Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson first spoke to humorist Dave Barry back in 1993. At that time, Hobson was an 11-year-old interviewer for “Treehouse Radio” for radio station WILL in Urbana, Illinois.
Hobson catches up with Barry as his new collection of humorous essays, “ You Can Date Boys When You’re Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About,” hits bookshelves ( excerpt below).
They talk about how comedy has changed since that time, Barry’s thoughts on the comic potential of the Obama administration and how he feels about mining his family for comic material.
Interview Highlights: Dave Barry
On how comedy has changed over the years
“It’s gotten to be a lot shorter. There’s a huge emphasis on being able to tweet things, so I think more and more people sort of focus on that, on, you know, what is a quick gag that I can come up with, how can I show my Internet hipness. There’s a lot of that. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad, you know, because there’s a lot of really funny stuff on Twitter. It’s just, I think it’s taken away a little bit from focusing on longer forms of humor, but, you know that’s what happens.”
On whether he’s writing for the same audience
“I never really write for an audience. I mean, I want people to laugh, I want people to think it’s funny. But I basically write what I think’s funny, what would amuse me, and I think you do better in the end if you stick to that approach, than if you keep trying to adapt to whatever seems to be popular.”
On his grammar essay about ‘affect’ versus ‘effect’
“This essay is based on a character I used do when I wrote my newspaper column, called ‘Ask Mister Language Person.’ And Mister Language Person was a language expert who every single thing he said was incredibly wrong, always. Like in this chapter, ‘why you should not end sentences with a preposition,’ and the answer is ‘because Hitler ended sentences in a preposition.’ But what used to get me about that when I wrote these columns, is the mail I would get. And they would often be from English teachers, but sometimes from others, people who I call the humor impaired who didn’t seem to notice that I was kidding. And here would be a column with literally 200 incorrect statements or ungrammatical sentences and they’d have circled two of them. ‘The way you call yourself an authority, Mr. Barry, perhaps you should check your own grammar.’”
Book Excerpt: ‘You Can Date Boys When You’re Forty’
By Dave Barry
In the movie Taken, Liam Neeson plays a father whose daughter is kidnapped by evil pervert sex traffickers with foreign accents. Fortunately, Liam’s character is a former spy, and he uses his espionage skills to go on a desperate quest, during which he terminates an estimated 125 bad guys with his bare hands before he finally tracks down his daughter and saves her.
Taken is on cable a lot, and every time I stumble across it I watch the whole thing because it combines two artistic themes with classic enduring appeal:
Liam Neeson beating the crap out of foreign
perverts, and
Fatherhood.
If you’re a man with a daughter, you can’t watch this movie without imagining yourself in Liam’s position—wondering how far youwould go for the sake of your daughter, what desperate life-threatening measures you would be willing to take.
Well, I don’t have to wonder anymore. I know exactly what I would do because I have already made the ultimate sacrifice: I took my daughter to a Justin Bieber concert.
How bad was it? you ask.
It was so bad that I cannot hear you asking me how bad it was. My hearing has been destroyed by seventeen thousand puberty-crazed girls shrieking at the decibel level of global thermonuclear war. It turns out that the noise teenage girls make to express rapturous happiness is the same noise they would make if their feet were being gnawed off by badgers. Also, for some reason being happy makes them cry: The girl next to me spent the entire concert bawling and screaming, quote, “I LOVE YOU!” directly into my right ear.
She was not screaming to me of course. She was screaming to cute-boy Canadian heartthrob Justin Bieber, as were all the other girls, including my daughter Sophie and her BFF, 1 Stella Sable. Sophie and Stella wore matching purple tutus (purple, as you are no doubt aware, is Justin’s favorite color) and spent the entire concert bouncing up and down, shrieking and vibrating like tuning forks. They are bigfans. Sophie has covered one corner of her room—she calls it the Corner of Appreciation—with pictures of Justin Bieber gazing at the camera with the soulful expression of a person who truly believes, deep in his heart, that he is the best-looking human ever. On March 1 (which, as you are no doubt aware, is Justin Bieber’s birthday) Sophie posted on Instagram 2 that he is, quote, “the perfectest person on the planet.”
One day, while I was looking at the Corner of Appreciation, Sophie and I had the following exchange:
Me:You know, Justin Bieber doesn’t have any idea who you are.
Sophie:Not yet.
This exchange disturbed me. I don’t want my daughter’s life goal to be to meet (and I say this respectfully) an overhyped twerp. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not one of those fathers who think no man will ever be good enough for their daughters. I’m sure there’s somebody out there who is worthy of Sophie, and I sincerely hope that she meets him someday, with “someday” defined as “after I have been dead for a minimum of three months and all efforts to revive me have failed.” Even then, if Sophie is going to go on dates with this male, I want to go along. My body can ride in the backseat, with an air freshener.
