A long time ago, in a media environment far, far away, an editor walked into my office and dropped a pile of books by Dave Barry on my desk. “Here’s an idea,” he said. “Read these and figure out how he does it.”
At the time, Barry was a weekly humor columnist at the Miami Herald, which, at the time, was a newspaper. By tradition, humor columns in newspapers were pretty dreary. For one thing, labeling any piece of writing “humor” discourages discerning readers from finding it funny; discerning readers like to decide these things for themselves. Beyond this terrible handicap, newspaper humorists shared a problem with their employers: They had to satisfy, or at least not offend, a large enough audience to stay in business, which encouraged a timidity and blandness that made humor nearly impossible. Too much humor could get a humorist fired.
Dave Barry was different. Dave Barry was funny—and not just funny but consistently funny, line by line and paragraph to paragraph, week after week. Yet he was astonishingly popular. By the late 1980s, the Herald was syndicating his column to more than 500 newspapers. (Yes! The world once contained 500 newspapers!) A TV network created a situation comedy about him, Dave’s World, which ran for four seasons. Even more: He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. A Pulitzer itself is nearly meaningless as a measure of quality—Thomas L. Friedman has won three of them—but anyone who can get a laugh out of the self-important, humor-impaired stiffs who sit on Pulitzer committees deserves a prize. You might as well try to jolly up a board of oncologists or the docents at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Barry seemed to be a magician. I didn’t know anyone who didn’t like his stuff. My editor’s idea of trying to figure out what made it tick technically, isolating the elements that, combined in a Barry joke, to combust into belly laughs, struck me as a fine assignment. It would be a public service.
And then I tried to do it.
