Playboy Interview: Dave Barry

If there's a subject on which Dave Barry doesn't have something funny to say, most U.S. newspaper readers haven't found it yet. A few samples:

On the possibility that your wife is having an affair: "You can tell, because she will inevitably do one of two things--act guilty or, in an effort to trick you, act the same as always. So it's a good idea to accuse her once every two or three days."

On options trading: "This is when you promise to buy something, such as a pork belly, that you would never in a million years actually want to possess and is probably not even permitted in your condominium."

On whether the Vikings discovered America before Columbus: "More and more, historians argue that they did, because this would result in a new national holiday, which a lot of historians would get off"

It is jokes like these that have made Barry, 42, the hottest humor columnist in the country. In the 150 cities where his weekly dispatches appear, fans consider him reason enough to buy the paper. Elsewhere, devotees ask friends to mail (or, better yet, fax) them his columns or manage to content themselves with his nine books (seven originals--only two are compilations of previously published work). Last year's release, "Dave Barry Slept Here," was a reduction ad absurdum of American history, in which, for simplicity's sake, all important events happened on October eighth (in reality, the birthday of Barry's nine-year-old son, Robert), and in which the Louisiana Purchase was explained in this real-estate ad: "Nice piece of land, approx. 34 hillion jillion acres, convenient to West, perfect for growing nation." His tenth book, the frightening "Dave Barry Turns 40," is an original look at the onset of middle age and will be released next month.

So what is it about Barry's writing that sends adults--including many who don't normally read humor columns--into weekly hysterics? The jurors who in 1988 awarded him a Pulitzer Prize for commentary (a practically unheard-of honor for a humor writer) aren't saying. The New York Times called him possibly "the funniest man in America" but failed to note that satirizing the Times' own pomposity is one of his most potent gimmicks. One Barry character, Mr. Language Person, is a funny-page version of the Times' venerable usage expert William Safire. Other columns start off sounding like high-minded, op-ed-page discourses but then deteriorate, at exactly the right moment, into the literary equivalent of a spitball.

Barry was born and raised (but apparently didn't grow up) in idyllic Armonk, New York. His family, which includes two brothers and a sister, seemed sitcom perfect but had a tragic dark side: His mother was chronically depressed (she committed suicide three years ago); his father, a Presbyterian minister, was an alcoholic. A self-described "tiny geek with glasses," Barry became class clown as a defense against unpopularity. "It often got to the point where, if I made one more joke, (A) the class would really crack up and (B) I was going to be thrown out of school--and I'd make the joke anyway! I couldn't help myself," says Barry.

As an English major at Haverford College in the Sixties, he protested the war, took drugs and played guitar in a series of "awful" rock bands. After embarking on a career as a reporter and humor columnist for the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and ending a brief first marriage ("I was too young to drive a car, much less get married"), he married Beth Lenox Pyle, a colleague at the paper. Although he left to teach "effective writing" seminars for corporations, he continued producing weekly columns that were gradually picked up by newspapers around the country.

In 1986, after The Miami Herald began syndicating his column nationally, Barry moved to Miami with Beth and Robert. Some Floridians insist that, since Don Johnson left, Barry has become the best-known person in Miami. "Hell," he says, "Don Shula is more famous than I am. Don Shula's stomach is more famous than I am." By the time he won the Pulitzer in 1988, his column was appearing regularly in 100 newspapers and his books were guaranteed best sellers. Still, without a national outlet for his writing, he is little known in some cities, a star in others--a dichotomy that he says "is a good reminder of the bullshitness of fame."

To interview Barry, we sent Fred Bernstein, a journalist and himself a humorist, to Minneapolis, where Barry was promoting a new book. Bernstein's report:

"My biggest question--Is Dave Barry funny in real life?--was answered right away. As we ate dinner in Dave's hotel, he joked about everything from the size of the pepper mill proffered by the waiter ('What is that, a log? You could build cabins in Montana from that thing') to the Caesar salad being prepared at a nearby table ('I thought we'd asked to sit in a no-Caesar-salad section') to the giant pepper mill again ('Why don't they just back a pepper truck up to the table and dump it?').

"The next day, the action shifted to his room, where an NBC news crew was filming a 'typical' day in the life of Dave Barry. A waiter came to the door with a tray of beer and was startled by the clutch of cameramen. Barry, instantly taking on the haughty manner of a Hollywood director/auteur, said to the waiter, 'OK, your motivation is: You're the waiter. And your action is: You're bringing in the tray. And you say, "Where shall I put this?" and I say, "Put it here." Got that?'

"A few weeks later, we met in Miami. Barry gave me a tour of the newsroom at The Miami Herald, his base of operations, where we were pretty much ignored by his colleagues ('See how they're all pretending not to notice me, because I'm a famous humor columnist?'). In his office, he described his typical day, which includes answering his fan mail, drinking a lot of beer and reading the tabloids--the inspiration for many of his most ridiculous columns (among his particular interests: accounts of turtles trying to make love to scuba divers).

"Later, we rendezvoused at Barry's house, a modest five-bedroom ranch still piled high with boxes from the family's move there just a week before. As a plumber worked in one of the bathrooms, Barry elaborated on the house's special features, including a giant fireplace ('You need this here in Miami--for the nights when the temperature drops to eighty, with a relative humidity of only ninety-five percent'), introduced his dogs, Earnest and Zippy, which appear to be as stupid as Barry claims in his columns, and showed me the office where he and Robert have computers (Dave's for writing, Robert's for 'blowing up airplanes'). Parked in the driveway were his 'shitkicker' Dodge van and four-wheel-drive Cherokee jeep ('You have to have four-wheel drive in Miami, in case a bale falls out of the sky and you hit a cocaine skid'). Then we sat down, beers in hand and mutts lapping at our feet, and began our discussion."

[Q] Playboy: Let's start on a scholarly note. How would you describe your humor?

