Class Clown

How can you turn class clown energy into a life’s work without losing the human being behind the laughs? In Class Clown, Dave Barry argues that humor isn’t a cute side dish to life; it’s the main course that helps you face the heavy stuff and stay connected to people. He contends that the funniest material doesn’t come from cleverness alone—it comes from real experience, decency learned at home, relentless practice in unglamorous places, and the willingness to keep testing the line between silly and sincere.

Barry’s throughline is simple: the jokes kept saving him, then his readers, then (sometimes) his subjects, because humor disarms, invites, and clarifies. But to get there, he had to grow up in a half-built, spider-filled house in Armonk; learn from a good father and a wickedly funny mother; muck through small-town obits and zoning meetings; get rejected and rerouted by the Associated Press; become a business-writing consultant who preached the power of a strong lead; crash Tropic magazine’s mad-science lab; and then write columns so relentlessly that a national audience started mailing him Pop-Tarts and Barbie skates to set on fire on the Letterman show.

Why This Memoir Matters Now

You live in a world that treats laughter as either an indulgence or a weapon. Barry offers a third path: humor as a way to stay sane, humane, and curious. He shows you how comedy coexists with grief (his mother’s depression and suicide; his father’s alcoholism and recovery) and how it survives the velvet ropes of celebrity culture (Johnny Carson; Steve Martin; the Rock Bottom Remainders) and the bramble patches of politics (New Hampshire primaries, conventions, and the Florida 2000 fiasco). The stakes here aren’t trivial: he’s wrestling with what counts—family, craft, integrity—and how to know when to quit while you’re still funny.

What You’ll Learn

First, you’ll meet the parents—his wise, gentle father who literally dug the family foundation and later used his AA recovery to help incarcerated alcoholics, and his mother, whose lethal one-liners (“Don’t drown, kids!”) taught him timing and edge. You’ll see how a free-range Boomer childhood—ice-skating, BB guns, and rope-towed snowplows—seeded a sensibility: the world is ridiculous and resilient; notice it carefully, then say so plainly.

Second, you’ll trace Barry’s apprenticeship in the Daily Local News newsroom, where obituaries, sewage authorities, and Cyclone Agnes taught him speed, accuracy, and nerve. You’ll step into the unexpectedly formative sabbatical as a business-writing consultant, where he became evangelical about structure—write a real lead; stop mutilating verbs—and where he learned how to hold a room, a skill that later powered book tours and TV spots.

Third, you’ll tour Tropic magazine’s madcap era with editor-geniuses Gene Weingarten and Tom Shroder: engineered rivalries (Heat vs. Magic), questionable covers (Dave with an incriminating basketball), fearless profiles (Bob Graham’s harmonica safety and Don Shula’s cover-starring midriff), and that Pulitzer-earning cocktail of mischief plus precision. Here Barry refines investigative humor: tell the truth, but make it funnier than the lies.

Fourth, you’ll see how readers turned into collaborators. Barry’s mailbox becomes an engine for columns and civic pranks: lighting underpants with Rollerblade Barbie, toasting Pop-Tarts, Justice John Paul Stevens writing about Beano, Mister Language Person’s glorious wrongness, a telemarketer phone jam that made national news, and a colonoscopy column that almost certainly saved lives.

Fifth, you’ll cross the campaign trail, where Barry’s political coverage treats primaries as a form of Kabuki—earnest, exhausting theater where sincerity and stunt merge—and where his core ethic remains: mock pomposity, not humanity.

Finally, you’ll roam through the green rooms: Johnny Carson’s desk, the Oscars writers’ room with Steve Martin, Hollywood’s development hamster wheel, a best-selling YA prequel to Peter Pan, and a bar band night when Bruce Springsteen sang backup for Barry. Then you’ll watch him make the hardest funny move: quitting his weekly column before slipping into self-parody, guided by Dorothy Parker’s truth that anybody can say, “I don’t think that’s funny.”

