A long time ago, in a media environment far, far away, an editor walked into my office and dropped a pile of books by Dave Barry on my desk. "Here’s an idea," he said. "Read these and figure out how he does it."
At the time, Barry was a weekly humor columnist at the Miami Herald, which, at the time, was a newspaper. By tradition, humor columns in newspapers were pretty dreary. For one thing, labeling any piece of writing "humor" discourages discerning readers from finding it funny; discerning readers like to decide these things for themselves. Beyond this terrible handicap, newspaper humorists shared a problem with their employers: They had to satisfy, or at least not offend, a large enough audience to stay in business, which encouraged a timidity and blandness that made humor nearly impossible. Too much humor could get a humorist fired.
Dave Barry was different. Dave Barry was funny—and not just funny but consistently funny, line by line and paragraph to paragraph, week after week. Yet he was astonishingly popular. By the late 1980s, the Herald was syndicating his column to more than 500 newspapers. (Yes! The world once contained 500 newspapers!) A TV network created a situation comedy about him, Dave’s World, which ran for four seasons. Even more: He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. A Pulitzer itself is nearly meaningless as a measure of quality—Thomas L. Friedman has won three of them—but anyone who can get a laugh out of the self-important, humor-impaired stiffs who sit on Pulitzer committees deserves a prize. You might as well try to jolly up a board of oncologists or the docents at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Barry seemed to be a magician. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t like his stuff. My editor’s idea of trying to figure out what made it tick technically, isolating the elements that combined in a Barry joke to combust into belly laughs, struck me as a fine assignment. It would be a public service.
And then I tried to do it.
I didn’t get very far. Even I could see what he didn’t do. He avoided the cheapest kind of humor tricks, usually steering clear of the grosser bodily processes or the tawdry shock of blue language. He never used dialect, another wheeze of the flailing funny man. He didn’t play the fool the way other "humorists" often did, pretending to an ignorance he didn’t possess.
I did eventually put my finger on one of his devices. Barry had mastered a certain kind of bureaucratic tone common to business and government. It’s an idiom puffed up by the bureaucrats’ self-importance and their sneaking suspicion that their own work, described plainly, would sound stupid, or at least unimpressive. (Verbal inflation, for example, is what leads a communications hack at Kraft Foods to describe its sliced cheese as "Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product.") This insight of mine, brilliant as it was, even prompted me to use the word "periphrasis."
That’s when I gave up. The moment you use the word periphrasis in an article about humor writing, it’s time to admit defeat.
It was only later that I recalled the famous line of E.B. White in his essay, "Some Remarks on Humor": "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." Therefore, in what remains [checks word count] of this review, I will forgo analysis in favor of an earnest plea that you read Dave Barry’s new book, Class Clown.
Class Clown is a full-blown memoir, making it unique among the long shelf of Barry’s books—a corpus that has now grown beyond the usual collections of columns to include a dozen novels, notably the Starcatchers series of fantasy tales, which is popular with people who can tolerate a series of fantasy tales. But it’s more than a memoir, as all good memoirs are. It also offers a critique of showbiz phoniness, a guide to good writing, a charming re-creation of suburban U.S.A. in the 1950s, an exploration of the relationship between celebrities and their fans, and a history of journalism, especially political journalism, over the last 40 years.
Barry came to newspapering the way lots of journalists once did, with no professional training or idea of what he was doing. He dabbled at his college paper before graduating college in 1969—"a truly shitty time for America," as he rightly notes. He hoped vaguely for a job that had to do with writing and eventually, through a friend, landed one as a reporter on a small suburban paper outside Philadelphia. Within a few months, as he also rightly notes, he had learned everything he needed to know to become a journalist. It’s not particle physics.
He is very good at evoking the pre-digital newsroom. "I loved the chaotic noise of the newsroom as deadline approached—typewriters clattering; police and fire radios sporadically blaring out staticky transmissions; editors calling out ‘Who’s up for an obit?’; reporters occasionally, for a wide variety of reasons, yelling ‘Fuck!’" Things are much quieter now.
As much fun as reporting was, he left the trade through a series of professional miscalculations and took a job as a writing instructor, giving tutorials to eager but not terribly literate businesspeople. What might have seemed like a career blunder proved invaluable. Journalism is at once the most outward-facing and the most insular trade there is. As a reporter, he writes, "I assumed that business was boring and monolithic, and that the employees were mostly drones doing mindless jobs, unlike us English majors in journalism keeping democracy alive by covering the regional sewage authority."
Pretty quick, though, he discovered what most normal, non-journalistic people know: "the business world, although it can be boring, is also fantastically varied and complex, and it’s inhabited by all kinds of people, including smart, funny, creative and subversive ones." This understanding of how most Americans make their ordinary way in our commercial republic struck him with the force of a revelation—one all too rare in the news business. It enlarged the scope of his sympathy without dulling his sense of the absurd. It was the making of him as a writer.
He began writing humor pieces on spec and sending them around to newspapers, and before long, the Herald offered him a full-time job. His editors gave him a long leash, even sending him to cover real events like a real reporter, with no obligation not to make fun of what was happening. Barry’s reported pieces were among his funniest, even when he was making it up.
He had a special feel for electoral politics. In 2008, he went to a rally for Barack Obama in New Hampshire: "People were cheering, chanting and throwing their underwear at him. And those were just the journalists." Later in the same campaign, Sarah Palin burst on the scene as John McCain’s running mate. No one was quite sure how this happened.
"McCain’s staff insists that it conducted a thorough investigation of Palin, which included not only inspecting her driver’s license, but also, according to a campaign spokesperson, ‘reading almost her entire Wikipedia article.’"
There’s an uncharacteristic tone of wistfulness when Barry describes the low state of contemporary political journalism. He is particularly dismayed at the mainstream press’s treatment of Donald Trump, "going after [him] more aggressively than we go after his opponents, and downplaying news that might benefit him."
Even those of us who, like Barry, know that Trump is a "narcissistic jerk and a liar" know this is bad news for the news business. "When the public sees us taking sides—and the public definitely sees it—we lose the only reason we had any influence with the public in the first place: our credibility. We become just another partisan voice in a cacophonous chorus, one more basement blogger." The credibility, he thinks, is gone forever, and he’s probably right.
If all this sounds long-faced, then I’m misrepresenting the book. A little wistfulness is excusable in a memoir, and Barry is quickly off to other matters, like exploding toilets, inflammable underwear, and—the Holy Grail of humor—boogers. He quotes himself liberally, making the memoir a kind of "greatest hits" collection in disguise and offering readers a chance to survey his work over nearly half a century. It turns out, upon rereading, that I was wrong those many years ago about Dave Barry not relying on the grosser bodily processes for his humor. There’s a ton here about the grosser bodily processes. I was right about the periphrasis, however.
Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up
by Dave Barry
Simon & Schuster, 256 pp., $28.99
Andrew Ferguson is a contributing writer at the Atlantic and nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.