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hello I'm here today with Dave Barry and we're going to talk about humor Dave's life and Dave's career uh my first question about humor has to do with YouTube so a lot of the funny things you have written rather than doing standup
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and now there's YouTube as a kind of competitor to written humor uh how has that changed what readers are looking for and what new constraints does that put on you well the second part is easy none for me I I'm I'm too old to change I basically do what I've always done I I do think um YouTube and the internet in general have uh radically changed the humor industry uh especially for younger audiences which are much more oriented
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towards Mimi things that they see other people looking at shorter things shorter bits things that require a lot of insight and knowledge which everybody seems to have now thanks to the internet um and I mean if I can extend it to not
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just you but Twitter and and Instagram and and Facebook and you know everything happens so fast and everything you know Builds on everything else so quickly and Things become old almost instantaneously or become mutated so much in it's really
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hard to keep up which is why I don't really try that hard to be honest if I think of the humor I consume I've realized today compared to when I was a kid how much of it is from amuter so there's some one star reviews on Amazon
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that are actually hilarious Twitter can be funny it's very context dependent maybe you know this South Korean video of Robert Kelly the man doing an interview he's trying very hard not to be funny and his two children barge into
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the room and they're removed by his wife truly if you were to hire professional writers to write a scene and try and professional actors to to act you could not possibly have outdone that particular 30 second sequence I mean it
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was just so wonderful because it was real and because he's trying not to be funny but if there are billions of people out there and say each one is you know really funny Once in their in their lifetime and some of that gets captured
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on YouTube and you have aggregators or filters as a professional comedian you're competing against the funniest moment of each amuter often unintentional so do you think it's the case that professionals now they become more like Brands so if I watch Steven uh cber report to me it's funny he's not as funny as that moment by Kelly so he almost to me is a kind of Watchman or he reassures me and that's made the comedian somewhat in a sense
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deliberately not that funny they play a different role or how do you see that I don't know I just think that you know the real comedians like coar you know he's basically delivering jokes written by a staff of writers and curating
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whatever they got from the Internet or presenting whatever they curated from the internet uh but you know guys like Louis CK and David Chapelle are still creating their own humor and it's still really funny it's you know and it's them
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it's not anybody else and don't look like anybody else so yeah there's way way more of it out there uh and it's probably it's probably tougher to be really original to sound really original than it used to be um but I think
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there's you know there's an awful lot of consumers as well and and there just seems to be this huge appetite for more funny U so I don't know that it's worse for I and in some ways it may be easier like if you are a a kid who wants to get
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you know known as as a comedian you don't really have to anymore go the you know incredibly difficult route that most of the standup comedians I know went which is you know starting out at catch a rising star or someplace much
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worse than that and you know and doing all those standups in front of you know three drunks and slowly getting noticed and finally getting hired by somebody you can just go on the internet make a funny video and sometimes that will
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produce fantastic results for you um is the halflife of a joke much shorter now yeah for sure I mean you know everything I as I say I cannot keep up personally I don't even try to keep up I I you know I see something that everybody tells me is funny I look at it but um to try to stay on top of all the stuff that's coming out you can't do it but doesn't mean we end up in a world where in a sense humor is rarely intentional and it's the
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moments that weren't expected to be captured that's what we laugh at and humor is a kind of science what will dwindle or no I mean but that is still going to be uh yes that's part of it but but there's still as I said there's
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still a lot of people who are very creative and are going to continue to be funny they're just going to use whatever is going on around them and it may be a lot more internet oriented than it used to be um but you know in the end PE I
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don't think people's sense of humor has changed that much it's sort of more the way it gets fed to us now and say 20 years from now do you think there will be more professional comedians in this country or fewer I don't I do not represent the humor Bureau I have no earthly idea I do I do think that like in the particular field that I'm in which is writing you you know with like the archaic form of actually writing words down right uh it
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certainly changed you know the the day of the newspaper humor columnist which is what I was is pretty much over because the newspapers newspapers are over that there's no more audience for it that people have no more time for it