[A] Barry: It's vicious, irresponsible, childish and filled with lies. It's a lot like the United States Congress.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you won the Pulitzer Prize.

[A] Barry: Well, it was a slow year for commentary. Besides, I burned the other entries.

[Q] Playboy: Still, you do discuss ideas.

[A] Barry: But only obvious ideas, like "People shouldn't be rude" and "We don't need a U.S. Government." Really, I'm not trying to change people's minds. In fact, I get really angry when people suggest there's a purpose to my humor. I'm not interested in serious humor, you know, the kind high school teachers love: "Now we're going to read A Midsummer Night's Dream, class, and it's a real thigh slapper." What's really funny is when you're alone with your best friend, and you're fourteen, and something cracks you up that only the two of you understand. That's the kind of sophomoric humor I like. The closer it gets to the "universal themes" of humor, the less likely you are to pee in your pants.

[Q] Playboy: You're not trying to be universal, yet millions of people find you funny.

[A] Barry: If that's true, it scares me. I'm just going for entertainment. Nothing I write will change the world. That's why I'm not really comfortable with an NBC news crew coming here to shoot a "typical" day in my life. My typical suburban day would be so boring they'd never want to show it on TV. What they really want is one wacky day in the life of a wacky guy. It just doesn't exist.

[A high-pitched scream is heard.]

[Q] Playboy: What was that?

[A] Barry: A peacock. One of our neighbors has a peacock. Either peacocks are just naturally loud birds or this man has got it hooked up to electrodes. But it doesn't bother me at all, really. I'm not about to take a machete and kill this man and his peacock; I want to stress that. Later on, in case something happens to this man or his peacock, I'm on record here.

[Q] Playboy: So, is the peacock the reason you bought this new house?

[A] Barry: Yeah. At our old house, we only had a recording of a peacock that we played each morning. Now we've got a live peacock, which is better. Plus the scum pond.

[Q] Playboy: That fountain in the back yard?

[A] Barry: Yeah, the scum pond is what attracted us to this house in the first place. The ad said, "Five bdrms, I scm pnd, must see to appreciate." So we rushed over.

[Q] Playboy: Did you pay extra for it?

[A] Barry: Well, we negotiated. "All right, we'll meet your price, but the scum pond in the back yard stays." They were going to take it along with them. But it was cheap at half the price. We have so much scum now that we're able to take baskets of it to our neighbors.

[Q] Playboy: Do they appreciate it?

[A] Barry: Oh, they love it. It's just like when people bring you zucchini, which they used to do in our old neighborhood in Pennsylvania. They'd never come over when you were home, because then you'd say, "No, thanks, don't need any." Instead, they'd leave it in the middle of the night, huge mounds of zucchini, a vegetable primarily suitable for ballast. Sometimes we'd wake up and our car would be buried under zucchini. We could have retaliated with scum if we'd had a scum pond.

[Q] Playboy: What else do people give you?

[A] Barry: Well, on book tours, people will walk up to me and give me six-packs of beer. They know from my columns that I drink a lot of beer. But you can't really carry a six-pack onto an airplane. Well, you can, but you have to leave your luggage behind. So I've done that.

[Q] Playboy: We've noticed that you have a lot of ceiling fans in your home.

[A] Barry: It's important to have one over every bed, so at night you can lie awake thinking, I wonder who installed that. I wonder if he really knew how to keep that sucker up there, or if it's going to come hurtling down and slice through my thigh like a machete through Wonder bread.

[Q] Playboy: They do tend to rock back and forth.

[A] Barry: They rock back and forth and they creak. They wait until you're just about to fall asleep, and then they go, "Cre-e-e-ak! Feelin' a little loose up here." They actually speak out loud at night.

[Q] Playboy: So if you called the guy who installed them----

[A] Barry: He'd say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, they'll rock on you. Nothing to worry about. We'll come out and check it in the morning." And then he'd flee to the Everglades and get plastic surgery to avoid any chance of your ever finding him again.

[Q] Playboy: What was the move like?

[A] Barry: You become insane trying to empty your house. Your stuff actually tends to multiply. At one point, I watched Beth open a box that had never been opened from the last move. She took out all the items one by one and put them into a bigger box, which we then moved here, and which is probably in our garage right now, waiting to be thrown away.

[Q] Playboy: Or waiting for the next move.

[A] Barry: Right. And the thing is, we could have bought everything we needed ififteen minutes at a K mart. But no one does that. We would be terrible nomads, Beth and I. We would be, like, the only nomads to carry around an aquarium on our backs. And we've never had fish.

[Q] Playboy: What's the worst thing about moving?

[A] Barry: You completely lose your moral values. You get to the point where you justify leaving behind disgusting things for the next owner: cans with one inch of petrified paint left at the bottom--sure, it was purchased during the Truman Administration, and sure, it was there when you moved in, but you leave it, anyway. "In case they need it."

[Q] Playboy: Are you doing a lot of work on the house?

[A] Barry: We're going to add on a bedroom, which should make our lives a living hell. That's what the contractor says: "A living hell." Contractors get joy in telling you that. Apparently, the way they work is, they cut off your water and electricity and food and oxygen supply, and then they rip your house into tiny Chicletsized pieces, and then they just leave for three or four months and don't come back, during which time you live in a motel. Then, decades later, the contractor's descendants come back and finish the work in about a day.

[Q] Playboy: Could you do the work yourself?

[A] Barry: I could. I used to be sort of a landlord. I had this idea that we were going to get rich by investing in real estate. I read this book about leverage and depreciation, which were, like, two superheroes who kept appearing, like Batman and Robin. The idea of the book was, we'd use none of our own money and there'd be leverage! And then there'd be depreciation! Following which we'd be rich. Not one place in this book did it mention the word toilet.

[Q] Playboy: So what happened?

