Barry, Dave 1947-

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BARRY, Dave 1947-

PERSONAL: Born July 3, 1947, in Armonk, NY; son of David W. and Marion Barry; married Elizabeth Lenox Pyle, 1975 (marriage ended); married Michelle Kaufman, 1996; children: Robert, Sophie. Education: Haverford College, B.A., 1969.

ADDRESSES: Office—Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL 33132-1693.

CAREER: Daily Local News, West Chester, PA, reporter, 1971-75; worked for Associated Press, Philadelphia, PA, 1975-76; lecturer on effective writing for businesses for R. S. Burger Associates (consulting firm), 1975-83; freelance humor columnist, beginning 1980; Miami Herald, Miami, FL, humor columnist, 1983—.

AWARDS, HONORS: Distinguished Writing Award, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1986; Pulitzer Prize for commentary, 1988.

WRITINGS:

The Taming of the Screw: Several Million Homeowners' Problems Sidestepped, illustrated by Jerry O'Brien, Rodale Press (Emmaus, PA), 1983.

Babies and Other Hazards of Sex: How to Make a Tiny Person in Only Nine Months, with Tools You Probably Have around the Home, illustrated by Jerry O'Brien, Rodale Press (Emmaus, PA), 1984.

Bad Habits: A 100-Percent Fact-Free Book, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1985.

Stay Fit and Healthy until You're Dead, illustrated by Jerry O'Brien, Rodale Press (Emmaus, PA), 1985.

Claw Your Way to the Top: How to Become the Head of a Major Corporation in Roughly a Week, illustrated by Jerry O'Brien, Rodale Press (Emmaus, PA), 1986.

Dave Barry's Guide to Marriage and/or Sex, illustrated by Jerry O'Brien, Rodale Press (Emmaus, PA), 1987.

Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, Crown (New York, NY), 1988.

Homes and Other Black Holes: The Happy Homeowner's Guide, illustrated by Jeff McNelly, Fawcett (New York, NY), 1988.

Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States, Random House (Garden City, NY), 1989.

Dave Barry Turns Forty, Crown (New York, NY), 1990.

Dave Barry Talks Back, Crown (New York, NY), 1991.

Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need, Fawcett (New York, NY), 1991.

Davy Barry's Guide to Life, illustrated by Jerry O'Brien, Wings Books (New York, NY), 1991.

Dave Barry Does Japan = Deibu Bari ga "Nihon o Suru," Random House (Garden City, NY), 1992.

Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up, cartoons by Jeff MacNelly, Crown (New York, NY), 1994.

Dave Barry's Gift Guide to End All Gift Guides, Crown (New York, NY), 1994.

The World According to Dave Barry, Wings Books (New York, NY), 1994.

Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys: A Fairly Short Book, Random House (Garden City, NY), 1995.

Dave Barry in Cyberspace, Crown (New York, NY), 1996.

(With Jeff MacNelly) A Golf Handbook: All I Ever Learned I Forgot by the Third Fairway, Triumph Books (Chicago, IL), 1997.

Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus, Crown (New York, NY), 1997.

Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs, Andrews McMeel (Kansas City, MO), 1997.

Dave Barry Turns Fifty, Crown (New York, NY), 1998.

Big Trouble, Putnam (New York, NY), 1999.

Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down!, Crown (New York, NY), 2000.

The Greatest Invention in the History of Mankind Is Beer; and Other Many Insights from Dave Barry, Andrews McMeel (Kansas City, MO), 2001.

My Teenage Son's Goal in Life Is Making Me Feel 3,500 Years Old; and Other Thoughts on Parenting from Dave Barry, Andrews McMeel (Kansas City, MO), 2001.

Dave Barry Hits below the Beltway: A Vicious and Unprovoked Attack on Our Most Cherished Political Institutions, Random House (New York, NY), 2001.

Tricky Business (novel), Putnam (New York NY), 2002.

Boogers Are My Beat: More Lies, but Some Actual Journalism, Crown (New York, NY), 2002.

ADAPTATIONS: Big Trouble was adapted as a motion picture, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, starring Tim Allen and Rene Russo, and released by Touchstone in 2001.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A children's book collaboration with suspense novelist Ridley Pearson.

SIDELIGHTS: Dave Barry ranks as one of America's most popular humor columnists; his lighthearted and often outrageous observations on the foibles of middle-class America helped to win him the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Barry is based at the Miami Herald, but since 1986 his column has been syndicated in more than 150 newspapers nationwide. The humorist attracts a large, loyal readership because he finds and exaggerates the irony in situations average people experience on a daily basis. The subjects of his columns are limitless; any event or popular trend that strikes Barry as silly or worthy of ridicule can become the focus of his scrutiny—the adventures of buying and maintaining a home, raising children, or facing rush-hour traffic.

