Family Fun/Family Fun.iso/joke1/jokes_d/dave.bar

Internet Message Format | 1992-01-07 | 29KB

From [e-mail] Wed Jan 24 13:19:23 1990
From: [e-mail] (Joe Simpson)
Subject: Re: Who is Dave Barry?

In lots of articles <...> a lot of you ask:

>Who is Dave Barry?


                      This should answer your question...

               The World According To Dave Barry
       (America's most outrageous columnist is dead serious about humor)

                 Article by Eric Zorn


Every week, an informed cadre of East Coast residents who, the poor slobs, do
not live near a newspaper that carries syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry,
logs onto a private computer bulletin board to read Barry's latest assault on
journalistic conventions.

Maybe this time he's suggested that Mark Goodson, the game-show producer,
should have his bowels ripped out by wolves or that Congress should free John
Hinckley and pass a law requiring Jodie Foster to date him.

Or maybe he's written that once an airplane takes off, the crew usually puts it
on automatic pilot and relaxes by trying on women's clothing, or that Mother
Nature is a vicious, irresponsible slut.

You just never know.

Barry, easily America's most preposterous newspaper columnist, weaves a weekly
tapestry of mangled facts, ludicrous propositions and penetrating if somewhat
warped observations is some 70 papers.  Those who dislike his work call it
tasteless and sophomoric - a judgment he embraces as though it were praise.
Those who like it say it's wonderfully bizarre.  Either way, most readers agree
they've never read anything quite like it.

Here's Barry covering the Miss America pageant last year for the Miami Herald:
"After a day of smiling like insane persons and talking about how they would
very much like to help handicapped animals, [the contestants] went back to
their hotel rooms and unwound by smoking enormous cigars and spitting out the
window onto elderly pedestrians."

Here's Barry on sports: "Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy,
overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing."

And Barry on babies: "A child can go only so far in life without potty train-
ing.  It is not mere coincidence that six of the last seven presidents were
potty trained, not to mention nearly half of the nation's state legislators."

Those who read and contribute to the Boston-area Barry bulletin board [there
are at least three others nationwide, each associated with large high-tech
companies] send in analyses and critiques of these types of observations as
well as information on where he has published lately, entries to Dave Barry
Write-Alike contests and the poop on petitions and letter-writing campaigns
organized to get the Boston Globe to print his column regularly and make
unnecessary this underground nonsense.

Barry himself is flattered but keeps out of the fray.  He's unconcerned that
his column is not published by Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., or Los
Angeles newspapers and that he has yet to break into the more prestigious
periodicals, such as the New Yorker, Esquire and the Atlantic.

"I'm just as happy not to be part of the literary establishment," he says in
a voice lightly laced with East Coast vowels.  "I don't think of myself as
remotely literary or deep or even a little bit thoughtful."

So there.

Dave Barry has other things to worry about.  Like on a recent Friday morning
when he pondered, over breakfast at Denny's near his home in the Delaware River
valley of Pennsylvania, whether he should spend an $800 paycheck he'd just
received from Ms. magazine on an electric guitar or on a new sofa.

The family clearly could have used the sofa.  Barry says that he and his wife
"were both born without whatever brain part it is that enables people to
decorate their homes" and that the current sofa is "covered with a blanket to
keep guests from looking directly at it and being blinded or driven insane."

But priorities are priorities.  "For 15 years I've been lamenting that when I
left college, I sold my guitar," he says, sounding eager rather than remorseful
and munching a bite of scrapple, a side-dish indigenous to western Pennsylvania
consisting of leftover pig parts fried up to look like Spam gone bad.

"I had a Fender Jazzmaster.  Great guitar.  I would have sold my amp, too, but
the night before, a friend and I threw it out the dormitory window.  We were
really drunk, and all we could say was `The Who!  The Who!'"

"We did, however, take the time to measure it to make sure it would go through
the window.  It did.  A clean shot.  There were at least 30 people gathered
outside to watch it land."

