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I read a lot of Dave Barry back in the day, both his weekly columns and his books. Even though I wouldn’t call myself a “booger joke” aficionado, his humor style regularly made me laugh. So I was obviously going to read his memoir, Class Clown.
It’s hard to believe he’s in his late 70s. (Just as it’s hard to believe I’m in my mid-50s. But here we are.) In this book, he shares his life story, from childhood to now. Marriages are not included; he mentions he divorced twice and won’t talk about those. Barry does refer to his children and current wife sporadically. And he does talk about his parents, including his mother’s battle with depression and ultimate suicide. Despite that sad note, his depiction of them both is warm and loving.
We read of his early jobs and then his entry into journalism at a small paper in Pennsylvania. A journalist myself who got a degree in the field, I still find it fascinating when I read about people who got into newspapers another way. Barry earned a degree in English and worked for a while teaching corporate types how to write. (The tips he learned from his boss and that he internalized and passed on to the business people are solid, so if you need a few pointers, check out that chapter.)
Just as I started as a copy editor and then added in some book reviewing on the side, Barry did all the “serious” writing and editing and wrote humor columns on the side. And then he managed to turn humor into his primary work for decades.
I got a kick out of how he described putting together a daily page one, and then was in awe at the kind of funding he got for his work in those flush golden years before the internet made a wreck of journalism. After The New York Times ran a huge story on Miami that was not flattering to the city where Barry lived and worked, he was given an assignment to go to New York and create a whole spread on that city for Miami Herald readers. He was able to use the newspaper account to spend $8,000 on a helicopter to get photos that would be awesome for the cover of the paper’s weekly magazine. Wow. Just wow. And this was a few decades ago, mind you. I don’t know what that is in today’s dollars. (I take that back: I googled it and learned it’s upwards of $21,000, which has me shaking my head so much it’ll probably fall off soon.)
Barry, of course, shares generous segments of his past columns, but not so much that the book is just a collection of columns. Even if I remembered (which maybe I do… vaguely) a few of them, they still had me laughing afresh.
If you’ve never read Dave Barry, you will first want to go back and check out his work. If you have (and enjoyed it), I’d recommend this memoir. Class Clown is entertaining, quintessential Dave Barry, with occasional moments of wisdom and poignancy. (I also listened to this while driving, which kept me nicely entertained in long hours on the road, and gave the bonus of hearing Barry’s voice reading his book.)
Rated: Moderate. Profanity includes 5 uses of strong language, around 7 instances of moderate profanity, a dozen uses of mild language, and a few instances of the name of Deity in vain.
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