Before becoming a full-time columnist, Barry worked as a journalist for the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and the Associated Press, then spent several years conducting writing seminars for businesspeople. The opportunity to contribute humor columns to the Daily Local News as a freelancer gave Barry the chance to indulge in his satirical observations. By 1983 his column appeared in the Miami Herald. That same year he published his first book of humor, The Taming of the Screw: Several Million Homeowners' Problems Sidestepped. Barry has since produced many other books, including Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, a collection of previously published columns, and two titles that reached the New York Times best-seller list, Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States and Dave Barry Turns Forty.

Dave Barry Slept Here offers Barry's unorthodox history of the United States, spoofing, among other things, history textbooks and classes and Americans'—including the author's—general ignorance of the subject. Barry boasts that the book skips most wars, is completely free of facts which he considers boring, and offers an ingenious cure for remembering historical dates: all events occur on October 8, which coincides with his son's birthday. Further humor derives from amusing chapter headings, useless footnotes, outrageous discussion questions, and an unusual index, with such helpful references as "Louis the Somethingth." Washington Post reviewer John Sladek pronounced the book "a dazzling performance" and New York Times Book Review critic Richard Lingeman lauded Barry's "irreverent eye." Dave Barry Turns Forty describes, from Barry's very personal point of view, the problems that arise when facing middle age.

A family trip to Japan became the inspiration for Dave Barry Does Japan. Jonathan Rauch commented in the Washington Post Book World that Barry "is funny on Japan, but like all good humorists he is also, in his twisted way, truthful and merciless." Barry comments on the strangeness of Japanese society and custom with satirical description of bathhouses, Japanese business ethos, Tokyo taxis, the exorbitant expenses associated with daily life, and the peculiar assimilation of Western culture in Japan. New York Times Book Review critic Robert J. Collins noted, "As Mr. Barry makes clear, Japanese and Americans do the same things for different reasons, and different things for the same reason." Barry's observations of Japan's "alien culture" are presented "with style, grace, true wit and a sense of humanity (though slightly warped)," according to Collins.

Barry branched out from his series of nonfiction humor books to write the novels Big Trouble and Tricky Business. Big Trouble is set in the criminal underworld of Miami, and Tricky Business takes place on a casino cruise. Both novels have a huge cast of characters, all of whom are involved in arresting, killing, influencing, or lusting after one another, and who all end up in various absurd situations. In the Houston Chronicle, Jim Barlow noted, "Plot is not a strong point with Barry. Funny is." Some critics, however, found that Barry's humor did not overcome his lack of strong plots and roundly depicted characters. In the New York Times, John Leland wrote that in Tricky Business, Barry's use of stock details to characterize people and institutions "serves him well in his columns, which tame the chaos of an unruly world by reducing it to a familiar comedy of manners," but that in fiction, this technique makes the story feel "mechanical and enclosed." Bob Longino wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that both novels were "fast-paced, bullet-riddled and steeped with Barry's cynical wit," and in the same publication, Phil Kloer commented that Big Trouble "is a very funny novel, with more laughs per chapter than most of Barry's twenty or so nonfiction books."

Barry's 2003 collection of columns, Boogers Are My Beat: More Lies, but Some Actual Journalism, continues in his trademark humorous vein, this time in discussions of everything from the Olympic games, the Florida election recall, income taxes, and Gary Condit to airport security, guest towels, Yorkshire terriers, and Humvees. "For the most part, the humor is in the title," remarked Library Journal reviewer Necia Parker-Gibson, "but it is intended to get the audience's attention so that Barry can make his political or personal points rather than shock his audience." In Booklist, Kristine Huntley commented that "Barry has never been as funny as he is in this rip-roaring new collection of columns." On a rare serious note, Barry includes two essays written after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. Of these essays, and the book in general, Huntley concluded, "Whether funny or serious, Barry is always on target."

"What makes Mr. Barry funny? Easy," wrote New York Times Book Review contributor Alison Teal in a review of Dave Barry's Greatest Hits. "He grew up in an all-WASP upper-middle-class neighborhood, played Little League baseball, mowed his parents' lawn and … attended the Episcopal Church…. He gets his humor from the blandest slice of American pie." Teal added of Barry, "He has a gift for taking things at face value and rendering them funny on those grounds alone, for squeezing every ounce of humor out of a perfectly ordinary experience."