Choosing to buy a new guitar over a new sofa turned out, in the end, to be
easy, Barry, 38, has never really grown up and remains sort of a demented Peter
Pan in blue jeans, sneakers and golf shirts. For all that he is a middle-class,
suburban family man with professional responsibilities and furniture on his
mind, inside he's still the same devious kid who spent hours in high school in
Pleasantville, N.Y., plotting the best way to send a truck loaded with dynamite
through the front doors of the nearby headquarters of Reader's Digest magazine.
He never considered for a minute, of course, that 20 years later the same
Reader's Digest would propel him to international celebrity by reprinting part
of one of his books.

Such are the ironies that run thickly through the life of our most cynical
natural resource, a man who rose slowly through the journalistic ranks and only
made it when he turned around and ran roughshod over all the sacred canons of
the Fourth Estate.

"I am hostile, vicious, unsafe and reprehensible," he says, ticking off the
adjectives as though they indicated virtues.  "There are times when I'll write
things I know are offensive just for the sheer thrill of seeing them in a news-
paper.  I discovered along time ago that you can get away with almost anything
if you think it's funny."

And get away with it he has.  Barry's full-time job is one of the most unusual
in journalism.  He is a staff writer for the Miami Herald, yet lives in bucolic
Glen Mills, Pa., 22 miles outside Philadelphia.  He writes one column a week
and three or four longer pieces a year for the Herald's Sunday magazine,
Tropic, and sends the paper periodic, wry dispatches from major events such as
the Super Bowl, the Live Aid concert and political conventions.

"Time was when the Democrats were no competition in terms of patriotism," filed
Barry from the Republican gathering in Dallas last summer.  "They were always
nominating their presidential candidates at 3 a.m. amidst clouds of marijuana
smoke, and it was always somebody like George McGovern, who would make a speech
where he'd call on Cuba to invade the United States, and for the closing
ceremony they'd have Eldridge Cleaver spit on a Bible."

He flies to Miami several times a year to meet with his editors and work on
stories, but the arrangement leaves him plenty of time to dabble in other pro-
jects, such as writing satirical self-help tracts for Rodale Press, a normally
straitlaced publishing house in Emmaus, Pa.  The editors there noticed him when
he was still a struggling and little-known humorist and hired him to write do-
it-yourself projects to liven up "New Shelter," a magazine for geodesic-done
types.  They then asked him to stretch it into an entire home repair manual,
which became his first book, "The Taming of the Screw," a 1983 paperback.

"A common problem is that the lights flicker," he wrote.  "This sometimes means
that your electrical system is inadequate, but more often it means that your
home is possessed by demons... If you're not sure whether your house is
possessed, see `The Amityville Horror,' a fine documentary film based on an
actual book.

He also finds time to write half a dozen snappy, smartypants essays a year for
magazines such as Glamour, Redbook, Ms., and Historic Preservation.  He has no
designs whatsoever on serious prose, fiction, poetry, screenplays or TV
scripts.

"I don't have a novel percolating in me," he says.  "I don't have vision, like
Garrison Keillor, nor do I have the patience to work on a slow build-up for a
big pay-off.  I like a lot of quick yuks.  Nothing I'm doing is immortal."

"I often describe myself as superficial.  People assume I'm being modest, that
I really believe I'm a deep thinker with lots of important ideas I'm getting
across through comedy.  But I really am superficial and I really am a
philistine."

Well, sort of.  It's quickly clear in talking to Barry that he's very serious
about being flip - his shallowness runs deep, in other words - and that his
iconoclasm is not idle pose.

"My motivation in writing is hostility," he says brightly.  "I honestly feel a
great deal of contempt toward rude and stupid people.  I'm not the kind of
person who can say, well, it doesn't matter.  To me it always matters."

Politically, for example, Barry says he is an anarchist. He tosses off the fact
lightly at first, as though, well, of course, such a crazy writer would be an
anarchist.  But press him on the point over a few beers, and he'll say that,
yes, he really does believe that government is bad and there should be no laws.
His hatred for politicians - he compares them to "brain-damaged turnips" - and
his attitude toward organized religion - "a load of horse manure" - are genuine.

