It took me a while to count the works listed under “Also by Dave Barry” in the front of “Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up.” It would appear that Barry has written or co-written 29 works of nonfiction and 16 of fiction.
Dave Barry is prolific is my point.
But “Class Clown” is his first real memoir. As the writer of a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated column that ran from 1983 to 2005, Barry is to humor what Stephen King is to horror, the most popularly known practitioner of the art. Still, Barry frets that his life, which consists primarily “of sitting in a room with two dogs and zero other humans, hour after hour, day after day, staring at a computer screen and thinking: This is not funny,” may not warrant a memoir, especially given that the genre is “dominated by mega-celebrities such as Barbra Streisand.”
Barry acknowledges he may not be a literary giant like Marcel Proust. But, as he humblebrags in “Class Clown,” he was on “The Tonight Show” with “Johnny Freaking Carson”; Bruce Springsteen sang backup for him; he wrote jokes for Steve Martin to deliver at the Academy Awards; and his books have been adapted for a network sitcom, a five-time Tony Award-winning Broadway play and a major motion picture. Most impressively, for more than 50 years, he somehow survived calls for his cancellation by Neil Diamond fans, Hoosiers, telemarketers and other constituencies who didn’t find his jokes about them funny. (Diamond’s fans were particularly incensed when Barry included “I Am … I Said” in a column about songs that made him want to immediately change the radio station.)
Barry’s success belies the maxim that nice guys finish last. In these pages, he comes across as decent and grounded, to which he credits his parents. “Although they definitely weren’t Ozzie and Harriet,” he writes, “they gave us Barry kids a wonderful childhood, and they taught us, by the way they treated others, how they believed a person should act. Mostly it was your basic, old-school Midwestern values: Don’t act like you’re better than other people. Be polite to everybody, not just people you want to impress.”
He also credits his mother for his absurdist sense of humor. In one telling anecdote, he recalls leaving the cemetery after his father’s funeral. His mother, fresh from burying her husband of more than four decades, regards a random tombstone and remarks, “So that’s why we don’t see him around anymore!”
But, as Barry movingly notes, “Funny isn’t the same thing as happy.” The passages about his parents, who both met tragic ends, comprise the strongest portions of the book, which raises the question: Why doesn’t Barry write more serious pieces? “Sometimes when something bad happens in my life, I have to write about it before I can get back to writing humor,” he shares. “These essays have usually been well received. … But I don’t want to write serious pieces, because they’re almost always the result of something bad happening.”
For aspiring humor writers, “Class Clown” takes its cue from an inside joke courtesy of Stephen King, with whom Barry plays guitar as a member of the all-author band the Rock Bottom Remainders. The two had never met until one jam session when, as Barry recalls, King “came over to me, leaned his face down to mine (he’s a big guy) and said, in a booming voice, ‘So, Dave Barry, WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?’” The question is a cliché that, Barry notes, writers get asked all the time, “to the point where many of us have a joke response, such as ‘Costco.’”
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Excerpts from Barry’s columns demonstrate how he transmuted the raw materials of his life, the news or random arcana (the flammability of Rollerblade Barbie) as column fodder, so he could “survive for another day as a writer, instead of having to get a real job.”
Barry has clearly come a long way from the junior high outcast who operated the record player at parties “amusing the other puberty-impaired loser boys by making hand farts.” Finding his niche in high school as a smart aleck, and an outlet for his silly outlook on life, he made the world safe for booger jokes.
Which brings to mind that glorious last line in Preston Sturges’s “Sullivan’s Travels”: “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”
Donald Liebenson is an entertainment writer. His work has been published in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and Vulture, among other publications.
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
