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Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass — Proof You Can Joke Your Way Through Life
Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I spent 77 Years without Growing Up
By Dave Barry
Simon & Schuster, 244 pages, $28.99
Class Clown is a raucous roller-coaster of a book. A very funny memoir of a very funny man’s very charmed life. I give it two thumbs up only because I don’t have three thumbs.
It will come as no surprise to the many who’ve been entertained by Dave Barry’s off-plumb humor over the decades that our Dave was a class clown in his school days. A bit on the small side and overtaken by puberty later than most, Dave survived by making his classmates laugh and by engaging in various forms of wiseassery.
This approach suited Dave, as well as his fellow students, who were happy enough with his shtick. But his teachers, and other duly appointed sticks in the mud who functioned as guardians of appropriate behavior (my schools were infested with these as well), warned him that: “You can’t joke your way through life.” Look who the joke was on, and who got the last laugh.
And since the word has come up, how many would want their obit and tombstone to simply read: “He lived appropriately”? What a dreary epitaph and sad summation of a life. Dave’s life has turned out to be appropriate enough. He graduated from college, married, had a family, made a good living, and paid his taxes. But there was nothing dreary about it.
Barry made millions, including me, laugh out loud through his regular columns, which appeared in the Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005 when Barry retired at 57. He could also, like Yorick, another able jester, set the table on a roar in his many speaking engagements. Some writers speak as well as they write. Most can’t. Barry can. Other amusing examples available on YouTube.
At the peak of its popularity, the column was syndicated in more than 500 newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. Semi-retired now, Barry still writes an occasional piece, including his much-awaited Year in Review columns. But he’s done with deadlines and being funny on a schedule.
Class Clown, with its long and Barryesque subtitle, is an enchanting tour de Dave. His life story is told in a pleasing mix of Dave’s comedic style and more sober narrative. It begins with his idyllic youth in Amonk, New York, then a working and middle-class hamlet of about 2,000 souls just 30 miles north of New York City, but a universe away from Gotham in size, style, and tempo. Since Barry’s youth, Amonk has more than doubled in size and has had the living hell gentrified out of it. Today, Barry says: “You can’t throw a rock in Amonk without hitting a hedge fund manager.”
From happy beginnings in Amonk, Class Clown takes alert readers (a patented Barry expression) through his school and college days, where, for young Dave, having fun trumped education. There followed a short but enjoyable time as a real reporter for a small, suburban afternoon newspaper with the Mayberryish name of the Daily Local News. After seven years teaching — or at least attempting to teach — corporate executives how to write clearly, he eventually achieved his real calling as, his term, an investigative humorist. The rest is hilarious history.
Fortunately, the Herald allowed Barry to make fun of anything, any place, or anyone he wished to. And he took full advantage of this latitude. Writing about everything from exploding whales and alien booger heads to more, allegedly, serious subjects such as political races and public policy. All in a profoundly unserious way.
While Barry makes fun of people, places, and things, his humor is not snarky, never vicious. He’s a humorist, not a hit man.
Barry has made use of exaggeration, faux bombast, irony, absurd comparisons, parody, wild and unexpected switches of subject, utter but amusing nonsense, and other comic devices known only to him. A favorite was, as he phrases it, “Assuming the Voice of Wildly Incorrect Authority.” While Barry makes fun of people, places, and things, his humor is not snarky, never vicious. He’s a humorist, not a hit man.
The Herald sent Barry everywhere to “cover” events ranging from the 1984 New Hampshire primary campaign to a snooty wine tasting at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City put on by the French Wine industry. Of an unpopular entry in this one, wine experts/snobs said such as “heavily oxidized” and “much too woody.” Dave’s offering: “Bat urine.” But he admitted to being the only one on the panel to drink the entire glass.
Unlike other funny writers, such as P.J. O’Rourke, Barry doesn’t spend a lot of time on politics. But he’s scrupulously non-partisan when he does. He makes fun of politicians from both sides of the aisle, especially of the Kabuki (Dave’s word) of election campaigns. His dispatches from the New Hampshire primary were less than serious, but having been there myself, it’s hard not to conclude that his jaundiced views and descriptions came closer to capturing the events in question than the far more serious analysis of the “experts,” whom Dave helpfully points out, are usually wrong.
In addition to having fun at the expense of various office seekers, it was clear when Barry admired a candidate. An example was former two-term Florida Governor Reubin Askew, who was competent, courageous, and honest (even when not measured against the low bar set for political honesty). Alas, excellent resume notwithstanding, Askew had no chance, Barry explained, because of “an almost life-threatening lack of charisma.” John Glenn has a similar problem, another candidate Barry liked. But: “It’s just that he doesn’t electrify the crowd, if you know what I mean. I doubt he could electrify a fish tank if he threw a toaster in it.”
Dave’s tomfoolery, on politics and on an almost bewildering array of other subjects, fetched him the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for “distinguished commentary.” (As much as I like Dave’s “commentary,” distinguished is not the first word that comes to mind to describe it.) This must have amused Barry and caused sulking on the part of uber-serious columnists who weren’t selected for the honor, which was given when Pulitzers were not the ideological badges they’ve become.
Class Clown is a short read, just 241 pages. But it’s a trip any reader who hasn’t allowed life to break his funny bone will want to go on. It encapsulates the life of a writer who was not only very funny but thoroughly decent. Dave’s fans frequently tell him that he’s made the world a better place for all the laughter he’s generated. Dave appreciates this but says: “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. It’s pretty much the only thing I know how to do. It’s in my DNA. I’m a class clown.” Millions are glad of this, even if his teachers weren’t.
READ MORE from Larry Thornberry:
The American Century … and Baseball’s
Real Men Not Welcome at the Book Store
Reflections on 1970s Baseball and the Snakes in Baseball’s Garden
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