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uh so longer form humor does seem to be disappearing on the other hand there's a million good TV shows I think more than they're ever used to be funny TV shows they keep popping up they're in all the you know they're on Amazon they're in
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Netflix some of them are really pretty fun I can't keep up with them all but I'm always surprised at the Quality uh so there seems to be you know more Outlets maybe than used to be if for not the kind of humor that I did but but
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still it's written humor it's scripted humor if we think of the political content of humor so I think back say to the 1960s there's Lenny Bruce there's Richard prior what's funny at that time it seems mostly to be anti-establishment
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in some way or leftwing uh John Stewart today again col bear uh there's some conservative or libertarian comedians there's PJ oror there's yourself there's Drew carry but do you think that the medium of humor today has a slant politically one way or the other and what is that slant oh definitely I mean I mean it is a leftist slant why well because that's what the cool kids think they're you know every all the other cool kids are doing it's
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kind of funny because it's not very um subversive anymore it's mean what what could be less subversive than the than the humor industry during the eight years of Barack Obama where like we never made fun of Barack Obama correct
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he was a president United St and there were some fun you got a Nobel Prize for doing absolutely nothing but you know you just didn't nobody made fun of him they continued pounding on um you know I'll never forget it was it I'll never
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forget and here I will be unable to to summon up the details but it was one of the many White House Press Association dinners while Barack Obama was President he's there and Donald Trump's there and I can't remember who the comedian was
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but he spent the whole time ripping Donald Trump who was at the time you know some Schmo in the audience he wasn't the president sitting right next to him and it to me it kind of epitomized the way it is like we're
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allowed to to you know in the humor Biz beat up all we want on Republicans cuz they're stupid idiot Republicans and their and their followers all redn morons and but at at some point that ceases to be even remotely creative I
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mean that point was reached a long a long time ago um so I think there was kind of a steep decline in the quality of American political humor from which we haven't really recovered combined with the fact that a lot of what passes
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for humor now on both sides is just vicious attacks sure and some of them are very clever and some of them are very funny but it isn't really that it isn't that funny it isn't that creative it's just sort of I I'm I'm going to
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smear I you know how many times you have to be told Donald Trump has weird hair at some point you would think this would be exhausted as a source of humor but it's it's not you know do you think there's room for a new right-wing kind
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of humor maybe not a right kind of rightwing that you like but say now's altright it's at least perceived as new it's outrageous to many people I think is this the new direction of funny I know I don't think or is there something
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intrinsic about humor that it's leftwing there a left wi definitely not I mean humor should be subversive and it's a lot it's a lot more subversive to be right-wing than leftwing these days um you know a prot trump humorist I don't
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know if any exist would be a lot more subversive than any of the N himself is the pro humorist in a sense he's too funny to make fun of yeah or or just too out there to you know he's such a a caricature by himself that it's hard to
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character but but you know like okay there's a guy uh are you familiar with the blog Ace of Spades yes guy's funny the guy is a funny funny writer you know I don't always agree with but he's funny he's really good and he's viciously um
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anti-left yes and that's rare and but when you see it it's like wow that's different you know I admire the skill that takes to do what he did what he does and I don't see it that often you know now Malcolm Gladwell in one of his podcasts he criticized the Teena F skits of Sarah palen Gladwell of course doesn't like Sarah palen and he thought that Tina feay even by mocking Sarah Palin since Tina Fay was a likable person a likable character that
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humanized Sarah pal for the audience and that the satire was counterproductive what do you think of that argument I was just like overthinking it so badly you know that's not how any normal person reacted to Tina feas uh Sarah Palin which was brilliant um you know uh so no I'm sorry that's I don't know Malcolm Gladwell and I know he's a brilliant man but that's way overthinking it and Alec Baldwin doing Donald Trump how funny do
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you think that is it's pretty funny but again it's like this is a pretty easy target to be taken a swing I mean there's a big pinata up there and everybody's got a stick and everybody likes to swing at the Trump pinata I
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personally have just kind of gotten to the point where I don't pay that much attention to Trump jokes anymore cuz they all seem to be the same joke to me hey he's look at what he said like he doesn't know what he's doing he's a more
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on you know now some things cross borders fairly easily a lot of different kinds of foods so not all kinds of foods some but not all kinds of music uh it's striking to me that humorous movies cross borders last it seems from box