This from the eldest son of a Presbyterian minister. He and three siblings grew
up in Armonk, N.Y., under modest circumstances in a home where, as he writes,
"every summer we had huge, brazen ants striding around the kitchen demanding
food and running up long-distance telephone charges.  My mother spent much of
her time whapping at them with brooms and spraying them with deadly chemicals.
Nothing worked.  The ants used to lie on their backs, laughing at the brooms
and the chemicals and calling for more."

He was not a particularly athletic youth, so he specialized in practical jokes,
minor vandalism and the gray area in between.  He became widely admired by his
peers at school for flushing a cherry bomb down a toilet and helping carry a VW
up the steps into the lobby.

The guys used to get together to play loadball, a drunken, disorganized version
of tackle football, and Barry's lengthy, detailed and bogus accounts of the
games would slip past the faculty advisor onto the pages of the school news-
paper.  A star was born.

As an English major at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, Barry's primary
passion was playing guitar and piano.  He even cut a record with the Federal
Duck, a very minor rock band, but soon realized his true talents lay elsewhere.
He wanted to write for the student-run Haverford News but disliked the idea of
trafficking in facts.  When the editors assigned him a feature story on the
local Nixon campaign headquarters, he stayed in his room and made the whole
thing up.

"I loved to write funny," he remembers.  "It was great to see people passing my
stuff around the dining room and laughing."

But the late 1960's were not a particularly amusing time to be a young man in
America.  To avoid the draft and stay out of Vietnam, Barry got a deferral as a
conscientious objector, largely on the strength of his father's ministerial
work and the fact that Haverford College was founded by Quakers.

"I would have told my draft board that Daffy Duck was the supreme being, if
that's what they wanted to hear," he says.

As a CO he had to work two years after graduation drawing up grant proposals
for the Episcopal Church in New York City.  To amuse himself he fired off
memos to the area comptroller and various clergymen proposing that the church
give money to absurd, nonexistent charities.

"All I wanted to do was write," he says.  "Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to
be like Robert Benchley, who basically got paid for making up short, funny
things.  I just didn't see any direct, clear way for that to happen.  Periodi-
cally I would think, `Time to get responsible,' and I'd apply to law school.
One time I was even accepted and put a deposit on an apartment in San
Francisco."

But the voice of reason saved the day.  As a leftist and budding anarchist,
Barry realized at the last minute he would make a lousy lawyer.  So, using
contacts from his school days and trading on his experience working college
summers as a go-fer and intern on the Congressional Quarterly, he landed a job
in 1971 as a reporter for the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pa., a short
drive from where he now lives.

"I covered a lot of raw sewage," he says.  "The only thing suburban people
care more about than zoning is sewage."

At the same time he contributed once a week to a staff-written column called
"Ad Libs," always attempting to write funny and sometimes succeeding.

Beth Pyle, a reporter who had started at the paper a week after Barry, was
appalled at first by his stinging humor and the way he openly insulted other
members of the staff, though they didn't seem to mind because they thought he
was only kidding.

"He was out of control, just a smartass," she says.  "But as I got to know him,
I discovered I liked the way he thought.  He's one of the most serious people
I've ever met.  He's got a lot of anger about and impatience with stupidity and
ridiculousness in the world.  He's deadly serious about the things he lampoons,
but it comes out funny in his writing.  And sometimes in person."

Pyle and Barry became close friends and helped each other through the ends of
their disintegrating first marriages.  In July 1975, after they were both
divorced, they married each other in an informal ceremony that concluded with
a back-yard volleyball game.

By that time, Barry, who had risen to news editor at the Daily Local News, was
working as a correspondent for the Philadelphia office of the Associated Press,
a profoundly unfunny organization.

"It was all very rote," he says.  "I hated feeding information to semi-retarded
radio news people, which I did all the time.  I hated being polite when some
lame cretin who couldn't write a paragraph of his own would call the AP and ask
them to do it.  I hated dealing with guys calling up and saying, `Hi, this is
the Shippensburg Gazette.  We got a guy in a yacht race in Monaco - we don't
know his name - can you tell us how he did?'"

The experience drove Barry out of journalism altogether.  After half a year at
the AP, he quit to become a business-writing instructor with Burger Associates,
a corporate consulting firm run by one of his neighbors.