Core Promise

Humor won’t spare you pain, but it can keep you human—curious, decent, and awake—long enough to take care of the people you love, tell the truth with style, and quit while you still own your voice.

How To Read This Summary

Treat each key idea like a backstage pass. You’ll get a scene, a craft lesson, a value, a caution. Whether you write, lead, parent, or simply want to laugh more wisely, Barry gives you a blueprint: earn your jokes the unglamorous way; respect your readers like collaborators; and remember—amid the noise—that it’s probably going to be OK.

Barry begins where the laughs actually come from: home. He grew up in Armonk, New York, in a half-built house his Presbyterian-minister father dug by hand and finished over years of trial, errors, and neighborly rescues from Henry the Swedish master carpenter (“Dafe, Dafe, Dafe”). If you’ve ever learned competence by watching someone cheerfully fail forward, you’ll recognize the DNA here. The place had quirks—well water that needed a pre-adolescent with lung power to prime it, four hundred trillion spiders in the pump house—but it gave Barry the two ingredients he believes make everything else possible: freedom and decency.

Dad: Calm, Caring, and Useful

His father, the Rev. Dr. Dave Barry (sans completed PhD, forever riffing on that), was the neighborhood’s soft-spoken first responder for human trouble. Cigarette in hand, he listened without judgment to late-night callers who were terrified, grieving, or suicidal, then put on a hat and went. He didn’t police belief; he married couples across faith lines because love outranked rules. When alcohol nearly took him under in the 1970s, he bottomed out, joined AA, made amends (including a letter to Dave about not hearing him clearly through the haze), and spent the rest of his life extending help to inmates as the head of Fellowship Center, a prison alcohol-counseling program. Barry’s verdict is simple: “He was the best man I ever knew.”

If you’re looking for the ethical keel behind Barry’s mischief, it starts here: a model of calm presence, service, and the idea that your hardest chapter can become the way you serve next. (Compare to Anne Lamott’s grace-by-service ethic in Bird by Bird.)

Mom: Dark Wit as Medicine

Marion Barry—the source of her son’s comic voltage—grew up in Depression-era Nebraska, learned to puncture pomp early with co-conspirator Gwen, and brought that satirist’s eye to 1950s suburbia. She greeted the butcher with “Just shitty, Ray!” and threatened to visit the school in bathrobe and curlers to terrify problem-causers. Christmas tradition? Slamming the door repeatedly on a gifted fruitcake before trashing it. When a family friend demanded the Skilsaw back, she loaded the tool and five-year-old Sam into the car, drove 250 miles to DC, rang the bell, and deadpanned, “Here’s your goddamned Skilsaw.”

But the sharpness coexisted with depression that darkened in widowhood. In a wrenching chapter, Barry recounts flying to Hartford to help her “pick a place”—a map exercise he mistook for strategy and she experienced as intolerable wandering—only to have her die by suicide weeks later in California. He preserves the ache and the gratitude: she was the funniest person he knew, and he owes his voice to her. He also refuses to reduce either parent to their worst fight—just as you shouldn’t flatten your own story to the chapters you’re still ashamed of.

Family Values, Distilled

“Don’t act like you’re better than other people. Be polite to everybody. Be modest; don’t toot your own horn. Above all, never take anything too seriously. Especially not yourself.”

Freedom, Rocks, and BB Guns

Barry’s boomer childhood was astonishingly free: bikes for miles, Woods with ponds and vines to swing on, BB-gun wars, occasional hitchhiking, and parents who assumed the world was survivable if you made it home for dinner with all major limbs. It’s the contrast he never stops noticing: we Boomers romanticize that freedom, but many of us helicoptered our own kids. The lesson isn’t to replicate 1950s risk; it’s to remember that unsupervised time grows a sense of the world’s scale—and humor needs that scale for perspective.

How This Shapes Your Humor

If you write, lead, or parent, the Barry blueprint is instructive. Goodness plus edge beats either alone. Be the listener in the night—then make the fruitcake joke. Let kids roam—then stock the pump house with a billion spiders of narrative potential. Most of all, resist summary judgments: you, like Barry, can honor the whole of a person—funny and frail—and still keep laughing in a way that heals more than it wounds.