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office data than say action movies or even what would appear to be quite culturally specific dramas what do you think it is about the border that limits the appeal of humor probably in part you know the English language I mean if if I
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just speak from personal experience what little I know of what you know anything I've seen mine that was translated and what little I understand of the other language it's extremely difficult to to translate humor and have
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it come off the same way it's easy to you know translate somebody beating a crap out of somebody else um so action movies are going to are lend themselves I think far better now if it's English to English um I think probably american
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comedies do okay in in English-speaking countries I don't know for sure I know englishspeaking comedies from England do pretty well over here so can Canadians on average seem funnier to me that would be a selection mechanism Canada is the funniest country in the world it just hides it much better than that's correct but so much British humor I literally feel I don't understand it there's something about it that's very flat to
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me and a sense that the British audience are in New Zealand they're gaffing and that word gaffa I would never use the word gaffa to apply to myself well I might G A lot of times they just acknowledge the humor of it that's right
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British way but yeah I mean yeah you have to accept with British that no British person has ever in history ever said what he actually thought about anything everything that every British person ever says is meant sarcastically
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um so it's because they're Less Direct that they they way less direct they refuse to ever say anything directly and that's kind of The Wonder of them I'm the kind of person I hardly ever find slapstick funny me too and if I look at
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old slapstick it doesn't seem funny at all intuitively you would think slapstick being only physical would have a much longer halflife uh what I find funny is very culturally specific references now am I strange well not about slapstick I I
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never thought that me when I was a little guy I maybe thought the three stoes were kind of funny but that stopped a long time ago some physical humor is still funny to me Abbot and Castell were pretty physical but they they were funny without being slapstick just punch you know hitting each other in the in the nose and going y never struck me as as funny at all um I missed the second part of your I forgotten the second part of your question you
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mentioned abidin Castell if you're willing I'll talk about a few comedians or mention a few and you can tell me what you found funny with them didn't find funny uh let's start with abot and Castello favorite of my father I've watched almost all the movies as a kid I didn't find them funny but I actually started to find them funny in retrospect after having watched a bit of Seinfeld and Larry David what's your take on Abbot and Castello yeah I I
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can see the connection there it it's it it more relies on on you letting it the humor slowly develop and the characters themselves um being the humor without coming right out and saying what's what's funny about it the one who who uh
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who never understands what's going on the one who's always uh losing his patience with the other one and the first maybe three or four times it's just mildly aming but after a while you when you You See It Coming U that
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becomes very funny to you it's very rare to find that kind of patience and humor anymore the way they you I don't think the audience is as generous as it used to be allowing humor to build the way it did in an Abbott and Castello St and is
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Abbott or Costello funnier to you Abbott being the straight man yeah I think Abbott is funny I think he's much funnier uh someone who just passed away I was watching him on YouTube recently uh Don Rickles H but it was Don Rickles
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was a funny man um and and I always felt that he was one of the things I liked about him I saw he was a little out of control and I know that was thrived but I think at least early in his career it was pretty real
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you see some of the older performan he says things sometimes on the old tonight shows that everybody's just dying and and then you realize none of them really knows exactly why that was so funny they just you know it was just that he said
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something that that nobody would have thought to say but he says some things that that we or at least I wince at I mean could there be a Don Rickles today he's a kind of equal opportunity insulter but a lot of it would at least
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seem to be in bad taste but since it's applied so liberally I mean that word in the multiple sense well it would work anywhere except on a college campus where of course you can't say anything at all but I think I think we have to
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distinguish between com com college campuses and comedy clubs comedy clubs you can still say pretty you can be racial you you know a lot of comedians still are very racial and you know everybody says yeah it's fine he's he's kidding um he's not really a racist he's just you know he's he's going on the stereotypes that everybody body is aware of whereas it can't say but I see non-white comedians being much more uh deploying racial humor than white
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comedians generally they because they can I mean they can't but even I I don't know even white comedians will do it as long as the understanding is hey I'm kidding you know I'm kidding which of course you can't do on a college campus
