Full disclosure: I believe I am semi-intimately related to Mr. Dave Barry even though we've never met or enjoyed carnal knowledge. At only 9% into an advance e-copy of Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass—How I Went 77 Years without Growing Up (pub. date, May 13, 2025), I was so delighted, entertained, and aroused that I prematurely ejaculated on Facebook:
Dave grew up in the 1950s in Armonk … just a hop, skip and a jump from where I was growing up in Briarcliff Manor.
His parents were married the same date as mine were. They were both smart and funny like mine. His father became an alcoholic but recovered. Mine didn't. And on and on and on.
I don't know whether to be jealous or in awe that I'm seeing a kind of parallel life in an alternate reality if only my family had been sane, nonviolent, and Presbyterian.
But it turns out that's where our parallel existences diverged.
Although Barry claimed to have been aimless after leaving college, flitting from bookkeeping to a local paper to misery at the Associated Press to teaching writing to business people, from my point of view as a writer who's slogged through publishing mud for more than 40 years, he was a goddam bird dog—zeroing in on Gene Weingarten (another writer who makes me guffaw) at the Miami Herald's Sunday magazine, Tropic … which is where this book became my personal hilarious writer's tutorial.
Lessons from Dave Barry: To do a successful humor column, it is critical to care nothing about the truth of your subject, what your subject is, or basically anything. Sometimes the stupider the questions, the more entertaining the column. Hence, my imagined interview with Dave Barry about his new memoir:
BETSY: Why class clown? For goodness sake, you were only in school for 12 of your 77 years (well maybe 16 if you count college, but by then you seemed to have outgrown clowning for clowning's sake). So isn't it kind of disingenuous to qualify your life by 1/6.416666666 of its duration? Speaking of which, what do you think of clowns? In my experience, they are often sad and depressed and they make lousy dates.
DAVE: Aw gee, I never dated a clown, Betsy. I'm sorry you had such traumatic experiences. We only picked that title because everybody in the focus group voted for the cover with six-year-old me in a party hat. I do look pretty cute, despite the buzz cut my father insisted on giving me, but he was probably drunk when he did it, or in the middle of writing a sermon—did you like the parts about my dad?
BETSY: Very much, Dave. Your dad seems like a swell guy, the way he helped so many people and took you, with his camp group, to the march in Washington, DC, to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. speak. (BTW, nice historical significance, giving the memoir the obligatory gravitas required for a Pulitzer. Smart move.*) Speaking of which, you said you didn't realize at the time that you were witnessing history. What were you doing standing there in the crowd in front of the Lincoln Memorial?
DAVE: To be honest, Betsy, my mom had insisted I wear laced shoes, and one of the staffers in my Camp Sharparoon inner city kids group thought it'd be a great joke to tie them together. So I spent a lot of the speech trying not to faint from the heat or fall down because we were packed so tight I couldn't bend over to untie them. But I've heard the speech on video many times—thank goodness for YouTube—and, like I said, it's mind-expanding.
BETSY: Speaking of almost dying, (I know we weren't but you seem okay with leaps of nonlogic), one of my favorite of your millions of quoted parts in the book (Great recycling! More leisure time to practice your broom and lawnmower marching skills and think about what to eat for dinner!) was your interview with Bob Graham, the then governor of Florida. And speaking of almost drowning in a harmonica accident (readers, you'll have to buy and maybe read the book to understand that—You're welcome, Dave!), have you ever played harmonica? I know you spent and spend a lot of time in a band—currently with a lot of famous writers—but how do you feel about blowing into a small box?
DAVE: Wow, what a creative question. Well, honestly, Betsy, I long ago stopped blowing into anything because it makes me hyperventilate, and particularly if I were to do so while standing next to a pool. I really valued Bob Graham's warning and establishment of the Harmonica Safety Day (Read the book!). Who knows how many lives besides mine have been spared. Full disclosure: I still do have impulses to blow into small containers, particularly if they make funny noises.
BETSY: What's a mutilated verb? I've heard of mutilated body parts and your description of your colonoscopy made me laugh so hard I may have fractured one of mine. But until your book, I never heard of "mutilated verbs."
DAVE: Wow, you're a real word person, aren't you? Try this:
It is my conclusion that the explosion in your head at the mention of this mutilation is due to the failure of the relief valve in your ears and may in the future result in sentences that are just too long for their own good.
See what I did? Lots of verb ideas have been mutilated into nouns: "conclusion," "explosion," "failure" and maybe some other ones that you added to this totally unauthorized revision of my book. Thus you pressed some really dull verbs into service. An unmutilated way to write it is:
"I conclude that your head exploded because your ears are blocked."
BETSY: Okay … So how about farts? You talk a lot about body emissions. Any final toots?
DAVE: Speaking of "toots," how come they don't rhyme with "foots" which brings me to footnotes. Did you like them?
BETSY: About footnotes**
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*I'm not being cheeky. Dave has a whole section where he makes fun of newspaper writers' obsession with winning Pulitzers, so this sentence is a bit of an homage. BTW, Dave did win a Pulitzer—I'm not making that up—so I'm sure he won't take offense if he ends up reading this after all his book tour interviews, signing autographs, and setting fire to many pairs of perfectly good underpants (Read the book!).
**There are lots of footnotes in this book and, in the digital edition, the way they pop up when you tap the footnote number makes the jokes on top of jokes even funnier. Way to go, Dave!
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DAVE: Thanks, Betsy.
BETSY: My pleasure, Dave. And thanks for the free book in exchange for an honest review … which I guess this really isn't. Whoops. Well, thanks anyway, and I'll think of you whenever I have nothing else to think about.
