying to sell a subscription.

TIME made another of many Broadway appearances in 1964, when Jean Kerr wrote a TIME writer into Poor Richard after he had interviewed her for a cover story. The character enters saying, "I'm from TIME magazine." Richard, an alcoholic poet, snaps, or possibly snarls or growls: "I should have known that from the bow tie." (Actually, the incidence of bow ties on TIME is low.)

College humor magazines have taken a special delight in kidding TIME. The Harvard Lampoon's effort last year attracted a paperback publisher, who had 150,000 copies printed. Its lead story began, "Dawn came up over the China Sea in the usual fashion last Thursday" and moved on to the punch line: "Viet Nam had disappeared."

Our intensive efforts to achieve accuracy inspired British Novelist Colin Maclnnes to imagine a conversation between Percy Bysshe Shelley and a TIME researcher who sets out to check and clarify the lines:

I am the eye with which the

universe

Beholds itself, and knows it is

divine.

In the end, she persuades the poet to change the passage to: "People in general are the left blue eye through which the solar system and its ancillary galaxies becomes aware of the existence of similarly related heavenly bodies and suspects it is religiously inclined."

From its earliest years, TIME has been a good target for caricature because of its success, familiarity and distinctive manner. In those terms, we hope to remain a good target. Besides, we enjoy the fun--most of the time.

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