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anymore because nobody's nobody's AOW a kid do you think there's anything people don't find funny anymore even in a comedy club campus is aside um if if I saw I mean I mean yeah I I will just speak for my own personal uh
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experence as a as a a dad of a daughter if I saw a guy get up and doing you know underage rape jokes it just wouldn't and it even if it were really brilliantly funny the only guy who even came close was uh Louis CK did a really edgy joke not too long ago basically about um pests that you know that came really close to you know and even then everybody kind of winced when he did it but it was it was it was daring and funny um but I myself
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would would draw a line there I I I want to say like the Holocaust but I've seen people make incredibly funny Holocaust jokes again it all depends on the context and it all depends on your understanding of their sensibility and
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you know what you're really laughing at you're not really laughing at the Holocaust you're laughing at the anxiety or the you know something something around it but that takes certain skill on the part of the comedian you know
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it's kind of hard to say in general how bad Eddie Murphy how funny is he why well he used to be really funny I mean his standup in in his day was as good as a God and His you know what was it Beverly Hills Cop and a couple movies
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like that coming to America is one of my favorites yeah he was really I don't know what happened I guess he just got too successful to need to be funny anymore or you know maybe he just got tired of it which I think happens and
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you know God bless them if you you get tired of it you don't have to keep doing it then that's that's fine you don't have to you don't have to live up to my expectation Eddie Murphy but he was really funny now one of your favorites if you could tell us what you find to value in him and that's Robert benchley a lot of what he wrote was in the 20s I was just rereading his essay on New Yorkers versus midwesterners and who are
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the true Americans and I thought it was better than things I might have read last year on the same topic what is it about benchley that makes a fair amount of it pretty enduring and influenced you so much well he was radiantly
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intelligent um he you know this is this was a very well-educated cultured man who made a very good living as a Critic um and you know would have would have been able to have a quite successful career as a theater critic or a literary
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critic he was a he was a smart guy but and he was in the movies like you his career in some ways he he sort of um he was sorry that he did that in a way he took the money and you know he he he regretted I think at least on a he might
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have regretted more if he didn't do it maybe so maybe so and he did make some pretty funny shorts yeah but the other thing the the reason that I loved him and still love him was that he was that rare uh comic writer who was willing to
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be really silly um silliness is an underrated part of humor most people in the end would rather be cool than silly and and you know snide and condescending and lot than just be out there and being genuinely silly Robert benchley was silly he would take you know extreme left turns in the middle of a uh of an essay about one thing and suddenly be an essay about something completely different he didn't care as long as he thought it was funny he went
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for it and that was the thing that when I was a kid just drew me to him that he didn't you I was used to being presented with Mark Twain as a humorist now Mark Twain is a funny guy and he wrote some funny stuff but you don't laugh out loud
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well you maybe do once every in a great while reading Mark Twain you you smile and chuckle Robert eventually made me laugh out loud when I was a kid um and and I thought that was that's what I wanted to do how about jokes in books so
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say when I was a kid I think I was eight I had a book of jokes and there was one I kept on bringing around to my mother I read it to her about five times a day and the punchline was I'm sick and tired of all this bickering about oatmeal now today if I say that sentence to myself in my mind I still laugh but I know the joke was never funny or just jokes listed in books joke cuz I missed the no that just only the punchline the joke is
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not funny all right I missed that one okay go ahead I'm sorry how funny are jokes listed in books it used to be you could buy these books all the time and now you don't see them much there's Chuck Lerman as you say Weis is you but
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we have now we have Twitter and now we have the internet but even before Twitter it seems those books were disappearing they were they are they weren't funny I'm trying to remember the no it's just people people don't have
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people don't read first of all people don't read books anymore as far as I can tell but if they want humor they look on their phone you know whatever is funny now on their phone that's what they're looking at they don't you know a printed
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page with a with a bunch of jokes on it would seem incredibly archaic to somebody like my daughter here's a movie if you don't know it will just pass but Mike Judge is idiocracy yeah I never saw the movie so I do know the principle of
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it it's it's a Wayne the like some professional wrestlers the president of the United States and everyone's an idiot the first half hour is I think at least watch that much of it when did Mad Magazine stop being funny and and why