[A] Barry: First of all, the bankers laughed at the concept of our not using any of our money. They would have other bankers come in from different banks and they'd sit them down and have us repeat the part about how we weren't going to use any of our own money. Then they'd laugh hysterically and hurl documents into the air.

[A] Then, when we finally bought a building, there were only seven apartments, but there were, like, seventy toilets, and every one of them had had an inappropriate object shoved down it by a tenant. You know how tenants sit around, tenanting, and then, suddenly, one of them will leap up and yell, "I've got it! Let's put an accordion in the toilet!" So I became the plumber, and now I'll pay any price not to have to do it in my own house, any price at all. If the guy wants to take my son in exchange for fixing my toilet, then we'll just have to have another child.

[Q] Playboy: Wouldn't you miss your son?

[A] Barry: I'd miss him, but someday Robert will have to go out into the world. And I'm still going to need a toilet.

[Q] Playboy: Do you and Beth plan to have any more kids?

[A] Barry: No. It was really Beth's decision. I don't know if you've ever seen a baby being born----

[Q] Playboy: Tell us about it.

[A] Barry: Well, first of all, there are two systems for childbirth. There's the old system, under which I was born, where the man did not have to watch. That was a good system. The man's function was to sit in the waiting room and read old copies of Field & Stream and smoke a lot of Camels. As for the woman, she did have to be in the delivery room--you understand that part, right?--but she was given extensive narcotics and didn't wake up until the child was entering about the third grade.

[A] So it was really a good system. The only people who actually had to watch the baby come out were trained medical personnel wearing masks and getting paid for it. But later, in the mid-Seventies, without any legislation being passed that I know of, the man was suddenly required to go and watch the baby being born! Not only that but there were even classes----

[Q] Playboy: You mean Lamaze?

[A] Barry: Yeah. My wife and I went to classes where we sat around in a room with people we didn't know and discussed things like the uterus.

[Q] Playboy: What was that like?

[A] Barry: Well, there was a time in my life when I would have killed for reliable information about the uterus. But having discussed it in detail, and having seen actual full-color pictures of it, while I respect it a great deal as an organ, it's lost a lot of its sparkle for me.

[A] Anyway, in these classes, they kept talking about "contractions." They never used the word pain.

[A] So when the great day came and the baby was actually coming out, Beth was making noises like a whale, and she tried the breathing exercises and they were really effective for, oh, I'd say fifteen, possibly even twenty seconds. Then she switched to the more traditional method, which is screaming for drugs. But they didn't give her anything for the pain--I mean, the contractions--because they wanted her to have a full, complete, natural childbirth. Which is why I think we have just the one child. I mean, I've told her I'd be up for another child, but her answer is always, "Well, then, you have it."

[Q] Playboy: Were you helpful when Robert was a baby?

[A] Barry: Yeah, I changed diapers, did all that stuff. A baby's output is amazing, especially when you're toilet training him. It's like when you have a dog, you're ready to nominate him for the Nobel Prize the first time he doesn't pee on the carpet. It'sthe same with kids. You end up calling your parents and saying, "Guess what? Robby made poo-poo in the potty." "Oh, good, put him on." I have a theory that having a child lowers everyone's I.Q. All you ever talk about is poo-poo. A few days earlier, you were solving the Middle East situation.

[Q] Playboy: What happened after Robert was toilet trained?

[A] Barry: He could go all by himself, but he would never go except in public rest rooms. And if it was a really disgusting rest room, a rest room where there were skeletons of Board of Health employees who had died trying to inspect it, he would have to do number two. He'd go into the stall, and he was so little that you couldn't see his feet, and I would have to stand there, guarding the door, because you can't just leave a kid in a public rest room, especially in Florida, where they would steal him and sell him for parts. So I would be standing there, and inevitably, some stranger would walk in, and I'd feel obligated to somehow alert this person to the fact that I'm not a pervert lurking but a parent guarding his child. So I'd say, "How's it going in there, Robert?" And of course, he wouldn't answer, so I'd basically look like a person talking to a toilet stall. That's my main memory of early parenthood.

[Q] Playboy: Getting back to your work--do you like writing?

[A] Barry: Well, it's terrible doing a weekly column, because it's like always having a term paper due. Worse than a term paper, really, because if you don't do it, they can take away your house. Still, the writing part is better than anything that happens after the writing is done.

[Q] Playboy: Like what? Like being edited?

[A] Barry: Yeah.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying people change your Pulitzer Prize--winning columns?

[A] Barry: Well, my editor at The Miami Herald edits me only if he doesn't think it's funny. He's the only person who has less taste than I do. So if I wrote an entire column about eel boogers, he might say, "No, you used eel boogers last week." Thatwould be his only criticism. But some newspapers edit me for taste, which usually means eliminating all the punch lines. When they're done, there's this dead carcass of a column, not funny at all, the kind of thing you might use to console a widow.

[Q] Playboy: Do you remember any particularly egregious examples?

[A] Barry: Well, I wrote one column in which I called the President "sputumhead." You know, George Herbert Walker Armoire Vestibule Sputumhead Bush IV. Aristotle made exactly the same joke many times. But the Bangor Daily News in Maine changed it to "I have nothing but the deepest personal respect for President Bush and Vice-President Quayle." Now, my feeling is that if the Bangor Daily News doesn't think it's funny or thinks it's too tasteless to run, then they shouldn't run it. I certainly respect their right to drop a column, but they don't have the right to change what I said and then leave my by-line on it.

[Q] Playboy: What happened?

[A] Barry: I apologized. I wrote this long column about how really sorry I was, but occasionally, in an effort to be funny, I go a little too far. And I also said that I have nothing but the deepest personal respect for President Snailsucker and Vice-President Dootbrain.

[Q] Playboy: Doot?

[A] Barry: Doot. D-O-O-T.

[Q] Playboy: Does it mean anything?

[A] Barry: No, it's kind of like a mild, nursery school way of saying shithead, I guess. You can't really write Vice-President Shithead. We haven't progressed that far in American journalism.

