Dying is easy, comedy is hard – unless you’re Art Buchwald. Or especially if you’re Art Buchwald.

I can’t decide if he’s proving or disproving that show-business saying. He’s turned his last act into a held-over show, and he’s milking it for every laugh he can get.

Buchwald, 80, is the political satirist whose column was once a fixture in 500 newspapers. He wrote from Paris and then Washington in a 55-year career that brought honors, fame and wealth. He was the life of every party.

He reached his final chapter in February. His right leg had been amputated because of diabetes, and his kidneys were failing.

“I was mad, I was sad, and I decided enough’s enough,” he wrote.

He decided against getting more dialysis treatment and checked into the Washington Home hospice.

The hospice, he said on National Public Radio, is “a place where people go when they want to go.”

He was ready. Family and friends gathered for farewell visits. Buchwald planned his funeral. He also held court, ate his favorite foods and did a round of goodbye interviews that were funny and matter-of-fact.

He said he was not afraid of dying (“it might be interesting”), was not concerned about an afterlife but did look forward to having his ashes scattered over every building owned by or named for Donald Trump in New York.

Buchwald called it his last hurrah. People said he was showing how to die. He basked in the attention and said everybody was nice to him.

“I’m having the time of my life,” he said.

Then a funny thing happened. He didn’t die. What went right?

“Nobody knows – not even the doctors,” he wrote. But his kidneys began working, and he joked he was being thrown out of hospice for breaking the rules.

He was supposed to be dead by summer. Since he wasn’t, he checked out of hospice last month and flew to his vacation home in Massachusetts.

“Instead of going straight upstairs,” he said, “I am going to Martha’s Vineyard.”

On Monday, in a wheelchair and under a straw hat, Buchwald returned to his traditional role of master of ceremonies at the Vineyard’s annual auction for its otherwise unfunded social-service programs. He called himself “your born-again auctioneer,” and the Vineyard Gazette put him on its front page.

Longtime neighbor Carly Simon sang the song she’d written for his funeral, “Too Soon to Say Goodbye.” It has the same title as the book Buchwald is writing.

Yeah, the book. It will include a chapter of eulogies from Buchwald’s pals, and it’s scheduled to be published in December. Which means all the healthy people with unfinished manuscripts in drawers can start feeling sorry for themselves now; although they should be happy not to be working under Buchwald’s sort of deadline.

He also has resumed writing his newspaper column, as if there weren’t enough competition out there already. He seems free of the depression that plagued him for years.

Dying has given him a whole new life.

His attitude makes him a print-press version of Cleveland sportscaster Casey Coleman, who went back to work last week after doctors gave him mere months to live in his battle with pancreatic cancer. Casey has never sounded better. He has things to do on his calendar.

Buchwald has had enough time to come up with his own take on the “dying is easy” line, which was supposedly a deathbed quip of Sir Donald Wolfit, a British actor and director.

“Dying is easy, parking is impossible,” Buchwald says, with an eye to Washington’s notorious traffic.

Impossible for other people, that is. Buchwald traffics in the impossible these days, and he has a handicap hang-tag for his car.

He can’t kick, the joke goes. But for now, at least, the one-legged humorist is having the last laugh.