CLASS CLOWN: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up, by Dave Barry
“All children, except one, grow up,” J.M. Barrie wrote in “Peter Pan.” Let’s make it two. Dave Barry has a new memoir titled “Class Clown.” On the back flap, the floppy-haired author, now 77, looks all of 45. It’s as if he’s sealed in the amber of his own booger jokes. His prose style hasn’t matured either, thank heavens. It’s as ideally sophomoric as ever, if more rueful around the edges, what with civilization aflame and all that.
“Who is Dave Barry?” young readers may ask, alas. Let me take you back to the early 1980s, the twilight of the era of the great syndicated columnists, those ink-stained champions whose work was published in hundreds of newspapers. Art Buchwald, Erma Bombeck and Russell Baker were among them, and they were by and large terrific, but they were generally wry rather than laugh-out-loud funny.
Barry brought the laugh-out-loud funny. Here, for example, is his advice in a piece on wilderness survival, written before he was syndicated:
If you or your companions gets bit by a snake, don’t panic. Take a razor blade and make a cut shaped like an “X,” then suck out all the blood. Snakes just hate this, and after you’ve done it to them one or two times they stop biting people altogether.
Newspapers were a daily diet of Serious Things, and Barry was profoundly unserious. He increased the gaiety of the nation. A day that began with “Doonesbury” and a Dave Barry column had a better chance of being a good day. The New York Times, being serious indeed, did not run either one of these things, so it could seem like a pot-au-feu without its gherkins.
I felt a bit smug when Barry went national, because I’d been on to him early. I spent the second half of my youth in Southwest Florida, and my parents were subscribers to The Miami Herald. Barry got his major-newspaper start writing for that publication’s Sunday magazine, Tropic. When I went up north to college, in those pre-internet years, people would mail me clippings of his best stuff, including columns on exploding toilets and cows. He was the LeBron James of exploding toilet humor.
“Class Clown,” as funny books go, is a home run — albeit a shallow, wind-aided home run. Barry leans heavily on old clips of his writing to fill this book up, and that’s fine, but near the end the bag of leftovers grows soggy. Barry has bragged about hating to work very hard, though it is difficult work indeed to give your prose this kind of easy, goofy feeling.
Barry was born in 1947 in Armonk, N.Y., 30 miles north of Manhattan. His father, a Presbyterian minister, was the executive director of the New York City Mission Society, a social-services nonprofit for impoverished children. His dad loved the humorist Robert Benchley and kept his books in the house. Barry read these when he was 11 or 12 and they influenced his writing style.
His mother, who had worked on the Manhattan Project as a secretary, seemed to others like a typical suburban housewife. “But she was not like other moms,” Barry writes. “She had an edge — a sharp, dark sense of humor coiled inside her, always ready to strike.” He derived his comic sensibility from her. Of course, “funny isn’t the same thing as happy,” he writes. His mother was prone to depression, and not long after her husband’s death in 1984 she died by suicide.
Barry was a wiseass at school. After teachers encouraged him, he wrote humor columns for both his high school and college newspapers. The college was Haverford in Pennsylvania — he thinks the school’s official motto should be “We Never Heard of You, Either.” He grew his hair long, smoked his share of pot and played in a party band called Federal Duck. The band was, to him, the best thing about being in college.
He graduated in 1969 and escaped the draft by becoming a conscientious objector. That his father was a clergyman, and that Haverford had Quaker connections, did not hurt. He has some guilt about this, alongside anger that America was in Vietnam in the first place.
Barry worked for two summers in college as an intern at Congressional Quarterly in Washington, a job he got through family connections. He fell into newspaper work in his 20s, becoming the city editor then news editor for a suburban Philadelphia paper. “I found my identity as a newspaper guy,” he writes, “which deep down inside I will always be.”
He took an unlikely 7-year detour into teaching business writing to the employees of major companies. It made him a better writer:
I became more conscious of details, of how even minor changes in vocabulary and structure affect the tone of a sentence — to make it sound more pompous, or more stupid, or whatever effect I’m going for. To this day I can spend an hour wrestling with a question like which word would be funnier in a given sentence, “squirrel” or “armadillo.”
He began writing humor columns again in his spare time. Behind the world’s silver linings lie dark clouds, but also stupid clouds, and those only Barry seemed to see. These columns appeared in smaller papers, then in larger ones. The Herald officially brought him on in 1983, and he was off like a Jet Ski, with flat water ahead of him and lively wake behind.
The Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary came in 1988. A photo of Barry being ecstatically hugged by his son ran in some newspapers. The photo still makes Barry laugh because his son was not celebrating his father’s big day — he was reacting to the fact that Barry had just promised him a Nintendo. That son is now an investigative journalist at The Wall Street Journal and has received a Pulitzer of his own.
Barry had legions of fans, some of them credentialed. In 1991 Justice John Paul Stevens wrote to him on Supreme Court letterhead, enclosing an advertisement for the anti-flatulence product Beano, suggesting it might spark a column. It did! Barry “conducted a scientific test of Beano under the most demanding possible field conditions — a Mexican restaurant” and wrote about the results.
A few newspapers declined to print the column, calling it tasteless. Barry got funny revenge in print on those papers, but you’ll have to read the book to find out how. The Beano column was, to borrow Lady Saphir’s words from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Patience,” “nonsense, yes, perhaps — but, oh, what precious nonsense.”
Barry kept his Sunday column until he retired in 2005, worried that he’d shot his bolt. He wrote a ton of books, including the novel “Big Trouble” (1999), which was turned into a movie that was sunk by Sept. 11 — “not a good time to release a wacky movie comedy, especially one with a suitcase nuke on an airplane” — and a reinterpretation of “Peter Pan,” co-written with Ridley Pearson, that became an award-winning Broadway play.
“Dave’s World,” a sitcom loosely based on Barry’s columns and books, ran for four seasons in the ’90s on CBS. Barry has mixed feelings about that show. He’s most enjoyed being a core member, alongside Stephen King, Amy Tan and others, in the Rock Bottom Remainders, an almost competent all-writer band that has jammed with Warren Zevon and Bruce Springsteen.
This book never goes too deep. Barry had two early marriages before marrying his current wife in 1996, for example, but no details are provided. He feels like a lucky man to have been paid for doing something that he loves. But he’s contemplative when people tell him he’s made the world a better place because of his writing.
“My response to these well-intentioned people has always been: Thanks, but I’d probably be doing this even if it made the world a worse place,” he writes. “It’s pretty much the only thing I know how to do. It’s in my DNA. I’m a class clown.”
CLASS CLOWN: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up | By Dave Barry | Simon & Schuster | 244 pp. | $28.99
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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