[Q] Playboy: We haven't?

[A] Barry: No, I can't say shit at all. The other words I can't use are fuck, piss, cock, cunt, prick. Pretty much the same words that George Carlin said you can't use on TV. And probably for good reason, though I'm not sure what that reason is. To me, you know, words are words and nobody gets hurt by them. My son is nine years old and I listen to him and his friends talk and I know for a fact I have never written in any column half the words they have used routinely since kindergarten. So I have a hard time taking it too seriously when newspapers get puritanical.

[Q] Playboy: Is there anything else you don't like about your job?

[A] Barry: One big problem is being recognized. In Miami, my picture is in the Herald and when we go out, inevitably, people recognize me. It's flattering, but it's not what I want. I'm a little scared of it, too. If I could push a button and never have anyone recognize me in public, I would.

[Q] Playboy: You could choose not to have your photo in the paper. Or just use a twenty-year-old picture. Isn't that what Ann Landers does?

[A] Barry: Maybe I could use Ann Landers' photo.

[Q] Playboy: It looks as much like you as it does like her.

[A] Barry: Yes, I could use Ann's. She writes all my stuff, anyway. It's time you knew that.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about going out and promoting your books?

[A] Barry: It's a pain. I was in Spokane, Washington, and one of the local TV stations said, "OK, we're just going to follow you around for the day. We want you to do whatever it is you would normally do; don't pay any attention to us." Then everything I did they'd ask me to do again differently. They'd say, "Dave, could you come out of the building again? But this time, could you turn left instead of right?" And they would watch that, and then they would say, "No, no, it was better when you turned right." If you told them, "John F. Kennedy is going to be assassinated in Dallas at exactly twelve-thirty P.M. on November twenty-second," they would say, "No, we can't do it there. The light is wrong." And then they'd say, "No, no, can you back up the car a minute? Lee, could you lean out the window a little farther?"

[Q] Playboy: You're about to begin another book tour, aren't you?

[A] Barry: Yes. The book's called Dave Barry Turns 40.

[Q] Playboy: You're forty-two. Isn't that a little old to be writing about turning forty?

[A] Barry: But, see, I had to turn forty to get to forty-two. That's one of the technical areas I cover in the book.

[Q] Playboy: Do you enjoy doing talk shows?

[A] Barry: Yeah. I especially love shows on FM stations in places like Cowpark, Iowa. Shows with names like Focus on Talking. Except when they're interviewing authors, they play music by bands with names like Death Penis. You walk in and there's a receptionist with a nail through her nose, and then you go back into some tiny little room and record this half-hour interview with some guy who keeps nodding off, and his head keeps banging into the table. He asks questions like, "Dave, what led you to write [name of your book]?" Then he sits there without listening. Then he asks, "Dave, what do you want us to feel when we're done reading [name of your book]?" Then he sits there again without listening, and finally he asks, "Dave, what lies ahead after you're done with [name of your book]?" You know they're going to air it on Sunday morning at six A.M., when all of their listeners have no brain-wave activity.

[Q] Playboy: Is every interview that bad?

[A] Barry: Some are a lot worse. Like when it's a call-in show. I'm not really a topic you can call in about. So people call in and say, "Dave, I love your column." And I say, "Well, thanks." "Really love it and just wanted to tell you that." "OK, thanks very much." People in eleven states are driving off the road from boredom.

[Q] Playboy: But you've done Carson and Letterman.

[A] Barry: On shows like those, I'm usually the guy who follows the singing turtles. I am always the last act. I'm what's called an author spot, which usually airs after the show ends. Sometimes, everybody goes home and the author comes out and sits there.

[A] When I did Letterman, I assumed he wanted me to be funny. But then he started asking me questions about Miami and my background, like we've got all day. It was like listening to two guys talking in a 7-Eleven. So we chatted for two or three minutes about Miami, and then it was time for a commercial, and then the show was over. And I had to fly all the way to New York for that.

[Q] Playboy: Normally, do you think Letterman's funny?

[A] Barry: Yeah, I've always liked his humor.

[Q] Playboy: He's occasionally accused of being mean-spirited.

[A] Barry: Really?

[Q] Playboy: Yeah.

[A] Barry: Then fuck him.

[Q] Playboy: Have you been on Pat Sajak's show?

[A] Barry: Yeah, sure. I got to sit next to the famous rock star Michael Damian, who wears pants made out of, like, three molecules and has the entire petrochemical output of Libya in his hair. A lot of women in the audience, the girls, really liked him. They were getting turned on. Then I came out and it was kind of like Sister Mary, the nun, had suddenly appeared. That's how I affect them sexually.

[Q] Playboy: You don't think women find you sexually attractive?

[A] Barry: People don't think of writers as sex objects. The women who write to me and suggest that we ought to have sex usually turn out to be, like, eighty. And their letters always end with, "Just joking." Young women never send me naked pictures. If there are any young women out there who would like to, I'd be grateful, very grateful. But it's never happened. I keep checking my mail.

[Q] Playboy: What do you get?

[A] Barry: A lot of pictures of people's dogs.

[Q] Playboy: Naked?

[A] Barry: Yeah, starkers. But they don't do anything for me. Not the way they used to.

[Q] Playboy: Do you enjoy all the time you spend traveling on airplanes?

[A] Barry: I basically like any environment where you can sit down and have a bloody mary brought to you.

[Q] Playboy: Not beer?

[A] Barry: No, because after you have a beer, you have to pee, you know. I don't want to get too detailed here, but----

[Q] Playboy: This is Playboy.

[A] Barry: OK, then. The advantage of bloody marys is that you don't have to fight your way past morons in the aisle to get to the bathroom. For some reason, when the airlines deregulated, they apparently felt obligated to lower the average I.Q. of the passengers. As a result, there are all these people who, if they get up for some reason--like to find a coloring book--can't get back to their seats. I wonder to myself, These people got dressed somehow. They seem to be capable of speech, but they're not capable of finding their seats on an airplane. How could that be?