(Context: Nora Ephron’s “Everything is copy” captures a similar maternal inheritance of humor-as-survival; Barry’s twist is Midwestern modesty fused to prankster energy.)

Barry’s early schooling doubles as a cultural x-ray of mid-century America—duck-and-cover drills he knew were useless, polio shots he feared more than death (“A Lark,” lied the local paper), and Dick-and-Jane readers that accidentally sounded like soft-core scripts. The point for you isn’t nostalgia; it’s input. Those rituals fed the two engines that power Barry’s voice: skepticism toward authority’s showy fixes and delight in fads, from Davy Crockett to Chubby Checker’s Twist (the great equalizer for rhythm-impaired white people, including Barry).

Sputnik and the Cosine Conspiracy

When the Russians launched Sputnik, grownups panicked and decided fifth graders would fix it—with more math and “cosine.” Barry marks this as a turning point: the people in suits would always claim the crisis was kids’ fault. He stores this in his comic toolkit: whenever The System tries to offload responsibility, write a joke that restores proportion. (Compare to Tom Lehrer, whose satire thrived on showing officials’ selective logic.)

Puberty, Pageboys, and Persona

Late-blooming in junior high made Barry a spectator to dating rituals—arm frozen in midair behind a girl at North to Alaska, mother driving and pretending not to exist—and pushed him toward the console: the record player operator, the hand-fart virtuoso. That’s the origin story of “wiseass,” his self-chosen high school identity at Pleasantville, where he and co-conspirator Lanny Watts got kicked out of fencing for attacking with a trombone and tried to smuggle a giant “69” into a dance poster (Tough Tony Sabella, assistant principal with a neck-lift grip and a sane sense of humor, stopped them, then taught an excellent American history class).

The practical lesson for you: when you don’t get cast as a lead, find the booth and make the show better. Barry wasn’t a Cute Boy; he became the writer. An English teacher, Regina Adams, amplified the signal by reading a funny essay to the class anonymously—an early dopamine hit that every future creative chases.

The First Byline Buzz

The Green Lantern, Pleasantville’s paper, published Barry’s “straight” coverage of the drunken, muddy, unsanctioned senior boys’ loadball game, a deadpan that would become a signature move. He also went to the 1963 March on Washington with staff from Camp Sharparoon/Minisink (run by his father’s NYC Mission Society), learning that solidarity could be joyful—and fragile, as Dallas shattered that certainty months later. That oscillation—euphoria to gut-punch—shapes his political humor: stay skeptical about who’s “in control,” but don’t lose your appetite for the big, good crowd.

Driving, Deejays, and the Beatles

A license brings freedom in a Plymouth Valiant (the family’s safer follow-up to cars that couldn’t steer or move), and the radio supplies a curriculum of Murray the K, Cousin Brucie, and, in ’64, a seismic jolt: the Beatles. Barry loved that older people hated their hair. If you want to preserve a comic voice, keep tuning yourself to whatever annoys the empire.

College: Bands Over Brothers Karamazov

At Haverford, Barry read a third of the great books, played a million hours of rock with the Federal Duck, and learned to hold a rowdy room. The band name came, fittingly, from a paranoid, pot-enhanced fear that ducks approaching the pond were federal agents. He also got his first bylines—humor in the Haverford News—after failing an assignment to cover Nixon headquarters by remaining in his room and making fun of it (a lesson in writing to your strengths that any creator needs).

Draft anxiety made Barry a conscientious objector—he did two years as a bookkeeper at Episcopal Church HQ in NYC—and he has carried the complicated gratitude/guilt ever since. It’s instructive humility: his satire of Vietnam-era politics comes from the ground he stood on, not borrowed bravado.