The Barrys still live where they did then, in a green two-story house on a cou-
ple of acres in a hilly, wooded area called Tanguy Homesteads.  The Homesteads
were originally incorporated as a 40-family utopian commune before breaking
into what Barry calls "a close-knit suburb."

For the next eight years, he was away from home almost half the time, traveling
coast to coast extrolling the virtues of clear concise writing to eager
business executives.

"They all agreed it was worthwhile and a good thing to do, but they would never
dream of doing it themselves because of the pressure in great, illiterate cor-
porate America to be unclear," he says. "I became a sort of religious figure. I
would tell them something they wanted to hear, and it cleansed their spirits."

Beth, meanwhile had become features editor at the Daily Local News.  She hired
her husband part-time to start writing weekly humor pieces again, this time
with a photo logo.

"It was basically the same column I'm writing today, only less consistently
good," says Barry, who is not at all bashful about admitting to being funny.
"Eventually I got a bunch of them stacked up to send around to the various
syndication services.  All the big ones, like the Washington Post Writers
Group, sent them back with vomit stains on them."

One small California feature syndicate was interested, however, and began
selling the column to newspapers, though not very aggressively.  Barry conti-
nued to teach and freelance, scoring his first significant coup with a 1981
article in the Philadelphia Inquirer magazine about Beth's ordeal giving birth
to their son Robert.

"It was a vicious attack on natural childbirth that really hit a nerve," he
says.  "All through the 1970's parents had been bombarded with smarmy nonsense
about how beautiful childbirth is and how it doesn't hurt and how all you have
to do is breathe right.  I just came along and pointed out that it hurts like
hell, breathing doesn't do a whole lot and most of what your hear in birthing
classes is stupid."

The story was widely reprinted, passed around and tacked onto bulletin boards.
Big, distant newspapers such as The Tribune and Miami Herald expressed interest
is seeing more of his work.  The Herald even flew him down to Miami, wined and
dined him and offered him a full-time staff job, but he didn't want to move, so
the deal fell through.

A year later, however, when he decided to quit Burger Associates to write full
time, the Herald relaxed its residency rules and agreed to hire him and let him
stay in Glen Mills.  He chose the Herald over the Philadelphia Inquirer, which
also wanted to hire him, because the idea of having his boss more than 1,000
miles away appealed to him.

"He is the only humorist I know who makes people laugh out loud," says Tropic
editor Bene Weingarten.  "He writes these massive exaggerations of fundamental
truths that are so familiar to people that they can't help but identify with
them."

"Purely as a writer he is brilliant.  He uses words in thoroughly unexpected
combinations, like the time he wrote the the four building blocks of the
universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl."

Weingarten snorts.  "I can't tell you why that's funny, but it's funny as hell.
It's undefinable genius."

Barry's columns are the single largest source of letters to Tropic, many of
them from outraged and incensed citizens who have taken him literally.  The
magazine prints without comment parts of these hostile letters, such as one
>from a government information office in British Honduras calling Barry an
"ugly American" and insisting that agricultural products are the country's
main export, not, as he had written, lice.

His reputation for nutty journalism has reached the point in Miami that, when
he's reporting on a story, normally serious sources such as Florida Gov. Bob
Graham, U.S. Rep. Dante Fascell and Florida International University Environ-
mental Studies director Jack Parker supply him with wacky quotes:

"One way to reduce the traffic damage to I-95 would be to make the exit ramps
very high, so the the cars would actually shoot off into space," said Parker
when Barry interviewed him for an article on Miami's interstate highway.
"Perhaps the exit ramps could be located over Alice Wainwright Park so the cars
would go off into the bay, where they would form a reef, which would attract
lobsters."

When he gets delicious actual quotations like this, Barry is forced to take
great pains to emphasize to his readers that, this time, he's telling the
truth.  But mostly this is not a problem.

