Dave Barry Talks Back

INTRODUCTION

I am always getting letters from people who want my job.

Dave, they start out. They always call me Dave.

Dave, they say, I want your job, because my current job requires me to be a responsible person doing productive work, whereas your job requires you mainly to think up booger jokes.

This kind of thoughtless remark really gets my dander up. Because although the reading public sees only the end product of my work, the truth is that I often spend many hours researching a particular topic before I make booger jokes about it. Take the Middle East. This is a very troubled region, a region fraught with complex and subtle issues of major international significance. You can’t just sit down and dash off a column that says:

The Middle East! Ha ha! What a bunch of boogerheads!

No, there is a lot more to it than that. As a respected commentator, I am expected to produce a column that is thoughtful, insightful, profound, and—above all—800 words long. Whereas the column above is only nine words, counting each haas a separate word. So as a respected commentator I have to come up with another 791 words’ worth of insights about the Middle East, such as: where it is,¹ and how come it is fraught with all these things, and what exactly we mean when we say our dander is up. According to the dictionary, dander means temper, which would make sense except that I distinctly remember that a former editor of mine named Bob Shoemaker used to wear a little medallion around his neck that said:

I AM ALLERGIC TO HORSE DANDER

Bob said he wore this so that in case he was ever rendered unconscious in an accident, the paramedics would realize that they should not expose him to horse dander. But if the dictionary is correct, Bob’s medallion was actually saying that he should not be exposed to angry horses. You’d think the paramedics would already know this. You’d think that one of the first rules they learn in Paramedic School is, Never expose an unconscious patient to an angry horse. Sheep, yes. We can all readily imagine situations where it would be necessary, even desirable, to expose an unconscious accident victim to an angry sheep. But as a respected commentator I am deeply concerned about this horse thing, which is just one more example of the kind of subtle and complex issue that we must come to grips with if we are ever to achieve any kind of meaningful understanding regarding these boogerheads in the Middle East.

Another question readers frequently ask is: Dave, what specific system of writing do you use?

Like many great writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and William Shakespeare, I use the Two-Dog System of writing. This system gets its name from the fact that it involves two dogs, one of which is your main dog and the other of which is your emergency backup dog, in case for any reason your main dog is unavailable. My main dog’s name is Earnest, and my emergency backup dog is named Zippy. Every morning I get my coffee and say: You want to go to WORK? And the two of them charge for the door. Sometimes they charge right into the door, because they have the combined IQ of mayonnaise.

So the three of us go to my office, where we all take our positions:

I sit in front of the computer and try to have insights;

Earnest lies directly under my desk and periodically emits aromas;

Zippy lies several feet away, ready to step in and emit aromas if Earnest experiences technical difficulties.

That, along with occasionally barking insanely at invisible beings, is the sum total of the dogs’ contribution to the column effort. In the years we have worked together, neither dog, to the best of my recollection, has ever come up with a single idea. Sometimes I get just a little ticked off about this. Hey Earnest! I’ll say. How about you come up here and have insights while I go down there and emit aromas? This causes Earnest to look at me and, drawing on the shrewd instincts that have made dogs so successful as a species despite having no marketable skills, wag her tail. So the real burden of production rests entirely upon my shoulders, just as it rested upon the shoulders of Dostoevsky and Shakespeare, both of whom, you will notice, are currently dead.

My point is that, counting all the research, the fact-checking, the trips to the veterinarian, etc., there’s a lot more to being a respected commentator than meets the eye. So as you read this book, I’ll thank you not to pause every few sentences and remark: "Hey! I could write this crap! Remember the wise words of the old Indian saying: Before you criticize a man’s collection of columns, walk a mile in his moccasins, bearing in mind that this is a good way to catch a fungus."

About Jeff MacNelly

I’m very pleased that Jeff MacNelly’s illustrations will appear in this book, because he is, in my opinion, of all the illustrators in the world today, probably the tallest. Also he draws pretty well. He does some of his best work in bars. I’ve seen this a number of times. We’ll go into a bar, and because Jeff is too modest to say anything, I’ll take people quietly aside and say, "Do you know who that is? That’s Jeff MacNelly."

And the people, clearly impressed, will say, Who?

So I’ll explain that Jeff has won about 17 Pulitzer Prizes and also draws the Shoe comic strip. This always gets a reaction. Oh yeah! they’ll say. Shoe! I love that one! Especially Opus the Penguin!