If you’re designing your own apprenticeship, steal Barry’s sequence: pick the persona that pays attention (wiseass), find a champion (Mrs. Adams), practice deadpan truth in small papers, keep a band or stage habit so you can survive live microphones later, and own your ethical choices without virtue-flogging them into punchlines.

Barry’s craft isn’t mysterious; it’s tiled together from deadline days at the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Picture twelve reporters at gray desks, carbon copies spiked, police scanners squawking, and a vending machine that dispenses soup, coffee, and incompetence. He covered house fires (ask names anyway), endless zoning boards (get the lead right), floods (wade in until you hang on to a traffic-sign pole with photographer Larry McDevitt), and armed standoffs. The lesson: it’s not glamorous, but it trains your eye for the weird, your ear for the human, and your fingers for speed.

The Reader Is the Boss

Barry learned fast what local readers actually care about. Mislabel a goose as a duck? The phones explode. Skip the horoscope? Torches and pitchforks. It’s humbling and clarifying—if you plan to be funny for a long time, the audience must feel seen. Call them “alert readers,” send them postcards, and build your column with them, not for them.

AP Misfit, Then a Pivot

Lured to the Associated Press in Philadelphia, Barry discovered the wrong job for his brain: hub clerical work, rewriting other papers’ stories until a canoeing tragedy piece achieved undeath by syndication. Overnight shifts, no humor allowed, a stomach pit. He left to teach business writing for Burger Associates—buying a briefcase, a mustache, and a case of nerves—then discovered the gig would renovate his toolbox.

Why Consulting Made Him Funnier

Training engineers and accountants taught Barry to think like a mechanic about sentences. The most important rule: Write a lead that tells me the point. Stop burying the conclusion in page 20. Second: end “verb mutilation”—turning verbs into clumsy nouns (“failure of the valve”)—and restore the strong verb (“the valve failed”). He learned to diagram sentences on a whiteboard for PhD chemists (it worked), devoured usage bibles (Bergen & Cornelia Evans), and realized he could control tone with micro-word choices (he will later spend an hour picking between “squirrel” and “armadillo,” then choose “weasel”).

If you lead teams or write for customers, steal Barry’s two commandments: lead strong, verbs alive. You’ll be clearer—and paradoxically, funnier—because the reader won’t be fighting your sludge.

The Column That Opened Doors

While consulting, Barry handwrote humor on legal pads, typed them at home, and sold them for $22 to the Daily Local News. A childbirth essay—skewering natural-birth class euphemisms, full-color uterus charts, and the notion that breathing solves pain—hit the Inquirer’s Sunday magazine, then boomer editors with babies. A Chicago Tribune editor asked his price. Barry, thinking small, said “$50.” “We pay $500,” said the editor. Suddenly he had syndication offers, freelance gigs, and a book deal.

Craft Takeaway

Start local; add stamina; let the odd jobs harden your prose; then write the piece only you can write at that exact generational moment. The market finds you when you stop writing “content” and start writing something true and funnier than the brochure.

Why It Matters to You

If you’re stuck in a job that pays the bills but dulls the soul, Barry’s detour is a map: keep a side practice alive, make structure your ally, and mail your best piece to the place that scares you. You can get from a vending-machine newsroom to a Pulitzer if you learn to write leads like a reporter and punchlines like your mom.

When Barry joined the Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine, he walked into a laboratory run by two brilliant anarchists: Gene Weingarten (desk like a chewed-pen landfill, sense of humor like a hurricane) and Tom Shroder (a quieter co-conspirator with equal editorial daring). Their philosophy was simple: anything but boring. They treated humor like investigative work—create situations that reveal truths—and they were willing to take heat when lines got wobbly.

Stunts With a Point

To gin up a Heat–Magic rivalry, Barry wrote a Miami-vs.-Orlando takedown (“low-forehead nosepickers”), then took a busload of readers to Orlando for the first game. The Magic ringed their section with crime-scene tape and faux cocaine. It was theater—and it sold a deeper idea: sports is place identity, and newspapers can host play. The cost was blowback when Tropic put Barry on the cover holding a basketball suggestively; angry calls flooded in, a radio host called for firings, and the executive editor later called it her biggest mistake. Weingarten laughed even harder. Barry logged the lesson: push, then listen to the bruise.