[Q] Playboy: Does flying scare you?

[A] Barry: Yes, but only because in high school, when they showed us that little demonstration about how airplanes stay up, there were all those little arrows moving over the wings. That I understood. But when I fly, I look out the window and I never see any arrows. And another thing: Where do they keep all the fuel? Huh? Huh? Thousands of gallons, and you never see it. Where is it, in the beverage cart?

[Q] Playboy: They say flying is the safest way to travel.

[A] Barry: I know. I know. You're actually safer when you're thirty-five thousand feet in the air in a plane than you are when you're driving to work. And I believe that's true up to the point where the plane crashes.

[Q] Playboy: Are you nervous on a plane?

[A] Barry: No, though I don't like it when the pilot is younger than I am. I think there ought to be a rule about that. They ought to check, and if I'm on the plane, the pilot should be older than I am. Too often, it looks like the flight crew is just being a flight crew to raise money for their class trip.

[Q] Playboy: It's probably because of deregulation.

[A] Barry: Right. Under deregulation, anybody who can produce two forms of identification is allowed to own an airline. People whose only training is in installing aluminum rain gutters are running airlines. The difference is, when rain gutters fall down, you can just nail them up again.

[Q] Playboy: You could own an airline.

[A] Barry: Right. Air Dave. The pilots would have names that sound good, like First Officer LaGrange Weevil or Captain Deltoid P. Hamsterlicker. At mealtime, they would land, on an interstate if necessary, and take everyone to a decent restaurant. Also, anyone who ordered a light beer would be ejected over Utah at thirty-five thousand feet.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to have a thing about light beer.

[A] Barry: Yeah, and I got a letter the other day from a light beer asking if I would appear in their commercial. But that brings up the problem of ethics, by which I mean, they'd have to pay me a lot of money. Quite frankly, all light beers, in my opinion, are rat urine. I take beer seriously. I take beer probably more seriously than religion. In fact, there's no contest. I'm one of those people who say if we can land a man on the moon, we should be able to make beer at least as good as Paraguay does.

[Q] Playboy: So you're not happy with beer in this country?

[A] Barry: Well, any beer advertised by sports figures, or by sweaty guys doing sweaty-guy stuff on television, I can almost guarantee will be bad beer.

[Q] Playboy: That's it. Once this interview appears, you'll never get a beer commercial.

[A] Barry: And Playboy will lose all its beer ads.

[Q] Playboy: Hmmmm.

[A] Barry: Of course, there's a lot of damn good beer advertised in Playboy. We have to stress that.

[Q] Playboy: So do you drink a particular beer?

[A] Barry: I drink imported beer mostly. Or beer from microbreweries.

[Q] Playboy: Microbreweries?

[A] Barry: Yeah, little breweries that no one's ever heard of. Actually, I used to make pretty good beer in my basement. The only problem was, you'd have to wait six weeks before you could drink it. So it's probably faster to go into a bar, but not always.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever thought of doing stand-up comedy?

[A] Barry: A lot of people have asked me that. And I do make speeches. But I think I'm funnier in print. As a writer, I can manipulate the words until they say exactly what I'm thinking. Besides, you can't be funny at night. Newton proved that, right? So I'd have to perform at prayer breakfasts, which are not as good. Take my waffles, please.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of organizations do you give speeches for?

[A] Barry: Big Brothers and Big Sisters, and an organization that makes products to help deaf children hear. I also do a lot of work for mental health.

[Q] Playboy: Any special reason?

[A] Barry: My sister, Kate, is a schizophrenic. We were very close when we were kids, and then she got this disease. They tried a lot of different treatments, but nothing really worked, and she ended up in an institution. She has basically made peace with it. She's still as charming and intelligent as ever, but she's in another world. So I call her from time to time, but I don't even want to do that too often, because it just reminds her of her other life. Really, there's nothing I can do, except once in a while send her fifty dollars for cigarettes. So if a mental-health organization asks me to talk, I usually agree, even though it's an obvious attempt to deal with my own guilt.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to be very open about personal subjects.

[A] Barry: Well, I'm not afraid or embarrassed to talk about my life. But I guess I don't quite understand why my life should be more important than anyone else's. It troubles me that because I write a humor column, people would care more about the fact that my sister is a schizophrenic than the fact that the mailman's sister is a schizophrenic, when the problem is essentially the same. That's the American celebrity obsession.

[Q] Playboy: But don't you enjoy having power to influence people?

[A] Barry: There are plenty of other columnists who devote their lives to persuading readers through logical discourse. That's not what I'm trying to do. I just look for ways to make people laugh--whether the joke makes me seem left wing or whether it makes me seem right wing. And I routinely get accused of being both.

[Q] Playboy: More often than not, the accusation is that you're left wing.

[A] Barry: Yeah, well, I spend a lot of time attacking Republican Presidents, but that's just because the Democrats are so profoundly incompetent that we never have a Democratic President. I'd cheerfully attack Democrats if they had any talent.

[Q] Playboy: Then if you attack George Bush, it's because he is in the White House?

[A] Barry: Also, he's kind of a dork; let's face it. Nothing personal. I love the guy, I've got all his albums, but he is kind of a dork.

[Q] Playboy: Do you really think of yourself as apolitical?

[A] Barry: If anything, I'm an anarchist. Not in the sense of running around, throwing bombs at politicians, which is sort of what everybody's perception of anarchy is. I just have a very strong antigovernment bias. A lot of it comes from journalism. Once you see government bodies operate up close, you begin to realize that no one connected with them is any better than you are, so you begin to wonder why they're in charge of your life.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you follow politics.

