Humor’s been on the ropes, for years.
Between lingering cancel culture and an opera buffa administration that daily defies parody, you could be forgiven for thinking nothing is funny anymore. The Onion stuck in there for a while, but lately it seems to be crafting press releases for the Department of Government Efficiency.
Even Dave Barry threw in the towel, retiring from his regular column 20 years ago.
So the good news is that the wildly popular funnyman — once syndicated in 500 newspapers, with dozens of books under his belt — is back, with “Class Clown — The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up.” (Simon & Schuster: $28.99).
I’ll be honest — as heir to the sophisticated urban wit of Robert Benchley, in my own mind if nowhere else, I generally avoided Barry’s column and, jeez, 45 previous books, including “Boogers are My Beat,” which neatly explains why.
Plus Barry was syndicated in the Tribune, which for many years I refused to touch, since doing so seemed like laying flowers on the grave of its former publisher, xenophobe and Hitler bootlicker Col. Robert McCormick.
But a publicist invited me to talk with Barry and I couldn’t see why not. We newspaper columnists are a vanishing breed, and I rarely get the chance to talk with one. Heck, I hardly talk to anybody anymore.
“I never set out to be an artist,” Barry told me. “I set out to be a joke guy.”
Mission accomplished. Though “Class Clown” begins seriously, with his parents — alcoholic father, depressive mother — in vignettes that are moving and real. I admired the details. A Swedish friend of his father, also named Dave, pronounces his name “Dafe,” which made me think of the tailor in “The Inferno” squinting in the twilight. Making me the first critic to compare Dave Barry to Dante.
The book surprises, practically poking me in the eye.
His father, Barry writes, “was a fan of the great humorist Robert Benchley and owned several books of Benchley’s collected columns. When I was somewhere around eleven or twelve I read those books and became obsessed with them; they definitely influenced my writing style, and I still read them today.”
Ah. Did not see Benchley coming.
“I was a huge fan — still am,” Barry said. “It’s definitely a sobering thing if you are humor columnist, to realize nobody read him anymore.”
Being a veteran journalist myself, albeit playing AAA ball compared to Barry’s big leagues, I enjoyed his recounting the profession, from his early days at the West Chester, Pennsylvania Daily Local News to his rise at the Miami Herald and the go-go 1980s. In 1987, he and a photographer spent $8,000 to rent a helicopter to get a photo of a garbage barge, adding that today “you cannot spend $8 without prior written authorization from at least three executives.”
That’s not so much satire as dry reportage. Last month, in order to be compensated for a CTA bus ride, I had to secure a note from my editor, vowing that the expense is valid, and I wasn’t just trying to steal $2.25 from the paper.
Barry said that humor is still around; sometimes you have to look harder.
“There’s not so much humor in newspapers, because there’s not so [many] newspapers,” he said.
Barry’s rags-to-riches story is an astoundingly quick stumble upward. One moment he’s teaching business writing, the next he’s yucking it up with Johnny Carson, a reminder of Twain’s line, “Fame is an accident.”
Still, Barry remains genuinely humble, though a quarter of the book is taken up chronicling celebrity encounters. He sets a pair of underwear on fire on the David Letterman show and plays in a band with Stephen King, who asks him where he gets his ideas. At one point, Bruce Springsteen sings backup for him. Bill Clinton says hello. I suppose rubbing elbows with the famous is a marker of significance, though I could have used less small talk with Barbara Bush and more observations about his two children.
That was a conscious choice.
“I’ve written so much about my family,” he said. “I wanted to talk about where the humor came from, rather than go back to, ‘My kids are funny.'”
Even without them, “Class Clown” is still funny, a quick read, a good time, and proof that at 77, Dave Barry has still got it, leading a brisk romp through the glittering career of America’s most beloved columnist, filled with surprising pathos and frequent valuable insights.
Dave Barry is giving a talk, sponsored by the American Writers Museum, Thursday, May 15 at 6 p.m. at Chicago Hope Academy, 2156 W. Ogden Ave., Chicago, IL 60612.