Profiles That Disarmed the Powerful

As governor, Bob Graham was famously dry; with Barry, he became zany, explaining harmonica safety day and BB-gun techniques for toads (“get that soft underbelly”). In the Senate, Graham stayed game, giving mock-serious answers about accordion-repair policy. Don Shula, however, did not enjoy being a magazine cover stomach. Barry jogged with the Miami Dolphins legend for interviews, wrote an affectionate piece, but the cover was the memory: “Yeah, I remember you,” said Shula through a smile. The craft point: charm the subject in person; be ready for the cover to carry a different tone. Newspapers are ensembles, and your name won’t control the photo crop.

Miami as Material Supernova

Barry arrived when Time magazine was wondering if Miami was “Paradise Lost?” He responded with a welcome-to-the-circus cover essay that acknowledged the city’s crime and cocaine while making killer toads and heat part of the joke. Then he aimed his satire north: after the New York Times clucked at Miami’s problems, Barry and photographer Chuck Fadely chartered a helicopter to photograph the Long Island Garbage Barge and wrote “Can New York Save Itself?”—a joyful counter-indictment that probably helped win his 1988 Pulitzer for Commentary.

Pulitzer, Then Back to Work

On prize day, Barry was supposed to take his seven-year-old son Rob to Key West for a motorbike ride. The Herald called him to the newsroom for a “meeting,” the Pulitzers were announced, and Barry blurted the only bribe that mattered to a kid: “I’ll buy you a Nintendo.” The next day’s photo—Rob beaming, arms around Dad—looked like Pulitzer pride. It was actually Nintendo joy. Years later, Rob—now a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter—won his own Pulitzer. (Parent note: bribery can backfire into legacy.)

Operating Principle

Investigative humor is still journalism: go there, notice precisely, surprise fairly, and make the truth feel lighter than the lie. When you take a swing, expect a bruise. Keep writing.

Why You Should Care

If your work ever feels trapped between safe and stale, Tropic’s model is instructive: gather a team that values nerve over neatness; send people to the weird thing; defend the cover you believe in (and apologize when you must); and remember that awards don’t change the next deadline. Barry went right back to finding exploding toilets. That discipline—fun plus rigor—travels to every field that wants to keep its audience awake.

Barry’s secret weapon isn’t timing; it’s collaboration. In the pre-Internet era, his readers built the column with scissors and stamps—mailing clippings of toilet explosions, bat-dung gang wars, and snakes in commodes. He replied obsessively, at first dictating chaotic letters (“Dear [name]: What?”), eventually hiring Judi Smith, a school librarian with perfect comedic triage skills, as his full-time assistant. If you want a long-term audience, treat them like sources, not “traffic.”

Public Experiments, Private Neighbors

When a Jackson, Mississippi column warned that Rollerblade Barbie’s sparking skates could ignite hairspray, Barry tested the claim in his driveway by torching his underpants. A neighbor wandered over. Try explaining that. Letterman invited him to do it on national TV; during rehearsal, nothing lit until the team used enormous amounts of hairspray. Live, it worked. Ditto the Pop-Tart flame column—eventually. Those minutes of nothing, with Dave and millions staring at a toaster, are why you practice: humor can be high-wire.

When a Supreme Court Justice Sends Beano

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote on Supreme Court letterhead to share a Beano ad “of immediate importance,” having been a faithful reader through Barry’s “exploding cows” saga. That letter is the career you want: important people sending you jokes because you’ve served them for years without pandering. Barry road-tested Beano and pronounced it effective. Two major papers spiked the column as tasteless. Barry replied by writing an anticircumcision column that replaced anatomical words with those papers’ names (“the Oregonian,” “the Post-Dispatch”). Juvenile? Yes. Deeply satisfying? Also yes. (Context: this is classic Swiftian substitution; the joke is the prudery, not the body.)