Barry once told an interviewer: "I always wanted to write when I was a kid; it just never occurred to me that you could have a job that didn't involve any actual work. When I wrote for my high school and college newspapers, I pretty much made stuff up…. I felt it would be fun to have a job like that where you could make stuff up and be irresponsible and get paid for it, but there were no openings for making stuff up when I got out of college, so I went to work for a small newspaper called the Daily Local News. … The result was that I wrote several years' worth of stories that nobody read but me, and sometimes even I didn't read all the way to the end of them. After a few years in this small-time newspaper business, I went briefly to the Associated Press. I really didn't like that. It was very restrictive." Once he turned from straight journalism to column-writing, things turned more interesting. "Just about anything's a topic for a humor column: any event that occurs in the news, anything that happens in daily life driving, shopping, reading, eating," Barry explained. "You can look at just about anything and see humor in it somewhere. The hard part is getting the jokes to come, and it never happens all at once for me. I very rarely have any idea where a column is going to go when it starts. It's a matter of piling a little piece here and a little piece there, fitting them together, going on to the next part, then going back and gradually shaping the whole piece into something…. That's what writing is. That's why it's so painful and slow. But that's more technique than anything else. You don't rely on inspiration I don't, anyway, and I don't think most writers do. The creative process is just not an inspirational one for most people. There's a little bit of that and a whole lot of polishing. … I don't worry about running out of ideas, drying up. The world's too full of things to write about for that to ever happen."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

American Spectator, September, 1989; December 1993, p. 25.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 19, 1999, review of Big Trouble, p. L15; October 17, 2002, Bob Longino, review of Tricky Business, p. E1.

Book, November-December, 2002, Steve Wilson, review of Tricky Business, p. 87.

Booklist, August, 1999, Brad Hooper, review of Big Trouble, p. 1984; August, 2000, Gilbert Taylor, review of Dave Barry Is Not Taking This SittingDown!, p. 2068; August, 2001, Kristine Huntley, review of Dave Barry Hits below the Beltway: A Vicious and Unprovoked Attack on Our Most Cherished Political Institutions, p. 2043; September 1, 2002, Kristine Huntley, review of Tricky Business, p. 4; July, 2003, Kristine Huntley, review of Boogers Are My Beat: More Lies, but Some Actual Journalism, p. 1842.

Chicago Tribune, June 16, 1989; May 14, 1990.

Entertainment Weekly, September 10, 1999, L.S. Klepp, review of Big Trouble, p. 143; April 12, 2002, Lisa Schwarzbaum, review of Big Trouble, p. 49.

Houston Chronicle, September 19, 1999, Jim Barlow, review of Big Trouble, p. 23.

Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 1999, A. J. Anderson, review of Big Trouble, p. 110; August 15, 2001, review of Dave Barry Hits below the Beltway, p. 1180; August 15, 2002, review of Tricky Business, p. 1155; July 15, 2003, review of Boogers Are My Beat, p. 960.

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, October 9, 2002, Charles Matthews, review of Tricky Business, p. K7414; November 6, 2002, Chauncey Mabe, review of Tricky Business, p. K0634.

Library Journal, September 15, 2000, Joe Accardi, review of Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down!, p. 74; October 1, 2001, A. J. Anderson, review of Dave Barry Hits below the Beltway, p. 97; September 15, 2002, A. J. Anderson, review of Tricky Business, p. 88; August, 2003, Necia Parker-Gibson, review of Boogers Are My Beat, p. 82.

Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1999, review of Big Trouble, p. NA.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 21, 1994, p. 6; July 23, 1995, p. 6.

New York Times, April 5, 2002, Elvis Mitchell, review of Big Trouble, p. E10; October 6, 2002, John Leland, review of Tricky Business, p. 2; October 14, 2002, Christopher Buckley, review of Tricky Business, p. E1.

New York Times Book Review, April 28, 1985, p. 25; October 9, 1988; June 18, 1989; October 25, 1992, p. 17; June 19, 1994, p. 33; October 13, 1996, p. 68.

People, September 11, 1989.

Publishers Weekly, August 26, 1996, p. 86; July 19, 1999, review of Big Trouble, p. 180; September 4, 2000, review of Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down!, p. 94; September 9, 2002, review of Tricky Business, p. 42; October 21, 2002, Daisy Marylea, review of Tricky Business, p. 20; June 23, 2003, review of Boogers Are My Beat, p. 56; September 15, 2003, John F. Baker, "Authors Team Up for Kids' Book," p. 14.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 5, 2002, Harper Barnes, review of Big Trouble, p. E3.

School Library Journal, February, 2002, Pam Johnson, review of Dave Barry Hits below the Beltway, p. 155.

Time, July 3, 1989; October 4, 1999, interview with Barry, p. 111.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), April 23, 1995, p. 51.

Washington Post, July 1, 1988; June 12, 1989; November 8, 1992, p. 9.