[A] Barry: Yes, but I don't--and this is serious--I don't acknowledge that the Government has a valid moral function in people's lives. And I don't vote. That's not because I'm lazy but because I feel that the process is a fraud, having witnessed up close and in person the way candidates are chosen in this country. Not voting is a way of saying something, and eventually, maybe people will recognize it as that kind of statement.

[Q] Playboy: How would you reform the system?

[A] Barry: I'd stage the entire election as what it really is, a television show. Do it just like the Miss America Pageant. Have the candidates go around wearing sashes and stuff. We could use an applause meter to pick the winner, or maybe do it by phone.

[Q] Playboy: With a nine-hundred number?

[A] Barry: Yeah. So you'd have to really care--you'd have to spend fifty cents to vote. It would be like calling a nine-hundred number to vote on whether you approve of Oprah's weight loss. I mean, what kind of moron would call up about Oprah Winfrey's weight loss? Why don't they just hook those lines up to a generator and jolt everyone who calls with sixty thousand volts? Then we'd be on our way to beating the Japanese.

[Q] Playboy: I gather you don't care about Oprah's weight.

[A] Barry: I care deeply. The problem is, when Oprah lost all that weight, her head didn't get any smaller. And so she looks kind of like a person carrying a balloon.

[Q] Playboy: Are you worried about America's place in the world?

[A] Barry: No, I think it will stay right where it is, between the Atlantic and the Pacific. But imported foreign humor, that's becoming a big problem. The Japanese are sending over these great jokes that really work.

[Q] Playboy: Who are your favorite humorists?

[A] Barry: Roy Blount Jr. I think he's a really wonderful writer. Calvin Trillin. I think he's very funny. P. J. O'Rourke. P.J. buys me beer, so I have to say I like him. P G. Wodehouse I always liked a lot. Walt Kelly--Pogo. I liked Woody Allen when he wrote, which I don't think he does anymore.

[Q] Playboy: He still writes screenplays.

[A] Barry: Yeah, he became Ingmar Bergman. I wish he would go back to doing yuks. Steve Martin, too. I liked him when he had the arrow through his head.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think certain groups of people are funnier than others?

[A] Barry: Well, I'm a WASP, but I don't think WASPs are funny. In this country, anyway, it's the persecuted minorities who are funny, as opposed to your serious power-structure-type individuals.

[Q] Playboy: Are you the funniest WASP in America?

[A] Barry: No, that would be Martin Mull. I'm probably the funniest son of a Presbyterian minister in America I know of living in the Miami area right now.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of which, what was it like being born to a Presbyterian minister?

[A] Barry: Smooth transition, Playboy. Is this where we start talking about my life?

[Q] Playboy: You got it.

[A] Barry: Well, I would have preferred being born to someone in the Donald Trump category of income. As my mother used to say, "It's better to be rich and happy than poor and sick." Those are words I've learned to live by.

[Q] Playboy: So it wasn't fun being born to a preacher?

[A] Barry: It worked out all right. Though, as a child, I had to constantly overcome the threat that people would think I was a good person.

[Q] Playboy: People thought you were a goody-goody?

[A] Barry: Yeah, well, they assumed that I would be. And so I was a wiseass instead. I couldn't resist making a joke. People would tell me that if I didn't eventually settle down, I wouldn't get anywhere in life. [Laughs] Where are they now? They're nothing. And I've got my own scum pond.

[Q] Playboy: Where do you think your sense of humor came from?

[A] Barry: My mother was an incredibly funny woman, though I didn't realize it until I was already grown up and started noticing that other people's mothers were, by comparison, extremely normal. She lived a kind of depressing life, though. She grew up in Nebraska during the Depression. She was born, literally, in a sod hut, and I think that made life permanently hard for her. But she took absolutely nothing seriously. When we went swimming, she'd yell, in this perfect June Cleaver voice, "Don't drow-w-wn," and we'd go, "We won't." That was our way of relating to each other. I could always make her laugh and she could always make me laugh.

[Q] Playboy: Did she make other people laugh as well?

[A] Barry: Yeah. I remember when we'd go into the deli near our house, the guy behind the counter would say, "How are you doing, Marian?" and my mother would say, "Just shitty, Bob," and I would be really proud of her. She knew that it was inappropriate, but she also knew that it was funny.

[Q] Playboy: Did she live long enough to see you make a career of being funny?

[A] Barry: Yes, she did, and I think there was a certain amount of jealousy on her part, because we had essentially the same sense of humor. She wrote letters that read a lot like my columns.

[Q] Playboy: It seems her humor was an attempt to deal with her depression. Could that be true in your case, too?

[A] Barry: That's a probing question. I'll just pick my nose while I think about it. I don't know. No, I don't think I have the kind of pain that she had. For most of her life, she was a clinically depressed person who needed pills just to get out of bed and face the day. I have never felt any real need to do that, and I don't think I have that extreme edge to my humor that my mother did. My father was also funny but in a much more conventional, upbeat, happy kind of way--a congenitally happy, positive person. I'm not sure it always blends genetically like that, but I basically came out perfect. Also, extremely handsome.

[Q] Playboy: What was your father like?

[A] Barry: Well, he wasn't a typical minister. He ran a program for inner-city kids. He (continued on page 76)Dave Barry(continued from page 70) commuted to work on the train, played cards and drank. He was an alcoholic--a recovering alcoholic, very involved in A.A.--when he died.

[Q] Playboy: What were you like as a child?

[A] Barry: A geek with a real high forehead. Real high. You could have rented out advertising up there. In fact, there are certain board games you could have played on my forehead, no problem. Basically, though, things were pretty much OK until the summer after the fifth grade. The girls all went away to summer bosom camp, and they all came back with tits. And then the guys started catching up. The other guys. I kept waiting for puberty to strike. One by one, it would strike my friends, but not me. They were all turning into men and I was still a little boy. I don't even think I've gone all the way through puberty yet. I still don't have any hair on my arms, and I worry about that.

