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USA Today
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Dave Barry is the eternal class clown
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. Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here 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 podcasts@ Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.
New York Times
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Dave Barry Is 77 and Still a Clown, Here to Amuse You
'All children, except one, grow up,' J.M. Barrie wrote in 'Peter Pan.' Let's make it two. Dave Barry has a new memoir titled 'Class Clown.' On the back flap, the floppy-haired author, now 77, looks all of 45. It's as if he's sealed in the amber of his own booger jokes. His prose style hasn't matured either, thank heavens. It's as ideally sophomoric as ever, if more rueful around the edges, what with civilization aflame and all that. 'Who is Dave Barry?' young readers may ask, alas. Let me take you back to the early 1980s, the twilight of the era of the great syndicated columnists, those ink-stained champions whose work was published in hundreds of newspapers. Art Buchwald, Erma Bombeck and Russell Baker were among them, and they were by and large terrific, but they were generally wry rather than laugh-out-loud funny. Barry brought the laugh-out-loud funny. Here, for example, is his advice in a piece on wilderness survival, written before he was syndicated: Newspapers were a daily diet of Serious Things, and Barry was profoundly unserious. He increased the gaiety of the nation. A day that began with 'Doonesbury' and a Dave Barry column had a better chance of being a good day. The New York Times, being serious indeed, did not run either one of these things, so it could seem like a pot-au-feu without its gherkins. I felt a bit smug when Barry went national, because I'd been on to him early. I spent the second half of my youth in Southwest Florida, and my parents were subscribers to The Miami Herald. Barry got his major-newspaper start writing for that publication's Sunday magazine, Tropic. When I went up north to college, in those pre-internet years, people would mail me clippings of his best stuff, including columns on exploding toilets and cows. He was the LeBron James of exploding toilet humor. 'Class Clown,' as funny books go, is a home run — albeit a shallow, wind-aided home run. Barry leans heavily on old clips of his writing to fill this book up, and that's fine, but near the end the bag of leftovers grows soggy. Barry has bragged about hating to work very hard, though it is difficult work indeed to give your prose this kind of easy, goofy feeling. Barry was born in 1947 in Armonk, N.Y., 30 miles north of Manhattan. His father, a Presbyterian minister, was the executive director of the New York City Mission Society, a social-services nonprofit for impoverished children. His dad loved the humorist Robert Benchley and kept his books in the house. Barry read these when he was 11 or 12 and they influenced his writing style. His mother, who had worked on the Manhattan Project as a secretary, seemed to others like a typical suburban housewife. 'But she was not like other moms,' Barry writes. 'She had an edge — a sharp, dark sense of humor coiled inside her, always ready to strike.' He derived his comic sensibility from her. Of course, 'funny isn't the same thing as happy,' he writes. His mother was prone to depression, and not long after her husband's death in 1984 she died by suicide. Barry was a wiseass at school. After teachers encouraged him, he wrote humor columns for both his high school and college newspapers. The college was Haverford in Pennsylvania — he thinks the school's official motto should be 'We Never Heard of You, Either.' He grew his hair long, smoked his share of pot and played in a party band called Federal Duck. The band was, to him, the best thing about being in college. He graduated in 1969 and escaped the draft by becoming a conscientious objector. That his father was a clergyman, and that Haverford had Quaker connections, did not hurt. He has some guilt about this, alongside anger that America was in Vietnam in the first place. Barry worked for two summers in college as an intern at Congressional Quarterly in Washington, a job he got through family connections. He fell into newspaper work in his 20s, becoming the city editor then news editor for a suburban Philadelphia paper. 'I found my identity as a newspaper guy,' he writes, 'which deep down inside I will always be.' He took an unlikely 7-year detour into teaching business writing to the employees of major companies. It made him a better writer: He began writing humor columns again in his spare time. Behind the world's silver linings lie dark clouds, but also stupid clouds, and those only Barry seemed to see. These columns appeared in smaller papers, then in larger ones. The Herald officially brought him on in 1983, and he was off like a Jet Ski, with flat water ahead of him and lively wake behind. The Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary came in 1988. A photo of Barry being ecstatically hugged by his son ran in some newspapers. The photo still makes Barry laugh because his son was not celebrating his father's big day — he was reacting to the fact that Barry had just promised him a Nintendo. That son is now an investigative journalist at The Wall Street Journal and has received a Pulitzer of his own. Barry had legions of fans, some of them credentialed. In 1991 Justice John Paul Stevens wrote to him on Supreme Court letterhead, enclosing an advertisement for the anti-flatulence product Beano, suggesting it might spark a column. It did! Barry 'conducted a scientific test of Beano under the most demanding possible field conditions — a Mexican restaurant' and wrote about the results. A few newspapers declined to print the column, calling it tasteless. Barry got funny revenge in print on those papers, but you'll have to read the book to find out how. The Beano column was, to borrow Lady Saphir's words from Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Patience,' 'nonsense, yes, perhaps — but, oh, what precious nonsense.' Barry kept his Sunday column until he retired in 2005, worried that he'd shot his bolt. He wrote a ton of books, including the novel 'Big Trouble' (1999), which was turned into a movie that was sunk by Sept. 11 — 'not a good time to release a wacky movie comedy, especially one with a suitcase nuke on an airplane' — and a reinterpretation of 'Peter Pan,' co-written with Ridley Pearson, that became an award-winning Broadway play. 'Dave's World,' a sitcom loosely based on Barry's columns and books, ran for four seasons in the '90s on CBS. Barry has mixed feelings about that show. He's most enjoyed being a core member, alongside Stephen King, Amy Tan and others, in the Rock Bottom Remainders, an almost competent all-writer band that has jammed with Warren Zevon and Bruce Springsteen. This book never goes too deep. Barry had two early marriages before marrying his current wife in 1996, for example, but no details are provided. He feels like a lucky man to have been paid for doing something that he loves. But he's contemplative when people tell him he's made the world a better place because of his writing. 'My response to these well-intentioned people has always been: Thanks, but I'd probably be doing this even if it made the world a worse place,' he writes. 'It's pretty much the only thing I know how to do. It's in my DNA. I'm a class clown.'
