Laugh It Up Dave Barry Keeps Fans Entertained Promoting His ‘Complete Guide To Guys’
Inside a store called A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books (not to be confused with A Dark Sweaty Vermin-Infested Place for Books), Dave Barry is pontificating on the weighty issues of our time, such as presidential politics, family values and whether it’s possible to set a pair of underpants on fire using a Rollerblade Barbie.
Barry, 47, is probably the only person to ever win a Pulitzer Prize writing booger jokes. As syndicated humor columnist at The Miami Herald, he also has driven the world’s fastest lawn mower and ridiculed everything from the U.S. Senate (“Motto: White Male Millionaires Working for You”) to heavy metal rock (“music to slaughter cattle by”) to the ancient Egyptians, whose most significant achievement was “the famous ‘Substitute Mummy Filled With Live Weasels’ prank, which led to the collapse of the empire, but everybody involved agreed it was worth it.”
And then there’s Dave Barry the humanitarian, who once recommended, for the betterment of mankind, “the explosion of Barry Manilow’s head.” And two of his books inspired the TV sitcom “Dave’s World,” for which he claims to exercise “total 100 percent artistic control over where I cash the check they mail me.”
But behind the humor is a serious, sometimes tragic life. His mother was tormented by chronic depression and committed suicide in 1987; his father was an alcoholic minister; Barry rants against government about as often as Rush Limbaugh, and he’s going through a divorce with his second wife.
Somehow, he manages to keep millions of fans laughing.
The editor who “discovered” him says Barry’s secret is an uncanny ability to combine adult sophistication with adolescent lunacy.
Both sides surfaced on a recent promotional tour for his book “Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys” (Random House), which explains (among other things) why men care more deeply about sports teams than about their own spouses: Because their wives will never make the playoffs.
This leg of the tour begins in Seattle, cappuccino capital of the known universe, where “there’s always six people in front of you (at Starbucks) ordering chemical equations.”
Barry’s favorite liquid, however, is beer, which he downs with a packet of cashews before an appearance at the University of Washington. There, about 700 people pack an auditorium to hear him spoof everything from former passengers of slow white Broncos to inane rock songs:
“In a move that’s been widely hailed in the legal community, the Supreme Court has replaced Judge Lance Ito with Judge Wapner. And in a move that should definitely speed up the trial, (Wapner) has sentenced the entire defense team to death.”
O.J. Simpson and his “Mormon Tabernacle Choir-sized” collection of attorneys are a running gag on the trip. So is music.
He recalls fallout from his worst-songs-ever column: “I got in huge trouble with the Neil Diamond people. If you think Salman Rushdie screwed up … (try) making fun of the song where (Diamond blurts), ‘I am, I said, to no one there. And no one heard at all, not even the chair.’ Of course the chair didn’t hear you, Neil. It’s furniture!”
Barry grew up in Armonk, N.Y., a suburb of New York City. In high school, Barry was elected class clown. “That is my permanent self-image: little and dweeby and people only pay attention to me because I’m funny.”
Barry has mixed feelings about his fans.
On the one hand, his career would be over without them. Not only do they buy his books, but their letters (hundreds a month, each of which he answers) have provided fodder for numerous columns on exploding cows, snakes in toilets and ways to reduce the federal deficit (“rent the Stealth bomber out for proms”).
But he is weary of the fawning, the loss of privacy and the people who approach him in public and try to out-funny him, as if he were a comedy quick-draw.
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: What’s what Selected quotes From “Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys”: On males in the ‘90s: Today’s man is making radical lifestyle changes such as sometimes remembering to remove the used tissue wads from his pockets before depositing his pants on the floor to be picked up by the Laundry Fairy. On the difference between TV and newspaper journalism: I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the “bare bones” of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring. On President Clinton’s re-election chances: Polls show that a bale of peat moss, if it were wearing a blue suit, would have a serious shot at beating Bill Clinton, especially if they had a debate.