Dave Barry Is 77 and Still a Clown, Here to Amuse You

CLASS CLOWN: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up, by Dave Barry

“All children, except one, grow up,” J.M. Barrie wrote in “Peter Pan.” Let’s make it two. Dave Barry has a new memoir titled “Class Clown.” On the back flap, the floppy-haired author, now 77, looks all of 45. It’s as if he’s sealed in the amber of his own booger jokes. His prose style hasn’t matured either, thank heavens. It’s as ideally sophomoric as ever, if more rueful around the edges, what with civilization aflame and all that.

“Who is Dave Barry?” young readers may ask, alas. Let me take you back to the early 1980s, the twilight of the era of the great syndicated columnists, those ink-stained champions whose work was published in hundreds of newspapers. Arka Buchwald, Erma Bombeck and Russell Baker were among them, and they were by and large terrific, but they were generally wry rather than laugh-out-loud funny.

Barry brought the laugh-out-loud funny. Here, for example, is his advice in a piece on wilderness survival, written before he was syndicated:

Newspapers were a daily diet of Serious Things, and Barry was profoundly unserious. He increased the gaiety of the nation. A day that began with “Doonesbury” and a Dave Barry column had a better chance of being a good day. The New York Times, being serious indeed, did not run either one of these things, so it could seem like a pot-au-feu without its gherkins.

I felt a bit smug when Barry went national, because I’d been on to him early. I spent the second half of my youth in Southwest Florida, and my parents were subscribers to The Miami Herald. Barry got his major-newspaper start writing for that publication’s Sunday magazine, Tropic. When I went up north to college, in those pre-internet years, people would mail me clippings of his best stuff, including columns on exploding toilets and cows. He was the LeBron James of exploding toilet humor.

“Class Clown,” as funny books go, is a home run — albeit a shallow, wind-aided home run. Barry leans heavily on old clips of his writing to fill this book up, and that’s fine, but near the end the bag of leftovers grows soggy. Barry has bragged about hating to work very hard, though it is difficult work indeed to give your prose this kind of easy, goofy feeling.

Barry was born in 1947 in Armonk, N.Y., 30 miles north of Manhattan. His father, a Presbyterian minister, was the executive director of the New York City Mission Society, a social-services nonprofit for impoverished children. His dad loved the humorist Robert Benchley and kept his books in the house. Barry read these when he was 11 or 12 and they influenced his writing style.