[Q] Playboy: Maybe you went to the wrong camp.

[A] Barry: Maybe. But I clearly was not going to be the kid people liked because he was scoring the winning touchdown, so instead, I became the class clown. I was the kid who had a sense of humor so people would like him.

[Q] Playboy: Were you a good student?

[A] Barry: Well, I was terrible at history. I could never see the point of learning what people thought back when people were a lot stupider. For instance, the ancient Phoenicians believed that the sun was carried across the sky on the back of an enormous snake. So what? So they were idiots.

[Q] Playboy: Did you get decent grades?

[A] Barry: Yes, I got good grades in high school and college. But I'm one of those people who, without actually knowing anything, tend to do really well on tests.

[Q] Playboy: In other words, you were a big bullshitter?

[A] Barry: Yeah, yeah, I think that's what it means.

[Q] Playboy: Did you learn a lot in school?

[A] Barry: No, not really. I probably learned something; I just can't remember what. I read a lot of great works of literature, all of which were really boring. I never liked The Last of the Mohicans, or even The Scarlet Letter. There's a classic for you. My question is, How, exactly, did those books become big? I mean, they didn't have book tours then, did they? What talk shows did James Fenimore Cooper do? Huh?

[Q] Playboy: Were there any books you liked?

[A] Barry: No, I was always sort of struck by how unrelentingly boring all the reading was. And back then, you weren't permitted to read good books like Catcher in the Rye, which today is probably mandatory reading in the second grade.

[Q] Playboy: You had no idea you were going to be a writer?

[A] Barry: No. I did like to write, though. I liked the part of English class where you wrote essays, the part all the other kids hated. I would try to write funny ones. Mine would always be singled out to be read, which was really embarrassing. My friends would punch me in the arm and make fun of me and stuff like that.

[Q] Playboy: So your teachers appreciated your sense of humor?

[A] Barry: Yeah, some of them did. English teachers are pretty used to reading essays that say, "A Tale of Two Cities was a very important book. The importance of A Tale of Two Cities cannot be overestimated, in my opinion. The reason I feel that way, that A Tale of Two Cities was an important book, is that I felt there was a tremendous amount of importance to what the author was saying in the book A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens." I didn't write like that.

[Q] Playboy: What did you write?

[A] Barry:"A Tale of Two Cities is a real booger of a book."

[Q] Playboy: Did you get dates in high school?

[A] Barry: One. Her name was Heather Campbell, and she was a junior at Pleasantville High School. I took her to the prom. We had a nice time, but then I had the quintessential guy's dilemma, which is, Now I have to marry her or else never see her again. You think you have to make some sort of huge commitment. I didn't want to marry her, so I sort of ignored her for the rest of high school.

[Q] Playboy: Were you an English major in college?

[A] Barry: Yeah. That's because I discovered symbolism. I just learned the simple trick of writing that whatever a book was about, it was really about something else. I did real well from then on, without ever reading anything too carefully.

[Q] Playboy: What was your main activity in college?

[A] Barry: I smoked a lot of dope, protested the war and played in a succession of incredibly bad rock bands.

[Q] Playboy: What was the worst band you were in?

[A] Barry: God, they were all pretty terrible. The worst one was probably the Guides, but we might just as well have called ourselves White Guys on Drugs. We had real long hair and we sang the blues. The worst thing that had ever happened to us was when one of us got a D in poli sci, and there we were, singing, "Our baby done left us." And about how we had our mojo working.

[Q] Playboy: What's a mojo?

[A] Barry: I have no idea what a mojo is. We would sing, "I got my mojo working, but it just don't work on you," whatever that means. Also, we would sing about "goin' down to Louisiana to get a black head bone." Again, I have no idea what a head bone is, but I have a feeling that it is basically something not related to suburban white culture.

[Q] Playboy: Did you protest the Vietnam war?

[A] Barry: Yeah, I did. I marched and did all kinds of futile stuff.

[Q] Playboy: Not necessarily futile, was it?

[A] Barry: Maybe not. I remember my freshman year, people were supposed to fast to protest the war. I signed up to fast, but later, I couldn't imagine its having any impact. Like somebody's really going to burst into Lyndon Johnson's office and say, "Uh-oh, Mr. President, they're fasting at Haverford College." And he's going to say, "Haverford? Well, I'd better rethink my whole Indo-China policy." I mean, that kind of stuff was dumb. But the marches probably were not dumb. I was at the big civil rights march of 1963 and heard Martin Luther King give his "I have a dream" speech.

[Q] Playboy: Whom do you admire?

[A] Barry: Well, back then, I liked Bobby Kennedy. I don't think politically I'd be so crazy about him now.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Barry: I now realize that guys who come in and think they're really smarter than everybody else and can change the world to make it better almost always end up making it worse, and I think the Kennedys were like that. I think I would admire people like that a lot more if they would come right out and admit that the real reason they wanted to be President was that they really wanted the plane. It has nothing to do with your eighteen-point program to create jobs. It has everything to do with Air Force One. I guess, basically, that has always been my problem with Government types. They don't reveal their true motives. We're supposed to believe that there are ten thousand people in Washington who genuinely care about us. Why should they? We don't care about them.

[Q] Playboy: Can you think of any exceptions?

[A] Barry: George McGovern. He seemed like a genuinely nice person who wanted (concluded on page 86)Dave Barry(continued from page 76) to be President for genuine ideological reasons, though I think he also probably wanted the plane.

[Q] Playboy: Where were you during the Vietnam war?

[A] Barry: I was a conscientious objector. My draft board assigned me to the Episcopal church. I was in the bookkeeping section.

[Q] Playboy: Bookkeeping?

[A] Barry: The draft board had a list of jobs that were supposedly in the national interest, and that was what I did. I did bookkeeping for two years, mostly approving expense accounts.

[Q] Playboy: Has your career taken any other strange turns?