Mister Language Person, Glorious Wrongness

Barry’s alter ego posed as a usage expert who was wrong about everything. Outraged readers would circle one error in a swamp of deliberate wrongness and write to “correct” him. He turned pedantry into performance art, then sent more postcards. It’s a masterclass in audience energy: give a particular tribe the game they secretly want to play.

Rage Mail That Launched a Book

Mocking the lyric “Not even the chair” in Neil Diamond’s “I Am… I Said” triggered a tidal wave of fury (“YOU STUPID IDIOT,” “HOW MANY GREAT SONGS HAVE YOU WRITTEN?”). Barry did what you should do with lawful hate: harvest it into a survey, then a book—Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs—where “MacArthur Park,” “Yummy Yummy Yummy,” and “(You’re) Having My Baby” battled for worst. Lesson: emotion is energy; redirect it.

Pranks with Policy Teeth

When telemarketers sued to stop the Do Not Call Registry, Barry urged readers to call the American Teleservices Association and “share your constitutionally protected views.” Thousands called. The group shut off phones and issued press statements about his malice, and the New York Times covered the episode. Humor became civic action without hashtags.

Talk Like a Pirate, Then Get a Colonoscopy

After two Oregon friends pitched Talk Like a Pirate Day, Barry amplified it; September 19 remains a merry nonsense holiday (“Arrrr”). Then he wrote the colonoscopy column—MoviPrep as space-shuttle launch—that gastroenterologists still hand patients. Readers told him the piece got them screened and saved their lives. Barry shrugs at the hero narrative: he wrote it because it was funny. You don’t have to aim at inspiration to do good; you just have to be useful and honest at the right moment.

Audience Strategy

Call them “alert readers.” Credit them by name. Mail them back. Build the column as a game you play together. When the world gets heavy, give them a lever—and sometimes the lever dials a telemarketer.

Barry’s political reporting is fueled by a simple recognition: presidential campaigns are ritual theater. Candidates arrive hoarse and smiling like hostages; staffers stage “visuals”; voters pretend to ask policy while hoping for a cookie; the press corps gathers nightly at the Sheraton Wayfarer to ferment conventional wisdom that will be wrong by morning. Barry covers it as humane farce—less cynical than affectionate exasperation.

Faltering Humans, Not Punchlines

He followed Reubin Askew, competent and charisma-challenged, as he tried to find actual voters in a shopping center while reporters asked whether he’d drop out. He chronicled John Glenn, hero but not a spark plug, as a fish-tank-electrifier. Back home, an editor scolded Barry for demeaning “serious business.” Barry’s rebuttal—implicit in every column—is that the seriousness is safer when we can name the absurd rituals honestly.

Conventions: Mylar and Record Scratch

In San Francisco (1984), he roasted patriotic Mylar and delegate flag-waving newly learned from beer ads; in Dallas, he noted that GOP delegates clap on the wrong beat for “Hit the Road Jack.” During the 1988 Democratic convention, he created “People with Boxes on Their Heads,” stood silently, and got mobbed by media—a live experiment proving spectacle beats substance for airtime. (Compare to Abbie Hoffman’s Yippie stunts as media judo.)

Clinton’s Kinetic Charm

Barry witnessed Bill Clinton work a near-empty late-night Italian restaurant in Manchester, remember everyone at the table (including “booger joke” Barry), and leave reporters half-joking they wanted to campaign for him—or sleep with him. Barry’s stance on Clinton stays consistent: mock the hound-dogging, marvel at the survival instincts, never forget the humanity.

Barbara Bush and the Burp Cells

In a scene every awkward networker should study, Barry stands next to First Lady Barbara Bush during a photo. His intelligent brain knows to be silent; his “burp cells” blurt, “I shop in the same supermarket as your son Jeb.” Mrs. Bush, gracious, replies that Jeb is thirty-nine. Barry doubles down: “He’s very tall.” She rescues him a second time. The joke is on Barry, and that’s why the story sings: it restores dignity to the person with power.

