The Semi-Retirement of Dave Barry
by Bob Cook
I am going to blatantly rip off Dave Barry in this essay. I'm doing this for two reasons. One, the longtime newspaper humorist recently announced he would be taking a leave of absence after 107 years of writing weekly columns. Two, most of us in the humor trade have been ripping him off for at least 105 of those years, so I may as well cop to it.
What can you say about Dave Barry that doesn't sound like you're preparing his obituary? Barry, a man of the 1960s, cranked out hilarious 800-word columns like Motown cranked out hits. Like Motown, Barry didn't appear on the surface to be doing anything groundbreaking, but he mastered basic humor forms, just as Motown mastered basic pop and soul songwriting. Even after repeated readings, many of Barry's pieces still contain heapin' helpings of soul, the human spirit and James Jamerson on bass. Barry didn't invent techniques like Capitalizing Words For Humorous Effect, the most obvious and outrageous hyperbole ever in the known universe, and poop jokes, but they came to be — like Sammy Davis Jr's glass eye, rings and Judaism — personal trademarks.
Budding humor writers could identify with his humble, loser-life back story. How his preacher father emigrated from Cuba on a raft created out of a 1950s Ford pickup truck, even though at the time Castro hadn't come to power, so you could hop on a plane to get to the United States. Also, it was not even the 1950s yet. How Barry grew up in rustic surroundings, going to a one-room schoolhouse in Walnut Grove, Minn., always in the shadow of his sister Laura Ingalls Wilder, because she was rather large. How Barry wrote his first columns on the back of a coal shovel, except the family used gas heat, so he had grind in his words with a butcher knife. His family often wondered why he just didn't get a pencil and paper out of the kitchen drawer.
Barry left his home for a career in Serious Journalism, which meant covering town meeting after town meeting for, and I Am Not Making This Up, the West Chester Daily Local News. Barry often says covering town meetings was the most spectacular writing experience he ever had because he was being paid to sit for hours to zone out and think about sex, because that's pretty much what everybody else at the meetings would do, except for the old coot always complaining about his cracked sidewalk.
Legend has it that Barry got his Big Break while sitting on his stool at Schwab's Drugstore. The Big Break was either in his left wrist or left arm, depending on how you read the X-rays. But then in the hospital, he had a vision — a vision of a world where he didn't go to town meetings anymore, where he could bring humor to the humorless world of newspapers. And how it would allow him to think about sex in the comfort of his own home, as long as that old coot wasn't outside, yelling about the sidewalk.
With the help of his Fairy Godmother, Barry went to the Miami Herald and got hired to write a humor column. He needed a Fairy Godmother to take him to Miami, what with Barry's inexperience with the city's drivers' tendency to follow the traffic rules of their country of origin.
After a few years, Barry, like a race horse, was syndicated, bringing him great fame and wealth and a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, Frequent References to Toilets Division, but still no decent haircut. The ride upward was dizzying, and not just because of Barry's chronic vertigo. Eventually, he had best-selling books, a hit TV show, based on his life, called "Dave's World" and a North Dakota sewage-lifting station named after him. Sadly, plans for a Broadway musical, called "I Am Not Making This Up! A Dave Barry Revue Set to the Music of the Strawberry Alarm Clock," collapsed when producers couldn't agree to contract terms with Nathan Lane to play Barry's grammatical alter ego, Mister Language Person. Also, when producers couldn't find a song the Strawberry Alarm Clock performed other than "Incense and Peppermints."
As his fame rose, so did his troubles. Well, not troubles in the Coal-Miner-Gets-Black-Lung sense, but there's always something. I mean, if "Dave's World" was any indication, Barry had to hang out with the likes of Shadoe Stevens. Plus, Barry's ubiquity inevitably brought a backlash. It came particularly from younger readers who found his everyday sense of humor, his straddling the lines between tasteful and taste-free in a medium where the average reader is 79 and finds Beetle Bailey to be the height of humor, all a bit "square." There also was a backlash from the humor writers who had ripped him off all those years, who wondered when he would retire and/or die to get out of the way so they, too, could be syndicated and rich. Or at least get known for something beyond writing "Eight Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter."
Well, now Barry is stepping aside. He's wiped out from that incredible, grueling, inhuman one-column-a-week pace, coupled with being Tony Randall to his young daughter. He's ready to step off the Screaming Treadmill of Life to relax on the Plushy Couch of Semi-Retirement. Unfortunately, in his abscense, newspapers will not take the opportunity to groom new humor writers because humor only brings Angry Letters. Even Barry himself, as funny and as mainstream as he is, might have a hard time breaking in today. But even if the rest of us humor writers are still licking candy bar wrappers for nourishment, we will always appreciate the work that Barry has done, the belly laughs he provided, the fart jokes he got in the paper. Even if Barry were to come back to be Andy Rooney, that could not tarnish his legacy among a generation that has loved his slightly warped and fact-free views on life. And I Am Not Making This Up.
E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.
— graphic by Pete Wagner(wag@mn.rr.com)
