Dave Barry's Greatest Hits
Like a lot of people, I've been trying to find way to occupy my time and my mind in the wake of COVID-19. After all, if all we do is talk and think constantly about it, the anxiety of this microscopic threat might well overwhelm us.
As always, my main source of solace has been sources of laughter. The last two weeks, I've recommended shows that make me laugh. This week, however, I thought I'd recommend a book I've been dipping in and out of for the last few weeks. It's a collection of humorous essays titled Dave Barry's Greatest Hits.
For those of you unfamiliar with Dave Barry, let me provide you with a brief professional biography. Barry is a noted journalist, who for many years has based himself in Miami, Florida. There, he's written for a number of different publications, but his main venue from the 1983 through 2005, was the Miami Herald. In that venue, he published a regular column, through which he expressed his many opinions and thoughts on the world he observed, and it was for that column that he eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1988. Since 2005, he's written many other books, including comic novels, parody, and humorous travelogues.
Many of the columns published in the first five years of his tenure at the Herald feature in this collection Greatest Hits. The title isn't an ironic one.
Barry's two great sources of subject matter are the two areas from which many comedians and humorists draw for their humor: everyday observation and family life. Out of this, seemingly, small pool of subject matter, he managed to produce 80 essays, each one of which has its own wry and funny charm.
Much like the father of American Humor, Mark Twain, Barry's approach to exploring his subjects through the lens of humor is very simple. He picks a subject, something simple, such as his son's obsession with dinosaurs in his essay, "A Boy and His Diplodocus." He then finds every single nook and cranny of the subject where he can inject his own brand of funny putty. For instance, there is the scene he describes his son convincing him to convince some German tourists that he was, in fact, a Gorgosaurus:
"Tell them I'm a Gorgosaurus," he said.
"You tell them," I said.
"Gorgosauruses can't talk," Robert point out rolling his eyes. Sometimes he can't believe what an idiot his father is.
Anybody who has every had a small child knows what happened next. What happened was Robert, using the powerful whining ability that mother nature gives to young children to compensate for the fact that they have no other useful skills, got me to go over to this elderly foreign couple I had never seen before, point to my son, who was looking as awesome and terrifying as a three-year-old can look lumbering around in a bathing suit with a little read anchor sewn on the crotch, and say, "He's a Gorgosaurus.""
You'd have to be completely humorless not to giggle, or at the very least smirk, at that description. (Especially if you're a parent. You're probably laughing out loud simply because it's not you.)
What makes Greatest Hits a wonderful book is a quality I hinted at earlier. It's a great book to dip in and out of. Like any collection of shorter writing complied into book form, you don't have to start at the beginning and go on straight through. You can turn to the table of contents right at the start, peruse the long list of each of the 80 essays titles, and flip to whichever one catches the fancy of your funny-bone at the moment. I guarantee, no matter where you start though, by the end of your reading, you'll have a smile on your face.
My current personal favorite at the moment, simply for its meta-quality title, is the first essay in the collection, "Why Humor is Funny." If you want a sample of Barry's wit, follow this link to SoundCloud to listen to my personal reading of it.
As always, my main source of solace has been sources of laughter. The last two weeks, I've recommended shows that make me laugh. This week, however, I thought I'd recommend a book I've been dipping in and out of for the last few weeks. It's a collection of humorous essays titled Dave Barry's Greatest Hits.For those of you unfamiliar with Dave Barry, let me provide you with a brief professional biography. Barry is a noted journalist, who for many years has based himself in Miami, Florida. There, he's written for a number of different publications, but his main venue from the 1983 through 2005, was the Miami Herald. In that venue, he published a regular column, through which he expressed his many opinions and thoughts on the world he observed, and it was for that column that he eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1988. Since 2005, he's written many other books, including comic novels, parody, and humorous travelogues.
Many of the columns published in the first five years of his tenure at the Herald feature in this collection Greatest Hits. The title isn't an ironic one.
Barry's two great sources of subject matter are the two areas from which many comedians and humorists draw for their humor: everyday observation and family life. Out of this, seemingly, small pool of subject matter, he managed to produce 80 essays, each one of which has its own wry and funny charm.
Much like the father of American Humor, Mark Twain, Barry's approach to exploring his subjects through the lens of humor is very simple. He picks a subject, something simple, such as his son's obsession with dinosaurs in his essay, "A Boy and His Diplodocus." He then finds every single nook and cranny of the subject where he can inject his own brand of funny putty. For instance, there is the scene he describes his son convincing him to convince some German tourists that he was, in fact, a Gorgosaurus:
"Tell them I'm a Gorgosaurus," he said.
"You tell them," I said.
"Gorgosauruses can't talk," Robert point out rolling his eyes. Sometimes he can't believe what an idiot his father is.
Anybody who has every had a small child knows what happened next. What happened was Robert, using the powerful whining ability that mother nature gives to young children to compensate for the fact that they have no other useful skills, got me to go over to this elderly foreign couple I had never seen before, point to my son, who was looking as awesome and terrifying as a three-year-old can look lumbering around in a bathing suit with a little read anchor sewn on the crotch, and say, "He's a Gorgosaurus.""
You'd have to be completely humorless not to giggle, or at the very least smirk, at that description. (Especially if you're a parent. You're probably laughing out loud simply because it's not you.)
What makes Greatest Hits a wonderful book is a quality I hinted at earlier. It's a great book to dip in and out of. Like any collection of shorter writing complied into book form, you don't have to start at the beginning and go on straight through. You can turn to the table of contents right at the start, peruse the long list of each of the 80 essays titles, and flip to whichever one catches the fancy of your funny-bone at the moment. I guarantee, no matter where you start though, by the end of your reading, you'll have a smile on your face.
My current personal favorite at the moment, simply for its meta-quality title, is the first essay in the collection, "Why Humor is Funny." If you want a sample of Barry's wit, follow this link to SoundCloud to listen to my personal reading of it.
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