Dave Barry - Elegy for the humorist. By Bryan?Curtis

When I was in high school and turning away from the math/science whiz track, I began writing for the high school newspaper.

At the time, my hero was a local humor columnist named Bob Morris, who was very obviously indebted to
Dave Barry, but with a little bit of Mitch Albom treacly humanism thrown in to boot.

I wrote a column for my HS paper, The Patriot (ugh, yes, i know - it is gross) called Yo! Miguel raps! It was about, well, anything I wanted it to be about, as long as it was funny. I once wrote about Nintendo thumb. (now known as Halo2 syndrome). For my ultimate piece before graduation, I threatened the 109 kids in front of me. Let's see that fly post-Columbine.

Anyhow, if I can ever dig those up, I'll post them here.

In the meantime, Dave Barry has retired from the columnbiz. Sad, but it yielded this piece from Slate, which has some great points about Barry's style.

2 pieces of extra tidbit: 1. Bob Morris was found to have plagiarized a whole bunch of work in 1993 and was fired from the Sentinel. 2. My idea about having 2 dogs - a main dog (Lab, Collie, et. al) and a 'special reserve dog' (shih-tzu) comes from a column i read from Dave Barry in 1985.

Dave Barry - Elegy for the humorist. By Bryan Curtis: "Dave Barry, who quit his syndicated humor column last week, has been playing dumb for 22 years. Whenever someone suggests that Barry is our noblest social commentator, that he regularly makes the lions of the New York Times editorial page look like bozos, Barry points out that this is impossible, because, unlike most Timesmen, he takes great pride in making booger jokes. Let us ignore that objection and repeat the suggestion. Dave Barry is was the most heroic newspaper columnist in America. He hides his considerable candlepower behind a jokester's guise of 'Don't trust me, I'm just the comedian!' Or, as Barry once put it, 'Readers are sometimes critical of me because just about everything I write about is an irresponsible lie...'

"Dave had astonishingly high SAT scores," says Weingarten. "His humor is informed by an astounding intellect." One week, when Tropic converted itself into a kind of Devil's Dictionary, Weingarten instructed Barry to come up with a definition for "sense of humor." Barry disappeared from the office for a few days. He came back with this: "A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge." Then he promptly went back to writing about exploding livestock...

Weingarten says Barry codified one rule of comedy: "Put the funniest word at the end of sentence." A second rule might be: "Put the funniest sentence at the beginning of the story." Without my eyeglasses, I have a great deal of trouble distinguishing between house fires and beer signs.

I have received a disturbing letter from Mr. Frank J. Phillips, who describes himself as both a patriot and a Latin teacher.

Obviously, we—and when I say "we," I mean people who no longer laugh at the concept of hemorrhoids—need to come up with some kind of plan for dealing with the yuppies.

Like most Americans, I was thrilled to death last February when our wealthy yachting snots won the coveted America's Cup back from Australia's wealthy yachting snots.

At the Miami Herald we ordinarily don't provide extensive coverage of New York City unless a major news development occurs up there, such as Sean Penn coming out of a restaurant...

In 1987, after the New York Times published a bleak article about South Florida ("Can Miami Save Itself?"), Barry's editors dispatched their man to New York to give the Times its comeuppance. Barry returned with a wicked 4,000-word story in which he gently pointed out that Ed Koch's Manhattan was a carnival of urban decay and drug paraphernalia, too. Where the Times' story had been heavy-handed and sober, Barry was impish and hilarious, reporting, "[W]e immediately detect signs of a healthy economy in the form of people squatting on the sidewalk selling realistic jewelry." The denizens of Times Square, he observed, were "very friendly, often coming right up and offering to engage in acts of leisure with you."

Link to his New York piece.
His retirement piece.