Indeed his first book, "The Taming of the Screw," contains as nearly as
possible no useful or verifiable information, despite the fact that it looks,
at first glance, as though it might be just another how-to book from Rodale
Press.  It was published when Barry was virtually unknown and sold just over
50,000 copies - a reasonably good showing but nothing compared to the 190,000
copies of last year's "Babies and Other Hazards of Sex," an 88-page expansion
of the popular article on natural childbirth.

"All a newborn baby really needs is food, warmth and love," he wrote.  "Pretty
much like a hamster, only with fewer signs of intelligence."

"Bad Habit," a hardback collection of columns published earlier this year by
Doubleday & Co. has sold fewer than 10,000 copies and is generally unavailable
in stores.  Barry refused to do a publicity tour because his former syndicate
stood to see most of the sales proceeds.

But Rodale Press, undaunted, has already printed 100,000 copies of "Stay Fit
and Healthy Until You're Dead," Barry's irreverent treatment of the exercise
craze slated for release this month.

"Professional ice hockey is an ideal way for the entire family to keep fit," he
maintains within.  "The kids will love participating in a loose, freewheeling
sport where everybody makes the play-offs and the only activity that is
specifically prohibited is selling narcotics to your opponents on the ice."

On nutrition he advises: "Each morning you should take a vitamin A pill,
followed by a vitamin D, followed by an E, until you spelled the healthful
mnemonic phrase, 'A DEAD CAD BAKED A BAD CAKE, ACE.'"

He is also branching into television, where he hosted four pilot episodes of
"That's My Baby," a parental-help talk show produced by Minneapolis public TV
station KTCA.  The station will produce and distribute the show as a series if
it can find a corporate underwriter.  It hired him on the strength of his two
guest appearances on "The Tonight Show," which were riotous successes even
though he did go on last, "after the pigs who knew how to weave."

Privately, though, Beth Barry says life with Dave is not a laugh a minute:
"He's just normal at home. He's very disciplined about his writing and takes it
very seriously.  When we go to parties, people expect him to be a clown, which
I think is very demeaning to him.

"We were at a party about a year ago with all the up and coming yuppie-type
writers and editors in Philadelphia. He felt the pressure to be funny and ended
up just making an ass of himself. Later he was really embarrassed about it, and
so was I."

Beth, who quit the Daily Local News when Robert (now four years old) was born,
recently started freelance business-writing and ghost-writing a newspaper
column for a butcher.  Nothing she composes is humorous.  She works all day
in an upstairs office, while her husband pecks away on his Radio Shack word
processor in a basement office decorated with cartoon drawings and littered
with back copies of supermarket tabloids from which he claims to take
inspiration.

"Beth buys them," he says. "We don't subscribe because if they were to get lost
in the mail, we'd get behind on events.  Like last week - `COUPLE FLEES TALKING
BEAR.'  Big story.  We could have missed it."

She is his toughest critic. Before any of his work is sent out for publication,
Beth scrutinizes it for logic, grammar and recycled jokes.  She also checks to
see if it's funny: only rarely does she laugh out loud.

"Whenever I do, he runs up and says, `What, what, what?  You laughed.  I gotta
know exactly what you laughed at and why,'" she says.

"Beth has seen all the devices I use," he says.  "The jokes about goat waste,
the tendency to introduce a subject by going back to the dawn of time, the way
I compare stupid people's brains to coleslaw and prune pits, that kind of
thing."

"Barry kills about one in five columns or budding ideas before they see print,
but he retains a strong, almost arrogant confidence that he can take any sub-
ject and, just by thinking and working hard, massage it into something funny.

"Everything has humor potential except Auschwitz and Ethiopia," he says flatly.
"In general I don't worry about being offensive.  I never did think of `offen-
sive' as a criticism.  There's a long, glorious tradition of offending people
in American humor writing."

It usually takes him three days working from 9 a.m. until early afternoon to
put together a 1,000-word column.  He writes seven days a week, and both his
wife and editor say they are impressed with his dedication.  He takes time out
each day to chauffeur his son around and to play with the family's goofy new
dog, a female Labrador/shepherd named Earnest that several months ago took the
place of their old dog, who was run over and killed by a garbage truck.