Healthcare Theater and Security State

In 1994, Barry watched Dee Dee Myers refuse to be “drawn into a debate about numbers,” then trailed senators announcing plans designed to fail, including Moynihan’s bill introduced to be voted down. In 2004, Knight Ridder issued him an “Anti-Terrorist Kit” (evac hood, flashlight, whistle) then confiscated his unapproved flashlight at a security checkpoint. When farce becomes policy, good humor records the receipt.

Media, Bias, and Trust

Barry dislikes Donald Trump, states it clearly, and still argues that parts of the national media dropped the balance mask in 2016, deciding an existential threat justified asymmetrical coverage. He worries that when journalists look like partisans, credibility dies. You can disagree; his point is about trust as a renewable resource. A humorist who loves newspapers is sounding a fire alarm—not on politics, but on the craft that made his life possible.

Barry’s Rule for Political Humor

Mock the rituals and pomposity. Humanize the targets. Keep your own side eligible for a joke, or you’ll stop being useful.

Barry’s post-column adventures show how a craft built in small rooms can travel—awkwardly, hilariously—into national pop culture. The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson is first: a limo to Burbank, Shirley Wood feeding him wine, Johnny doing what great hosts do—set you up, let you land. Barry learned a vital speaker’s lesson: when the red light is on, trust the pro beside you.

The Hardware Store Signing That Sold Five Books

Fame did not follow him to retail. A Cape Cod hardware couple, charmed by his DIY parody The Taming of the Screw, invited him for a signing. They taped a note in the window. Barry sold maybe five copies in four hours and ended up helping customers find parts. If you make anything, memorize this scene: audiences are not portable, and humility is the only travel adapter.

Dave’s World and the Split Screen

CBS built a sitcom from his books; Harry Anderson played “Dave Barry” in a world full of wacky family lessons and a luxuriantly haired editor named Kenny. Barry’s real life was a quiet room, two farting dogs, and a deadline. He cameoed in an appliance-store bit—botching “Wild Thing” with Harry—and was relieved when the show ended. The creative principle: protect the difference between the brand version of you and the person who writes.

Novels, Movies, and 9/11

The collaborative serial Naked Came the Manatee (Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, et al.) led Neil Nyren at Putnam to ask Barry for a full novel. Big Trouble—Miami mayhem, Russian gangsters, Santería goats, and a suitcase nuke—was filmed by Barry Sonnenfeld with a starry cast (Tim Allen, Rene Russo, Zooey Deschanel, Dennis Farina, et al.). Then the premiere date: September 11, 2001. A comedy with an airplane nuke could not debut. The film was delayed and quietly released in 2002. Barry’s association with it remains emotionally tethered to that day. Sometimes the world redraws your joke for you; you accept the scar.

Rock Bottom Remainders

Kathi Goldmark’s author band became Barry’s community: Amy Tan, Stephen King, Scott Turow, Mitch Albom, Roy Blount Jr., and ringers who could actually play. Al Kooper aimed for “faint odor.” Warren Zevon loved the hang. One night in LA, Bruce Springsteen appeared and sang backup while Barry led “Gloria.” The good life is often this: being the least famous person in the world’s happiest bar band.

Peter and the Starcatchers

Ridley Pearson asked: How did Peter Pan meet Hook? Their YA prequel became five books and a Broadway play (Rick Elice’s Peter and the Starcatcher, five Tonys). Barry discovered that Disney press events sometimes lock you for fifteen minutes in a small room with a cast member who must remain in character as Peter Pan. (There is no conversational safe word.)

Oscars with Steve Martin

“Hi Dave, it’s Steve Martin.” Barry joined a dream team (Rita Rudner, Bruce Vilanch, et al.) to write the 2003 Oscars. In the backstage writers’ room, Steve’s “ya, ya, ya” meant no; taptaptap on the laptop meant maybe; standing up to perform meant yes. After Michael Moore’s antiwar speech, the team needed a tension diffuser fast; Steve came out with: “It’s so sweet backstage… The Teamsters are helping Michael Moore into the trunk of his limo.” Boom. Barry learned how precision and kindness can coexist under terrifying clocks.

