X-NEWS: spcvxb alt.fan.dave_barry: 221Relay-Version: VMS News - V6.0 10/3/90 VAX/VMS V5.3; site spcvxb.spc.edu Path: spcvxb.spc.edu!njin!rutgers!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!abcfd20.larc.nasa.gov!ames!uhccux!virtue!ccc_simon Newsgroups: alt.fan.dave_barry Subject: Erica Zorn's Review Message-ID: <1528.26ed061e@waikato.ac.nz> From: ccc_simon@waikato.ac.nz (Simon Travaglia) Date: 11 Sep 90 03:43:25 GMT Organization: University of Waikato Computer Centre Lines: 530 I saw this, and thought it was worth reposting. Note: The article contains small excerpts of Barry's work as the author thought necessary 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 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 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 sheet 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 year 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 car 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 - wee 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 4-year-old Robert 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 whey 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. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This signature has been thoroughly vetted by the Signature Police. Vetting procedure includes full signature body cavity searches and exposure in infraviolent light. Federal Signature Cleanliness Rating: X-3 Not to be viewed with terminal at full brightness. spt@grace.waikato.ac.nz (or @truth.waikato..) Voice: 064 71 384008 "Hello?" ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "White House carpenters have reworked the master bedroom, remodeling it so that Ronnie can sleep with his head in the hall. That way, by the time he wakes up, somebody will have already shined his hair."