In Defense of Laughter

On Dave Barry

Dave Barry in Florida, 2016, Photograph, Johnny Louis via Getty Images

At the start of Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up, the longtime humor columnist Dave Barry informs us that he’s writing the book in part because he wants to explain where he gets his ideas. Being a fan of Barry since I surreptitiously read his column collections in middle school language arts class, and as one of his biggest enthusiasts under 50 that you’ll probably ever meet, it’s with considerable affection that I say: Hey Dave, what ideas?

Barry is not an ideas guy. He is not an original thinker. His columns, which he started writing in the 1970s and were nationally syndicated until his semi-retirement in 2005, concern such topics as New York City being dirty, Miami drivers being unsafe, Lamaze classes being silly, opera being boring, and sommeliers being pretentious. Like his contemporary Jerry Seinfeld — with whom he shares a decidedly boomer sensibility — he’d be a hack if he wasn’t a genius.

If genius sounds a little over the top, you’ve probably never tried to be funny in print, which may be the most challenging form of writing. Humor writers can’t use sight gags or physical comedy or funny voices; they have to get laughs with prose alone. Like poets, humor writers have to be extraordinarily precise in how they structure their sentences, which punctuation they deploy, and which words they use. As Mark Twain once said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is . . . the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” Or, the difference between lightning and a huge heaping pile of unfunny dogshit.

At the risk of analyzing a joke, consider this ancient Barry line: “I fly a lot, because of the nature of my job. I’m a gnat.” If you reverse the order of information here — “I’m a gnat so I fly a lot for work” — it’s not a joke at all. If you replace the period with an em dash, you are telegraphing the setup-punchline structure. You need the period to stop the reader’s eye for that microsecond and have them think the thought is finished before the second sentence hits them unexpectedly. Finally, Barry could have easily written “I’m a bird,” since that’s the easiest flying animal to reach for, but gnat is unexpected — a little kicker at the end of the punchline — plus it’s a much funnier word than bird. Just two short sentences and 14 words, and a half-dozen decisions to be made.

Now, you may not find that joke all that funny. Not all of Barry’s jokes land for everyone, but there are a lot of them. In a typical column, every single line is a setup, a punchline, or a callback. There’s no wasted space, no throat-clearing, no sentences that serve merely as connective tissue. This is especially true of the older columns, like his 1985 “Young Frankincense” about being a kid in a Christmas pageant, which contains the line: “Many were the happy rehearsal hours we shepherds spent back there, in the dark, whacking each other with sticks and climbing up the ladder so as to cause bat emission products to rain down upon us.”

What I’m saying is, Barry writes clean, tight prose. Class Clown doesn’t have much in the way of revelations about his personal life, but Barry does mention that for a stretch he taught writing to businesspeople, and to beef up his know-how he read “every book on grammar and usage I could get my hands on.” As a writer, he’s a technician, a craftsman. It might be easier to see when you look at one of his rare non-humor columns, like “A Million Words,” about the death of his father. This is how it ends:

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.

Someone who can write like that deserves your respect.

Barry has won a Pulitzer, his columns inspired a network sitcom, he’s written novels — one of which, Big Trouble, became a movie — and he’s even penned jokes for Steve Martin when the comedian hosted the Oscars. He’s had every level of success a writer could have, and yet he’s not really respected by critics or the type of person who reads The Metropolitan Review. (Are we still saying “literati”?) He doesn’t even have the grudging admiration granted to his bandmate Stephen King. No one talks about him.

In fairness, Barry has never tried to be literary or even edgy. Class Clown is worth reading if you’re already a Barry fan and wonder about his life, but it turns out that his life is not all that interesting. Barry’s other books are similarly unambitious: There are some collections of columns, a book about the internet written back when it was still called “cyberspace,” a few lightweight but fun comic novels, and — God help us all — a book about the lessons his dog taught him. Dave Barry may be an incredible writer of sentences, but he’s also unabashedly corny. Toward the end of Class Clown, as he tries to impart some wisdom, he goes with: “It’s gonna be OK.” Unpacking that, he goes on, “I’ve been hearing apocalyptic predictions, often from people considered to be authorities, for going on eighty years . . . . If you spend all your days worrying about some horrible catastrophe that never actually happens, you’re wasting the only days you get.” That may sound pretty trite, but cut him some slack: If you came of age in the most affluent society the world had ever known and became rich and famous by writing jokes, wouldn’t you also be pretty optimistic?

Barry is also apolitical. Though a fair number of his columns have been about politics, they haven’t contained any political opinions or analysis, none really worth taking seriously anyway. His most controversial view is probably his lament that today, “humor is viewed not as entertainment, but as a tactical weapon for attacking the other side.” He pines for the days when humorists like Art Buchwald — a columnist whom Barry admires — “got laughs from both Ronald Reagan and Nancy Pelosi.”

Here is maybe why Barry reeks of lameness. His comedy lacks a compelling, specific perspective. It doesn’t skewer its targets. It doesn’t really punch up or punch down, because it doesn’t punch. He really just wants to make people laugh, and “people” is a category that includes everyone, even Ronald Reagan. His Substack — of course he has a Substack — is more of the same stuff he’s been doing for nearly half a century: riffs on hotel showers, women-be-shoppin’-style Mother’s Day jokes, movie parodies. Dave Barry will be 78 in July, he’s achieved everything a humor writer could meaningfully achieve, and he’s surely got more money than he needs. Yet he’s out here still writing jokes about Mission Impossible. A purer soul does not walk the streets of Florida.

Comedy is often employed on behalf of some kind of message, and this leads audiences to focus on the message rather than the comedy. Liberals love The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight not because they’re laugh riots, but because they produce long-form video op-eds that explain, in great detail, why their political enemies are wrong. Saying that you liked a comedy merely because it’s funny makes you seem a bit . . . stupid, like a food critic who writes that a restaurant was good because the pizza was yummy.

But the point of comedy is to produce laughter. And people want to laugh; we need to laugh. If our hearts are knotted with rage or fear, laughing forces that knot to loosen, at least a little — at least for a little while. Laughter is an end in itself, just as the feeling great art provokes is an end in itself. Laughter is joy. It is a release. If political enemies could sit down together and laugh at the same jokes, as Reagan and Pelosi once did, it would be a sign of civic health. It’s hard to hate someone you shared a laugh with.

Barry may end up being forgotten. A lot of his best columns haven’t aged all that well — not because he’s “problematic” in any way, but because he did lots of jokes about, like, Spiro Agnew. God isn’t likely to mint many new Dave Barry fans: I fell in love with Barry because I picked Bad Habits, his first collection of columns, off my dad’s bookshelf, but I accept that not many 12-year-olds will be enthralled by old newspaper humor columns. Barry will fade away into comedy history, the people who remember him will die, then the robots will take over, then the sun will explode. But who cares? Dave Barry made us laugh.

Harry Cheadle is a writer and editor living in Seattle with his wife, two kids, a dog, a Substack he doesn’t have time for, an unpublished novel, and (surprisingly, he thinks) no agent.