Dave Barry is the eternal class clown

USA Today

25-05-2025

Dave Barry is the eternal class clown | The Excerpt
On a special episode (first released on May 25, 2025) of The Excerpt podcast: Nationally-syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry memoir chronicles his life mostly spent joking around.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, May 25th, 2025, and this is special episode of The Excerpt. Think back, do you remember the person voted class clown at your high school? Is that person still doing funny antics in adulthood? One person who can nab that claim to fame is Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Dave Barry. Barry has made a career out of being a jokester, writing a nationally syndicated humor column for two decades. He's also a best-selling author. His latest book is Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass. Class Clown is on bookshelves now. Thanks for joining me on The Excerpt, Dave.
Dave Barry:
Thanks for having me, Dana.
Dana Taylor:
You've written a lot of books. Why this memoir and why now?
Dave Barry:
Well, I was a little nervous about writing a memoir. Why now is like, I'm 77 years old. If I don't write it now, I don't know when I'm going to write it. And my editor at Simon & Schuster, Priscilla Paton, and I agreed that maybe this would be a good time to write a memoir. I hope she was right. I was a little nervous about talking about myself, which I don't usually. Well, I do talk about myself, but I'm usually kidding. In this case, I'm sometimes telling the truth.
Dana Taylor:
How have your experiences in childhood shaped your career as a humorist?
Dave Barry:
My parents were really funny people. It's weird because both of them had sort of tragic elements to their lives. My dad dealt... fought with alcoholism much of his life. He recovered. My mom committed suicide after my dad died, which was brutal for everybody. But this is going to be weird to say, my mom was the funniest person I've ever known. She had a very dark sense of humor, but it was a real, edgy, strong sense of humor. And despite what I just said, I had a remarkably happy childhood, and both my parents encouraged humor in our family, and so that's kind of where I got started trying to make my family laugh.
Dana Taylor:
I was going to say you didn't shy away from serious matters including intense and vulnerable moments with, as you've said, both your mom and dad. Can you tell us more about one of them and how did these moments change you?
Dave Barry:
Well, I'll take my mom. She dealt with depression all her life, and ultimately it's what she lost to. She had a tough childhood. She grew up in the depression, and she literally lived in a sod house in Nebraska when she was a kid. But she had this ability to always see humor in things and never... it was the one rule in our lives and our family. You don't take anything, especially yourself too seriously. That was our environment as we were kids. Although she had her demons, she didn't let them affect us. What we saw from her was a very funny person who loved us very much, took good care of us. She couldn't beat them in the end, but she passed along that that sense of humor, that edginess, that willingness to not take yourself seriously. That's really what made me.
Dana Taylor:
Dave, I know you were a news reporter before you pivoted to writing humor columns at the Miami Herald. What lessons from your early journalism career have stayed with you?
Dave Barry:
Well, I love journalism. I love to be in a newspaper reporter. I learned everything I knew about journalism at this little newspaper in Pennsylvania, but I also learned the quirks and foibles of the newspaper world, the way newspapers tend to present themselves as authorities on everything. And the fact is, it was really people like me writing the newspapers. So when I switched over to the humor side, I could make fun of newspapers and the news business, but from a position of A, love and B, deep knowledge, I've been there. I've written those stories, and I think that really helped me kind of connect with the newspaper reading audience like they were used to reading newspapers that took themselves pretty seriously, and I was a person who came along and said, "You don't have to take us that seriously. Some of us are clowns. I'm one of them."
Dana Taylor:
You spend a good deal of your book talking about reader feedback, some nice, some not so nice. Why were these important to you? I know you wrote about how you even enjoyed the hate mail.
Dave Barry:
Yeah, my reader... I loved my readers. My readers did not all love me. One of the things you learn if you write in any kind of column, but especially a humor column, is no matter what you write, somebody's going to be really angry at you and want you fired. And so there was a certain percentage of my readers, I called them the humor impaired, who never figured out that I was kidding. Like if I would say, [inaudible 00:04:43] we all know Abraham Lincoln invented the light bulb and then go on and they would write letters to the editor, "Abraham Lincoln did not invent the..." and then usually they would get it wrong. They say, Benjamin Franklin invented the light bulb.
But anyway, I love those people. They enabled me to write whole columns about the reaction I got to my columns. Then of course, the vast majority of my readers did get the joke, and that's why I was able to stay in the news. That's why they didn't fire me when they were told to by the humor impaired readers. So my readers made my column work. I got so much from them. I got so many ideas from them, and they would send me clippings about weird things happening. I wrote a million columns based on that stuff. So I put a lot of my readers into this book. I mean, they're a big reason why I made it, I was successful as a columnist.
Dana Taylor:
What's your take on humorous power to change the national conversation, which has become so partisan with last November's election?
Dave Barry:
I don't think that humorists have that much power to change anything, to be honest, if I'm being brutally honest. I mean, I think some of us would like to think we do, but we don't really. I kind of don't like where we've gone with humor, political humor in this country. I talk about this in the book, how I kind of grew up in the era of Johnny Carson and Art Buchwald, people like that who were very funny, but you didn't really know their politics or it didn't matter what their politics were because they laughed at whoever was in charge, whoever was running the country, and everybody got that that if you laughed at the leader, didn't mean you hated your country, would mean you were an evil person or whatever.
And a lot of the humor, I think now, a lot of political humor is basically tactical. It's like it's aimed at one side or the other side so the people who agree with you can laugh at it, but the people who don't agree with you hate you for it. There's just a lot of anger in the humor now, and I think that's unfortunate. I was happier with the way it worked when people kind of agreed, "Well, we're all on the same side. We may disagree politically, but we are on the same side." We sort of lost that I think.
Dana Taylor:
I'm sure some of our listeners and viewers are very inspired by your unique career path. What's your advice for writers who'd like to become humorous?
Dave Barry:
Oh man. Well have a day job for sure. It's tough. I used to hear all the time from people who wanted to be newspaper columnists. There's not that many anymore because there's just not that many newspapers anymore. So people who want to do humor have to sort of go more toward the internet, some stack and places like that, or stand-up comedy or writing for television, whatever. And my advice is always the same thing. If you're funny, eventually people will discover you. They will recognize that you're funny, but it's going to take a while usually for that to happen, and while you're waiting for it to happen, you kind of have to be able to support yourself somehow. So that's the most important thing. Don't give up, but don't be too optimistic that it's just going to suddenly happen for you.
Dana Taylor:
When people sit down to write their memoirs, it often makes a person introspective about their lives. Looking back, is there anything you'd do differently, a moment that gives you pause or an inflection point for you?
Dave Barry:
More inflection point than regret. I've really been very, very lucky. I mean, I did not ever think until I was in my mid-30s it didn't occur to me I would be able to make a living writing humor. I was doing other things. I was working as a newspaper reporter. I was teaching effective writing seminars to business people, but I was writing humor whenever I could, but I didn't think that would ever become a real job. I got several big lucky breaks along the way. I wrote a couple of stories that just caught the attention of a bunch of editors to the topics I happened to be on and got launched that way. I still feel just like that. I've been very, very lucky more than anything else. I had this incredible career where I never had to do anything from my mid-30s on. I never had to work. I just had fun basically.
Dana Taylor:
What's next for you Dave?
Dave Barry:
After this memoir? I guess continued immaturity, followed by death. Not in any hurry, but I mean, that's what I see coming.
Dana Taylor:
That's the most unique ending I've had to an interview. Dave, thank you so much for being on The Excerpt.
Dave Barry:
It's my pleasure, Dana. Thanks for having me.
Dana Taylor:
Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Kaely Monahan for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [e-mail]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.