Hollywood Development Is a Bit

Barry and Alan Zweibel (It’s Garry Shandling’s Show) have had a screenplay “in development” for over a decade—rewritten for Tom Cruise, then Adam Sandler, then Emma Stone, perhaps a singing pig, possibly a Hulu series about transgender Amish flamingo breeders. Conference calls reschedule forever. Money flows from a mystery bathroom-renovation industry. The bit is true because the bit is endless. If you’re tempted by Hollywood, bring a sandwich.

Portable Skill

Write clean leads and alive verbs; be great in a room; and remember the best career moments feel like Springsteen singing backup for you while you do the most joyful thing you’re barely qualified to do.

In 2005, Barry ended his weekly column at the peak of its reach (roughly 500 papers). His two reasons are a playbook for any long-game creative: (1) stop before you become the guy everyone says “used to be funnier,” and (2) make room for other work and people. Dorothy Parker’s line—anyone can say “I don’t think that’s funny”—hung on his wall as a talisman against denial.

Grief, Friendship, and What Matters

Cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, Barry’s friend and collaborator (three Pulitzers, Shoe creator), died in 2000 after cancer. At a cannon-ash scattering in Key West, MacNelly’s best friend, cartoonist Mike Peters, told Barry that in the hospital the staff didn’t know Jeff was famous; they just knew he was “Mr. MacNelly.” Barry distilled the only conclusion that has stuck: in the end, your career is not who you are—your people are. That conviction animates his exit: more time for family, fewer Sundays with a keyboard as a third parent.

Art Buchwald: Not Dying, Yet

Barry’s idol and friend Art Buchwald—who invited him into the imaginary American Academy of Humor Columnists (members: Buchwald, Russell Baker, Erma Bombeck, Art Hoppe, and Barry)—checked into hospice in 2006, refused dialysis, and then… didn’t die for months. He loved hospice life (“everybody treats me like a million dollars”), then left hospice, then wrote again, then finally died in 2007. At the Kennedy Center celebration, Barry spoke alongside Bradlee, Brokaw, and Wallace; a video showed Reagan laughing at Art’s jokes. Barry misses the era when political humor punched up and across—when it was okay to be funny about everybody without first checking the party registration.

Boomerhood and Bodies

Now in his late 70s, Barry inventories doctors like a softball team and jokes about HDPs, CDFVs, and a Louisville Slugger prostate exam that feels much bigger than a finger. The point isn’t to mock aging; it’s to give you permission to laugh while acknowledging that everything is, in fact, falling apart. He also gently skewers Boomer scolding—your music sucks; get off TikTok—while offering the only generalizable advice: it’s mostly going to be okay.

The Opera Corpse

After joking that opera can kill mammals at three football fields’ distance (an okapi reportedly died near a rehearsal), Barry accepted Eugene Opera’s invitation to play a corpse in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. He lay under hot lights in itchy nightshirt and wig while professionals bellowed in Italian inches away. Death, he reports, is loud and itchy. He plans to avoid it when possible.

Six Nuggets to Keep

Barry’s distilled wisdom for you reads like refrigerator advice that actually helps: don’t confuse career with life; if someone is rude to the waiter, they’re not nice; somebody will always take it too seriously; your friends love you anyway; nobody cares if you can’t dance—dance; and—perhaps the hardest earned—it’s gonna be OK. He has lived through nuclear scares, wars, market panics, pandemics, and breakdancing becoming an Olympic sport; most catastrophes didn’t happen, and the ones that did became stories we survived together.

Exit Strategy

Quit while your voice still sounds like you. Keep your people close. Aim your jokes where they relieve pressure, not pile it on. And when the winds of panic pick up again, remember the Barry Constant: probably, it’s going to be okay.