SAM DINGMAN: Humor writer Dave Barry recently published a memoir. These days, Barry is perhaps best known for his books, but for decades, he wrote a regular column for the Miami Herald which, at its height, was published in hundreds of newspapers.
His hilarious observations on the absurdities of masculinity, marriage, history, religion, and politics were a source of delight for generations of readers — including yours truly.
I started reading Barry’s work when I was about 13. One of my favorite parts of the memoir was an early scene where he talks about what it was like for him to go to parties in high school. So when Barry joined The Show, that’s the first thing I asked him about.
DAVE BARRY: I tended to be like off to the side, amusing people by making hand farts, as opposed to actually participating. [LAUGHS] Yeah. So I think that sort of shaped my, you know, I'm the funny guy, I'm the clown. ...
DINGMAN: Right, right. Yeah. Well, one of the reasons I really appreciated that scene is because, as a fan and and somebody who's been reading your work for a long time, for me, it encapsulated an element of your comedic voice that I don't I think I could have put my finger on previously. Where it seems like the inherent question is like, does anybody actually understand what this all is? It feels like you're sort of highlighting the fact that all of us are sort of confused about where we're supposed to fit into all this.
BARRY: Yeah, I think that's, actually, that's very astute. I've often said that sort of underlying a lot of humor is fear — a kind of fear, anyway. The sense that you go through your day, you tend to just act as though everything is normal all the time and everything is functioning the way it's supposed to. But sometimes it kind of feels like the whole world is a little bit crazy. You really don't know how things are going to work out. There's like an anxiety underneath it. And what comedians often do — I think wwhat I try to do as a humorist — is you point out that, yeah, somebody else feels that, too.
DINGMAN: That makes me think of the part in the book where you're talking about the nuclear air raid drills that you used to do in elementary school ... and you say, yhey would have us hide under a desk. And you say something to the effect of: That never made sense to me because ... if that was all it took, why wouldn't they just build a giant desk over major cities?
BARRY: Yeah [LAUGHS] ... but I really was in that generation. I mean, I'm 77 years old. So ... I was in elementary school in the '50s when everybody was worried about. I mean, everybody grown-up was basically suggesting, "Hey, we could all die tomorrow." [LAUGHS] So, you should learn to get under a desk for when that starts to happen. And like, we did.
DINGMAN: Well, it makes me think about the way you write about your mom and and her sense of humor. Which seemed to do this really amazing job of addressing terrifying things that existed in the world, but kind of not letting them get her down. Is that fair to say?
BARRY: Yes, my mom, I 100% attribute my sense of humor to my mom, who was a very edgy, dark person. She had a severe depression issue, which ultimately caused her to take her own life — not to make bring this interview too far down. But she was the funniest person I knew. ... And part of her humor was she would see the darkness and things and realize, well, you're not gonna make the fear go away, but you can laugh at it anyway.
Like the one example I give in the book is when I was little, my sister and I, there was a pond behind our house, and we'd go play by the pond. Which I know now you would never allow your children to do, whatever, but we did it all the time. And back in the '50s, people did stuff like that. We go, "We're going to the pond," And she'd go, "Don't drown kids." Like in this super cheerful June Cleaver voice.
DINGMAN: [LAUGHS]
BARRY: And, you know, she was expressing, of course, her actual fear that we would, something bad would happen to us. And she didn't want it to happen to us. But she did it in a really funny way and we laughed — ... we got it.
DINGMAN: That makes me think of the fruitcake story. Is it a fruit cake?
BARRY: [LAUGHS] Yeah, yeah, fruitcake. Yeah, this is one of my favorite memories of her is we had a neighbor who used to bake a fruit cake for us every Christmas. And we hated it. It's this really massive, dense — it was heavy — fruit cake. And my mom and I developed this ritual over the years.
Mom would go, "Well, it's drafty in here. I think I'll open the door. I think I'll just put the fruit cake down here on the door sill." You know, maybe to keep the door open, whatever. And then, then we go, "Boy, it's getting cold in here. We had best closed the door. I hope we don't slam it on the fruitcake." And my mom would slam the door on the fruitcake, which sometimes it would take two or three slams to really get it crushed.
DINGMAN: That's a serious fruit cake.
BARRY: And we would go, "Oh, no, we've ruined the fruit cake. We'll have to throw it away." That way —we did that and if it just became more and more fun for us. We would look forward to the arrival of this hideous fruit cake so that we could slam it in the kitchen door. That's one of my — to this day — is one of my favorite memories of my mother.
DINGMAN: You write in the book about having some early experiences with writing humor pieces for school newspapers, first in middle school and high school, and then in college. But then you go and you work at a traditional local newspaper when you graduate from college. And it seems like it takes a while for you to really let yourself admit to yourself that it's a humorist that you really want to be.
BARRY: Well, actually ... if you had asked me early on, what did I want to do, I would have said ... I would like to write humor. I mean, always that's what I wanted to do. But I didn't think there was any path to that. But I liked to write and pick a job in the newspaper business where I could be, you know, write And the, the journey really was slowly discovering, well, maybe I could do this because I did it on the side, basically. I wrote humor columns for the Daily Local News in Westchester, Pennsylvania. Which wasn't paying me to do that. It was paying me to cover the Downingtown Regional Sewage Commission.
But you know, but when I could, I would write humor. Along the way, because I had to do all the conventional journalism things, I learned all the conventions of journalism. And so when I finally kind of emerged later by a kind of a tortuous process as an actual humor writer, I could use the knowledge I had of the way institutional journalism works to make fun of it. And I think one of the reasons that my column was successful is that I made fun of newspapers a lot.
I mean, I presented myself as, you know, the authority — as newspapers always do. "I'm the authority, I'm unbiased." ... And I was none of those things. I was completely full of crap, and I was lying all the time. [LAUGHS] And I often didn't know what I was talking about, which is true of real journalists, but they don't admit it. So, I think readers responded to that.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, you know, as somebody who has been a professional humorist for such a long time. I wonder what you make of the state of humor now? Because something that we've had conversations about here on The Show and that I would be curious to get your take on is there can be such a sense of tribalism in comedy now that people are only interested in going to see comedians or read comedic publications that align with their political beliefs. And something I always really appreciated about your work is that it felt like it was for everyone 1 not because it was watered down, but because it was coming from such an authentic place of fear [LAUGHS] as you were describing earlier.
BARRY: Well, I try to do the same as I always have. I mean, I've always tried to make fun of everybody. I remember the era of like Johnny Carson, who every night made fun of whoever was president. It didn't matter to him who the president was. He's going to make fun of 'em ...
And, now, as you say, it's gotten very tribal. Lost of the late-night comics do not make fun of their team, and it's everybody knows who their team is. And to me, that's a shame. Because I think one of the things that made us, like, like a happier country was that when everybody could laugh at whoever was the politicians. And there wasn't quite this need to like immediately, vehemently defend whatever team you're on and immediately attack vehemently, whatever side the other team's on. I'm not gonna tell anybody what to think, but at least acknowledge that you're not perfect.
DINGMAN: Well, Dave Barry is the author of "Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wise Ass," which I'm pretty sure I can say on public radio. Dave, thank you so much.
BARRY: That was my pleasure. I enjoyed it. Thank you.