[A] Barry: In the Seventies, I taught effective-writing seminars to business people. I'd go around to a DuPont plant or a Union Carbide plant and they'd bring in a bunch of engineers or chemists or accountants or whatever, and I would teach them how to be effective writers. Or try, anyway.

[Q] Playboy: What did you learn?

[A] Barry: I discovered that corporations that seem to be, from the outside, incredibly logical are not. There are tons of screw-ups, and the employees can't believe their company makes any money because of all the dorks they have to work with. That was very reassuring. Plus, I had the time to write my humor columns.

[Q] Playboy: When the Herald syndicated your column, was it an overnight success?

[A] Barry: It took a while to catch on. What we kept hearing from the other papers was, "All the reporters here read it, and we think it's funny, but the readers aren't ready for it." So I was a big underground success at the beginning. Then, gradually, more and more papers started using me and found that although, yeah, some readers would write and be really annoyed, generally, the public response was fairly positive. Minimal bomb threats, you know. More like torches at the castle gates.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of people complain to newspapers about your column?

[A] Barry: Let's just say that when I used to answer the phone at my hometown paper, we could have reported that Lebanon was in Connecticut and we would not have heard from anyone. But when we left Capricorn out of the horoscope, then, wow, did we get phone calls!

[A banging on pipes is heard.]

[Q] Playboy: It sounds as if the plumber's back.

[A] Barry: Yeah. And he's probably going to announce that the only way to fix my toilet is to wrap the entire length of the pipe in ten-dollar bills. And I'll go, "OK, well, if that's what we've got to do...."

[Q] Playboy: You were talking about your recent success. Has it gained you female fans?

[A] Barry: Now that I'm a syndicated humor columnist, girls finally tell me I'm cute. But I'm still waiting for those naked pictures. I've checked my mail six times today. Nothing.

[Q] Playboy: What are your distinguishing cute characteristics?

[A] Barry: The main thing is that I look younger, way younger, than I actually am. When we moved to Miami, I was forty years old, and I got carded in a pizza place buying a beer.

[Q] Playboy: Have you always looked younger than you are?

[A] Barry: Yeah. When I was ten, I looked like a fetus. I think it's one of the reasons I tend not to be taken seriously.

[Q] Playboy: You look young enough to do one of those books in which the author poses as a teenager to find out what's going on in American high schools.

[A] Barry: I know what's going on in American high schools. A lot of kids are sitting around, going, "You know, like, you know? You know what I mean, like, you know?" Another thing I've noticed about kids: When they talk, it always sounds like they're asking a question, even when they're not. They talk like this: "So I was going downtown? And I was driving my brother's car? And all of a sudden, it stopped? And it didn't have any gas?" That's how they talk.

[Q] Playboy: And it's humor like that that enables you to live here in the lap of luxury. BMW, platinum American Express card. You do have a platinum card, don't you?

[A] Barry: No, just a matched set of platinum American Express--card mailings. I wish that once a year, American Express would send me a check equal to the cost of the brochures it sends me trying to get me to apply for a platinum card. [Leaning into microphone] You American Express executives, I know that, basically, all you do is sit in your offices all day and read Playboy. And I want you to know, I'm never going to own a gold card and I'm never going to own a platinum card. You can stop getting in touch with me. Thank you.

[Q] Playboy: So you're not a Yuppie?

[A] Barry: Nah. In the mornings, I'm out there in my van on the freeway, singing Twist and Shout. Everyone else is on the phone, making, like, a hundred thousand dollars on the way to work.

[Q] Playboy: Who handles the money in your family?

[A] Barry: I do, but not all that well. I mean, the worst thing you can do is put your money into a passbook savings account, so that's what I do. I'm sure the minute I leave the bank, they take my money out of my account, on which they pay me, like, two percent, plus the free toaster, and they put the money into a convertible bond of debenture, which makes them like a hundred and twenty-seven percent. So I finally opened an account with an investment firm. I give them all my money and they send me totally incomprehensible statements every month, and now I have my own convertible bond of debenture.

[Q] Playboy: What's that?

[A] Barry: I have no idea.

[Q] Playboy: Would you like to know?

[A] Barry: Yeah, but I don't need to. My account is with a large, reputable firm represented by a bull--a giant dumb animal that shits all over the place--so I have confidence.

[Q] Playboy: Most days, do you go to your office at The Miami Herald?

[A] Barry: Yeah, because I get a lot of mail there, and it would be hard to answer letters without going into the office. I'd have to guess what they wrote, or send answers to random people.

[Q] Playboy: How much mail do you answer?

[A] Barry: I guess about a hundred, a hundred and fifty pieces a week. But most of it's easy to answer. I usually just write something like, "Thanks a lot, and same to you, buster."

[Q] Playboy: Do you get lots of weird mail?

[A] Barry: Dumb mail, yeah. I wrote a column not too long ago proposing the death penalty for anybody who burns the flag, and I got mail from people who agreed with me. "It's about time somebody in journalism stood up and spoke for the real Americans." That sort of thing. They took it seriously, even though I wrote that one of the founding fathers who would agree with my position was Thomas Edison. There were clues the really sharp reader might have picked up that I was not actually being serious.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever worry that you'll stop being funny?

[A] Barry: Well, a couple of months ago, I was with my family on vacation, and I was trying to write a column. And I couldn't write it and I was telling everybody, "I'm not funny anymore; I'm just not funny." But then I said to myself, Hey, I'm a professional, I can do this, so I really concentrated on it and I finished the column.

[Q] Playboy: And?

[A] Barry: And it sucked. I'm gonna be a plumber.

"They'd leave huge mounds of zucchini, a vegetable primarily suitable for ballast. Sometimes we'd wake up and our car would be buried."

"The summer after fifth grade, the girls went away to summer bosom camp and came back with tits."

"I look younger, way younger, than I actually am. When I was ten, I looked like a fetus."