Speaking of death: My wife nearly experienced it before the concert started. I have seen my wife perform some amazing physical feats; I once saw her produce, from somewhere inside her body, a live human being. But nothing I’ve seen her do was as brave, if not foolhardy, as what she did when we got to the Justin Bieber concert; namely, she purchased officially licensed Justin Bieber merchandise for Sophie and Stella. To do this, she had to battle her way through what was basically a mom riot—several hundred frenzied women 3 engaged in a desperate elbow-throwing struggle against other moms to reach the merchandise counter so they could pay upwards of fifty dollars apiece for Justin Bieber T-shirts for their daughters.
God forbid this should happen, but: If we ever go to war with Japan again, and they embed their forces deep inside heavily fortified caves on Iwo Jima again, instead of sending in the Marines, all we need to do is put the word around that the Japanese forces are in possession of overpriced Justin Bieber merchandise. Within minutes they will be overrun by moms fully capable of decapitating an opposing shopper using only their MasterCards.
The concert itself was also pretty brutal, lasting (this is an estimate) twenty-seven hours. We had to stand the whole time because everybody else stood the whole time because that is how excited everybody was. Justin Bieber was preceded by two lesser heartthrobs. You could tell they ranked below Justin because they had fewer backup dancers. Your modern singing star does not go to the bathroom without backup dancers. Your modern musical concert consists of the singer prancing from one side of the stage to the other accompanied by a clot of dancers, everybody frantically performing synchronized dance moves and pelvic thrusts, looking like people having sex with invisible partners while being pursued by bees. At times the dancing looks silly, but it serves a vital artistic function; namely, keeping you from noticing that the music (and I say this respectfully) sucks.
OK, perhaps “sucks” is too strong a word 4. Perhaps I am just being a flatulent old fossil clinging to memories of the Golden Age of Rock ’n’ Roll, back when I was young and all four Beatles were alive and nobody I knew had ever heard of gum disease. Musical acts in those days didn’t have to distract you with dancers because, goldarnit, they had talent. When you went to see, for example, Sly and the Family Stone, you did not go expecting to see dance routines. You went expecting to see a funktastic band made up of highly entertaining musical performers who, in all probability, were not going to show up.
Headline acts that failed to appear were a distinguishing feature of the Golden Age of Rock ’n’ Roll. Back then, the concertgoing experience often consisted of sitting in an auditorium amid dense clouds of smoke, listening to some nervous promoter announce, for the eighth time in three hours, that the headline act was at that very momenten route to the venue, when, in fact, the headline act was passed out facedown in a puddle of vomit in an entirely different time zone.
But my point is that during the G. A. of R. and R., on those occasions when the headline acts didshow up, they didn’t race all over the stage inside a clot of hyperactive backup dancers. They stayed in one place, which made them easy to keep track of, which was helpful if you had spent some time inside the smoke cloud, if you know what I mean. Here’s an example of what I mean: In approximately 1969, I attended a performance by Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, and I was able to watch the entire show lying on my back on the floor next to the stage pretty much directly underneath one of the Youngbloods, who was known as “Banana.” I did get stepped on occasionally, but overall I had a relaxed, mellow experience as well as an excellent view of the band, which stayed in one place the whole night and never attempted any dance maneuvers, and which for all I know is still standing in basically the same spot at the Electric Factory.
If I had lain on the floor at the Justin Bieber concert, within seconds I would have been trampled into human lasagna. I had to stay on my feet in the throbbing, screaming crowd, which shrieked even louder whenever Justin and his backup dancers pranced past, or when Justin did something especially awesome, such as remove his sunglasses. The most exciting moment, which caused a level of shriekage that I’m sure alarmed dogs as far away as Canada, came when Justin took off his shirt and revealed his physique, which reminded me (and I say this respectfully) of the Geico Gecko.
But as thrilling as that was, it was not the highlight of the concert. The highlight, for me at least, came toward the end, when Sophie and Stella decided to execute their plan to invite Justin Bieber to their bat mitzvahs 5. They had both brought large square white envelopes containing official invitations: On Stella’s envelope, she had written, “Justin please come to my bat mitzvah ♥.” Sophie’s envelope said “I ♥ you! Please come to my Bat Mitzvah!” Their plan was to somehow get the invitations to Justin Bieber, who would read them and decide to attend their bat mitzvahs.
1 “BFF” stands for “Best Friends Forever.” This is a term that girls my daughter’s age use to describe essentially everyone they know.
2 Instagram is an Internet service that young people use to post photographs of themselves every eight minutes so their BFFs will not forget what they look like.
3 There were roughly eight men at the Justin Bieber concert, counting the janitorial staff.
4 Not really! The music sucks.
5 A bat mitzvah (for boys, it’s barmitzvah) is a Jewish religious ceremony in which a thirteen-year-old child formally becomes a thirteen-year-old child who has received a lot of gift checks from relatives he or she does not always know.
Excerpted from the book YOU CAN DATE BOYS WHEN YOU’RE FORTY by Dave Barry. Copyright © 2014 by Dave Barry. Reprinted with permission of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, a Penguin Random House Company.
Guest
- Dave Barry, author of “You Can Date Boys When You’re Forty.” He tweets @rayadverb.
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