His major hobby is making, and bottling, his own beer - by far his favorite
ingestible.  He ends up jogging two miles every day up and down Twin Pine Way
so he can drink it and not get fat.  In the winter he goes to Philadelphia
76ers pro basketball games, where he has season seats at courtside and can
holler at the referees.

Everything in his milieu - the dog's stupidity, his son's ingenuous charm,
beer, jogging, basketball - are grist for his mill and show up in his columns.
He's never at a loss for ideas, which generally come from news events, ads, the
aforementioned supermarket tabloids or, frequently, mail from his readers.

"Over and over and over people write, `I've finally found someone whose mind
works like mine,'" he says.  "My column jumps out at people because, histori-
cally, newspapers have assumed that their readers are idiots.  I can't blame
them.  Most of the people who come to newspaper offices or write to them are
the ones who are trying to prove that the Trilateral Commission is putting
communist radio transmitters in everyone's teeth.

"I write a hipper, less predictable, more offensive column than mainstream
humor columnists, who I think are obvious and not particularly funny.  I aim at
intelligent people. Readers love the idea that a newspaper thinks they're smart
enough to get the joke."

Though he has carved out a niche as America's least accurate columnist -
"Rembrandt's first name was Beauregard, which is why he never used it" - Barry
does spend a good deal of time researching the subjects he wades into.  The
sole purpose, however, is to make sure that his distortions of fact have some
sort of internal logic, no matter how screwy.

Read enough from Barry's oeuvre in one sitting and you start to see a bit of
method in his madness.  Aside from playing fast and loose with the facts, other
oft-used arrows in his quiver include:

*Exaggeration: "The New Right thinks George Bush is Che Guevara."

*Oversimplification: "The Army is a place where you get up early in the morning
to be yelled at by people with short haircuts and tiny brains."

*Gleeful bad taste: "Have you ever stopped to think what life would be like
without flowers?  I mean, what would you send to dead people?  Grapes, maybe.
Then there would be something to eat at a viewing."

*And something he calls "judo," in which he attempts to make the reader stumble
over his expectations: "...the Mayo Clinic, named after its founder, Dr. Ted
Clinic."

He says he wants his work to read as though he were "drunk, out of control"
when he wrote it, though he remorselessly edits and re-edits each piece, and
depends very little on inspiration or mood to be funny.  He was, in fact, able
to crank out a humor column on the day after his father died in April, 1984, an
event that prompted the only serious writing he published in many years. It was
a rambling, revelatory essay for the Miami Herald, the ending of which read:

     So I go in for my last words because I have to go back home, and my
     mother and I agree I probably won't see him again.  I sit next to him
     on the bed, hoping he can't see that I'm crying.  I love you, Dad, I
     say.  He says, I love you too, I'd like some oatmeal.

     So I go back out to the living room, where my mother and my wife
     and my son are sitting on the sofa, in a line, waiting for the
     outcome, and I say, He wants some oatmeal.  I am laughing and crying
     about this.  My mother thinks maybe I should go back in and try to
     have a more meaningful last talk, but I don't.

     Driving home, I'm glad I didn't.  I think: He and I have been talking
     ever since I learned how.  A million words.  All of them final, now.
     I don't need to make him give me any more, like souvenirs.  I think:
     Let me not define his death on my terms.  Let him have his oatmeal.
     I can hardly see the road.

Readers' response to his public grief was positive and his editors encouraged
him to write more in the same vein, an invitation he declined.

Asked why, he says, "I don't mind using the device of writing to make people
laugh, but I'm suspicious of those who use the device of writing to make people
cry.  I just don't trust them intellectually.  How many different subjects can
anyone really say they care about?"

Barry calls this his "cop out" and leaves it at that.  He doesn't see himself
as a crusader or righter of wrongs, and he remains content - more than content,
actually - to hang out in the country, drink a few beers, write a few columns
and, these days, sit in the living room on a nasty old sofa and play his new
electric guitar.

It's a Gibson Les Paul model.  Great guitar.  The amp he bought to go with it
"could destroy a greenhouse."

Beth didn't mind.  There's plenty of time in life to buy a sofa.




----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original publication unknown - this was sent to me electronically.

   -joe