Exploding Toilets, Booger Jokes and a Pulitzer

Dave Barry publishes his autobiography

He would grow up to have a sewage pumping station named after him.

This will be the funniest essay I ever post, because I will quote liberally from Dave Barry’s new autobiography, Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass.

Dave belongs to the now-lost tradition of great newspaper columnists.* For younger Substack readers, newspapers were a printed medium that were popular in the last century. The ink from them would stain your fingers, so a solution had to be found, which was making them electronic and turning over the entirety of their profits to Facebook and Google. This is why you haven’t heard of them.

But while they existed, humor columnists like Erma Bombeck, Molly Ivins, Russell Baker, Art Buchwald, Art Hoppe, Herb Caen and Barry provided a break from the otherwise bleak news, like the Buffalo Bills losing four—four—Super Bowls in a row.

Here’s Barry remembering elementary school “duck and cover” drills back in the 50’s, in which his kindergarten class had to practice getting under their desks to save themselves in the event of a nuclear blast:

“I think we all knew, deep in our hearts, that school desks did not provide meaningful protection against atomic bombs; if they did, why not erect giant school desks over major cities?”

Besides being extremely funny, Barry is an extremely good writer. For seven years he taught writing to businesspeople, a job he credits for making him a better writer, too. It worked—he’s won a Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary. In this book, his writing about his mother and father required a few Kleenex on my part. He downplays it, but he has not always had an easy life.

Not least in the haircut department. In junior high, his father used to cut it for him, in the same short length:

“The result was a hairstyle that left me with an expanse of bare forehead that appeared to be the size of a regulation volleyball court.”

Besides writing extensively about exploding toilets, Barry used to cover politics. Here’s his take on Florida politician Bob Graham’s on-the-stump speaking style:

“We land in Bartow, which apparently consists of a hangar. Inside the hangar is a smallish agricultural crowd, which Graham, using his oratorical skills, immediately whips into a stupor. He is not a gifted speaker. He is the kind of speaker who, if he were not the governor, people would shoot rubber bands at after a while.”

Here’s Barry describing presidential candidate Paul Tsongas:

“This is a man so low-key he may be capable of photosynthesis, a man who makes Michael Dukakis seem like James Brown.”

On Bernie Sanders endorsing Hillary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic Convention:

“No, seriously, Sanders gave Clinton a strong endorsement. Granted, he had a pained expression when he did so, but he always has a pained expression. Even when he’s saying something upbeat he looks like a man passing a kidney stone the size of a box turtle.”

Barry recently joined Substack (he has 44,000 grateful subscribers). You’ll laugh out loud at least once per post. And probably way more than that. This past Independence Day he wrote:

“Many people mistakenly think they have to keep ketchup and mustard in the refrigerator, yet these same people happily dine at restaurants where the ketchup and mustard have been sitting out on the tables, at room temperature, since the Clinton administration. Why is this? Because people are stupid. We may never know the answer.”

Barry’s most lasting work may not be his short columns, or even Peter and the Starcatchers, the prequel to Peter Pan he co-wrote that became a Broadway play and won five Tony Awards.

I think they could be his lengthy “Year in Review” pieces. They will be pored over by future historians to understand what was really going on in the country, providing them somewhat less specificity than Heather Cox Richardson, but more jokes.

Dave Barry has done his idols—Robert Benchley, P. G. Wodehouse, Art Buchwald, Jean Shepherd and Erma Bombeck—proud. As well as his other biggest comedic influence, his mom. He shares that last one with of his few peers, David Sedaris.

Someone put this man in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, already.

I mean, how many of its members have sung “Gloria” onstage… with Bruce Springsteen singing backup? If you’re a writer, that alone oughta get you in.

*except for the wonderful Alexandra Petri, who just left the Washington Post for the The Atlantic.