Washington Post
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
From Florida's finest writers, some sunshine for our times
Between them, Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen are authors or co-authors of more than 70 books,with many millions of copies sold. Their works have been adapted into movies, TV shows and plays. Yet their latest offerings — a memoir by Barry, another novel by Hiaasen — feel especially timely. This matched set of Florida's finest writers comes at our fraught, conflicted times with confidence and clear eyes.
Washington Post
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Dave Barry looks back at growing up without growing up
It took me a while to count the works listed under 'Also by Dave Barry' in the front of 'Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up.' It would appear that Barry has written or co-written 29 works of nonfiction and 16 of fiction.
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Yale and Master Lock Unveil Latest Professional Products at ISC West 2025
The Brands Double Down on Commitment to Serve More Professional Installers with Industry-Leading Security Solutions LAS VEGAS, March 31, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today at ISC West, trusted security brands Yale and Master Lock announced their newest lines of smart locks for businesses and multi-family facilities. Part of Fortune Brands Innovations, Inc. (NYSE: FBIN or "Fortune Brands"), Yale and Master Lock are expanding their professional portfolios to offer a new level of security and convenience for multi-family properties, offices, schools, healthcare facilities, small and medium businesses, and more. "By launching these new product lines under Yale and Master Lock, we are poised to serve a greater share of the professional market," said Dave Barry, President of Security & Connected Products at Fortune Brands. "Yale is continuing its legacy of providing flexible solutions for multi-family environments, simplifying access decisions for our partners and operators. Master Lock is delivering solutions to secure access for essential places like schools, healthcare facilities, small and medium businesses, and more." Yale's new multi-family product line will serve partners and operators with innovative, flexible, and scalable access control solutions. Designed to enhance security at every entrance, the Yale Pro® 2 Interconnected Lock, Yale Pro® 2 Mortise Lock, and Yale Pro® 2 Cylindrical Lock include key features such as: Flexible Connectivity: With Yale's range of technology offerings, multi-family properties can choose between: Z-Wave (800 series) module offering long range support and SmartStart Zigbee module offering app compatibility with top smart home partners Wi-Fi module offering remote access and easy app management Single Action Egress: Meeting all code requirements, multi-family apartment doors can be unlocked in one motion, all with top ANSI/BHMA grading and 90- to 190-minute fire ratings (fire ratings vary by model). Tamper-Proof: Each product is available as a key-free model to provide convenient, keyless access for residence doors—so they can't be picked, there are no keys to lose, and installers save money by no longer having to address tenant lockouts or rekey apartments after residents move out. Award Winning Design: Modeled after Yale's award-winning residential product line, Yale Assure Lock® 2, the new multi-family product line features seamless pairing for apartment buildings, no matter what lock style is chosen for apartment or common area doors. Master Lock is also unveiling a new line of locks designed for commercial applications. The Master Lock Electronic and Connected Mortise Locks and the Master Lock Electronic and Connected Cylindrical Locks offer more advanced access management and tracking, providing commercial owners the confidence that their properties are protected. The introduction of these new products will expand Master Lock's renowned brand applications to include schools, healthcare facilities, small and medium businesses, and more. Key features include: Flexible Connectivity: With different technology offerings, installers can choose the right technology for their customers, including: Z-Wave (800 series) module offering long range support and SmartStart Zigbee module offering app compatibility with top smart home partners Non-connected (no module) offering keypad access only Convenient, Key-Free Access: Control access to common areas, exterior doors, residence doors, and stairwells to enhance facility security with access control at every opening. Options for Every Door: Product options are available for standard cylindrical or mortise door prep, and offer top ANSI/BHMA Grade 1 and a 180-minute fire rating. These products will be available for customers to order later this year. Attendees at ISC West can learn more about how Yale and Master Lock are creating safer multi-family housing and businesses at booth #24131, or visit and for more information. About Fortune Brands Innovations Fortune Brands Innovations, Inc. is an industry-leading innovation company dedicated to creating smarter, safer and more beautiful homes and improving lives. The Company's driving purpose is to elevate every life by transforming spaces into havens. The Company is a brand, innovation and channel leader focused on exciting, supercharged categories in the home products, security and commercial building markets. The Company's portfolio of brands includes Moen, House of Rohl, Aqualisa, SpringWell, Therma-Tru, Larson, Fiberon, Master Lock, SentrySafe and Yale residential. Fortune Brands is headquartered in Deerfield, Illinois and trades on the NYSE as FBIN. To learn more, visit About Yale Home Yale Home is a leader in smart home security that protects the people, places, and things we love most. We secure homes throughout the United States and Canada with our innovative smart locks and smart storage solutions to protect front doors, interior doors, cabinets, package deliveries, and more. The Yale residential brand in the United States and Canada is part of Fortune Brands Innovations, Inc. For more information, visit About Master Lock The Master Lock Company is recognized worldwide as the authentic, enduring name in padlocks and security products. The company offers a broad range of innovative security and safety solutions for consumer, commercial, and industrial end-users. The Master Lock Company is part of Fortune Brand Innovations, Inc. Visit to learn more. View source version on Contacts Media Contact fbin@ Sign in to access your portfolio