Jeff is very gracious about this kind of adoration and will frequently take some place mats and do drawings for his fans, which is amazing to watch because he never opens his eyes. Really. I’m not even sure that he has eyes, because nobody I know has ever seen them. He just sits there with his eyes closed, drawing things for people in the bar, and they get all excited and buy him beers. This makes me jealous because, as a writer, I can’t do the same kind of thing. Usually I can’t even bring my dogs into a bar. But at least my eyeballs are visible.

¹ Not around here, I can tell you that.

INTRODUCING: MR. HUMOR PERSON

I frequently get letters from readers asking me to explain how humor works. Of course they don’t ask in exactly those words. Their actual wording is more like: Just where do you get off, Mr. Barry, comparing the entire legal profession to flatworms? Or: How about if I come down to that newspaper and stick a wastebasket up your nose?

People come to me with this kind of probing question because I happen to be a major world expert on humor. I deal constantly with sophisticated humor questions such as: Would it be funnier to have the letter say, How about if I come down to that newspaper and stick an IBM Selectric typewriter up your nose? Or should I maybe try to work in a subtle political joke, such as: How about if I come down to that newspaper and stick Vice President Quayle up your nose? This is the kind of complex philosophical issue that I am forced to wrestle with, hour after hour, until 10:30 A.M., when Wheel of Fortune comes on.

After years of pursuing this regimen, I’ve learned certain fundamental truths about humor. One of them is that weasel is a funny word. You can improve the humor value of almost any situation by injecting a weasel into it:

WRONG: Scientists have discovered a 23rd moon orbiting Jupiter.

RIGHT: Scientists have discovered a giant weasel orbiting Jupiter.

WRONG: U.S. Rep. Newt Gingrich.

RIGHT: U.S. Rep. Weasel Gingrich.

But the most important humor truth of all is that to really see the humor in a situation, you have to have perspective. Perspective is derived from two ancient Greek words: persp, meaning something bad that happens to somebody else, and ective, meaning ideally somebody like Donald Trump.

Take for example funerals. Funerals are not funny, which is why we don’t laugh during them unless we just can’t help ourselves. On the other hand, if a funeral occurs way on the other side of the world, and it involves the late Mr. Ayatollah Mojo Khomeini, and the mourners are so upset that they start grabbing garments and souvenir body parts off the deceased to the point where what’s left of him could be laid to rest in a standard Good & Plenty box, then we have no choice but to laugh until our dentures fall into our laps.

An even better example of humor perspective involves a masseuse named Danette Sadie I met in San Francisco. (Let me stress, for the benefit of those readers who happen to be my wife, that I met her in a totally nonmassage situation.)

Danette had a regular client who decided to give her husband a professional massage as a gift, thinking that he would enjoy it. When the husband showed up, however, he was very nervous: He said he’d never had a massage before and he was concerned about getting undressed, and specifically whether he was supposed to leave his underpants on. Danette assured him that she was a professional and that he’d be covered at all times by a sheet, but he was still very concerned. So Danette said look, leave your underpants on, take them off, whatever makes you comfortable. Then she left the room while he undressed.

When she came back, the man was under the sheet looking as relaxed as a person being strapped down for brain surgery via ice pick. So Danette, trying to be as calm and non threatening as possible, walked up to him, reached out her hand, and touched the man’s back at exactly the moment that the famous World Series earthquake struck.

Let me stress that there was nothing funny about this earthquake, unless you have the perspective of hearing Danette describe how the man’s entire body, in defiance of gravity, twitched violently into the air like a trout on amphetamines and landed on the other side of the room.

It’s usually more relaxing than this, said Danette.

It’s a good thing I kept my underpants on! said the man.

These are words that a lot of people could stand to remember more often, but that is not my point. My point is that by having perspective on things we can find humor in virtually any situation, except of course for genuinely tragic events that cause serious trouble for large numbers of people. Or anything involving my car.

(THIS COLUMN IS FUNNY)

Today we’re going to attempt a ground-breaking medical experiment in an effort to help those unfortunate readers who suffer from a tragic condition called: Humor Impairment. Don’t laugh! Humor Impairment afflicts Americans from all walks of life. Look at Richard Nixon. Here’s a man whose sense of humor was so badly stunted that he was forced, at White House social functions, to wear special undershorts equipped with radio-controlled electrodes so that his aides could signal him, via electric shocks, when he was supposed to laugh. Sometimes, if the guests were unusually witty, the chief executive wound up twitching like a fresh-caught mackerel as dangerous voltage levels were reached in his boxers.

So it is possible for a Humor Impaired person, through courage and determination, to overcome his handicap, and maybe even someday, like Mr. Nixon, attain the ultimate political achievement of not getting indicted. But before we can treat Humor Impairment, we have to be able to recognize it. It can affect anyone. YOU could have it. To find out whether you do, ask yourself this: What was your reaction to the first paragraph of this column? Did you think: Ha ha! That Nixon sure is a geek, all right! Or did you think: This is offensive, cheap, crude, and vicious humor, making fun of a former president of the United States, a major public figure, an internationally recognized elder statesman, just because he is a geek.

If you had either of those reactions, you are not Humor Impaired, because you at least grasped that the paragraph was supposed to be funny. The Humor Impaired people, on the other hand, missed that point entirely. They are already writing letters to the editor saying: They wouldn’t use electric shocks! They would use hand signals! Or: Where can I buy a pair of undershorts like that? Trust me! I know these people! I hear from them all the time!

In fact, that’s how I got the idea for the ground-breaking experiment. I had received a large batch of Humor Impaired letters responding to a column I wrote about Mister Language Person, and I was asking myself: How can I respond to these people in a humor column, when they don’t understand that it’s supposed to be humorous? That’s when I came up with my ground-breaking idea. You know how some TV shows are closed-captioned for the hearing impaired, meaning that if you have a special TV set, you can get subtitles? Well, I thought, why couldn’t you do that with humor?

So the rest of this ground-breaking column will be closed-captioned for the Humor Impaired. After each attempted joke, the humor element will be explained in parentheses, so that you Humor Impaired individuals can laugh right along with the rest of us. Ready? Here we go:

Many readers were upset about a recent column by Mister Language Person, the internationally recognized expert (NOT TRUE) who periodically answers common language questions submitted by imaginary readers (HE MAKES THE QUESTIONS UP). All of Mister Language Person’s answers are intended to be as accurate (NOT TRUE) and informative (NOT TRUE) as is humanly possible while still containing words such as booger. (BOOGER IS FUNNY.) No item is ever allowed to appear in Mister Language Person until trained grammarians have indicated their approval by barking at it in an excited manner. (THOSE ARE NOT GRAMMARIANS. THOSE ARE HIS DOGS.)

Although I had thought that the Mister Language Person column met the usual high standards of accuracy (EVERYTHING IN IT WAS WRONG), it contained an item that attracted a very large amount of mail from astute readers (SARCASM: THESE PEOPLE APPEAR TO BE MISSING KEY BRAIN LOBES) (NOT LITERALLY) who saw that, in one of the items, something was wrong. Yes! In a column that was basically a teeming, writhing mass of wrong answers, these keen observers were somehow able to detect: a wrong answer. (HEAVY SARCASM.)

The item that virtually all of these readers focused on was the one where an imaginary airline employee asked whether it was correct to say A bomb has been placed on one of you’re airplanes or A bomb has been placed, on one of you’re airplanes, (THIS IS NOT REALLY HOW AIRLINES HANDLE BOMB THREATS) (AS FAR AS WE KNOW) and Mister Language Person replied that the correct wording was A bomb has been placed IN one of you’re airplanes. (GET IT? IT’S STILL WRONG!! HA HA!) Many readers felt this answer was incorrect and took time out from their busy and rewarding careers in the demanding field of food chewing (PROBABLY NOT TRUE) to write letters containing quotes such as—I am not making these up (HE IS NOT MAKING THESE UP)—I was shocked with the grammar and Never have I seen such a mistake in grammer and I sure hope you remember this small bit of information, being as you are a writer you should have known it already.

Well, readers, I’ve researched this issue carefully (NOT TRUE: HE DRANK A BEER), and although this is not easy for me to say, I have to admit it: Your right. Thanks for straightening me out. This job would not be the same without you. I mean it. (HE MEANS IT.)

READER ALERT

EXPLODING THINGS

I don’t wish to toot my own horn, but I definitely deserve to win several Nobel Prizes for the ground-breaking scientific work I’ve done in the field of exploding things. Since I wrote my first report, several years ago, about a snail that exploded in a restaurant in Syracuse, New York, I have received literally thousands of letters from alert readers sending me newspaper clippings about exploding ants, pigs, trees, yogurt containers, potatoes, television sets, finches, whales, municipal toilets, human stomachs, and of course cows. In accordance with standard journalism accuracy procedures, I never pass any of these reports on to the public without first reading it, saying to myself, quote, Huh! Using this process, I’ve determined that we