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did that happen when it did I I don't know if it stopped being funny I stopped reading it when I started reading like National Lampoon which struck me as more I don't know a little more grownup um and maybe maybe I was wrong because Mad
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Magazine was some of the old parodies in Mad were just brilliant it seems it was an influence on you right it was I read a lot of mad I mean issue of Mad Magazine when I was you know like 10 11 12 13 um and I can't honestly say that
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it stopped being funny I stopped reading it so I don't know but maybe by the mid 80s it became harder for it to be daring because you have other Comedians and mainstream media well before the internet but being more daring Eddie
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Murphy would be an example so mad didn't seem so outrageous anymore do you think that's it that could be and then we had you know we had a crossover into tele like Saturday Night Live you know be brought the sensibility of my gener to TV you complete willingness to mock everything mock commercials the way mad used to and nobody but nobody on television mocked television and suddenly there was you know this show that was mocking everything about
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television and then uh the Larry Shandling show and thing where where it became kind of a staple of Television to mock television and Letterman was going of make a whole career out of that so maybe we didn't need a a magazine
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anymore to say hey look at the look how silly TV is anymore you know CV was doing that for us you've said in one of your essays that you can't really pin down what makes things funny in a consistent sense that there's something
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surprising about it but you think a lot of humor stems from fear and despair what is it you think that we fear and are despairing of so much well the simplest thing is we fear that uh we're going to die and that before we do our lives are really pretty meaningless I mean they're basically you know the world is completely unfair uh ridiculously unfair place I mean things keep happening to people that should never happen to anybody and it seems to
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be pretty random how they happen um and I think basically the two reactions to that are religion you know in other words they're really is a reason for all this and it really is going to end up okay and if you don't buy that then there's humor
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you know like which is to me just this kind of weird psychological reaction human beings have developed to tolerate how scary and unfair the world is I mean there's no good reason to have humor no practical reason that I can
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think of no evolutionary benefit to it other than it keeps us from going insane so in your theory religious people are less funny because religionist their substitute or they become more skilled at dealing with Despair and so they're
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more funny I think they're less funny so comedians tend to be atheists I think that's true I mean I think that that this is and this is not to dismiss religious people my dad was a religious person and he was a funny guy but that
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in generally the two things one tends to mitigate the other and to be really edgy funny it's probably better if you don't believe in anything good is coming is this why so many successful comedians have been Jewish in this country well that's assuming that Jewish people are more likely to be which is probably a pretty good probably assum that and the you know the fact that they're uh you know historically persecuted group that
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managed to somehow find ways to survive you using often their wits um yeah you know that that's probably part of why there why there are so many Jewish comedians at that and the fact that everybody if you're Jewish everybody you know is funny like trying to be funny anyway Mormons revered in that community that skill the ability to make people laugh Mormons historically have been a persecuted Community it could a wacky fun group once against no
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no no but what why I don't know if there's any Mormon comedians Sarah silver but they came along just for the purpose of of giving um who are those guys the south South Park guys um something to make fun of and that's that's that may be their
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Divine Purpose on Earth they're also too libertarian oriented uh com yeah yeah and we like we Libertarians love the Mormons so but social conservatives as comedians that's a lot tougher right social conservatives yeah people who
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like think um there should be strict drug laws and um have a prudish approach to sex can't they be funny about something else you're not going to see that much no I don't think so but our ability to compartmentalize as human beings just
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the fact that we could say at times find a joke about the Holocaust funny that suggests for wonderful compartmentalizes but the people who are social conservatives they they can't compartmentalize I mean what does that
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tell us about humor well I think the you know you have to look at the reason they are social conservatives to begin with and it's probably in part because they are religious people which goes back to my feeling it's not that it's funny that
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you know the world is set up the way it is it's because there's a divine plan for it and rules we need to follow this is not how a humorist thinks the humorist thinks no there's no divine plan and these rules are stupid um you
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know this is you kind of have to be some on some level pretty subversive I think to be funny H here here's a question from Chuck closterman from his cocoa Puff's book uh see what your answer is every every person you have ever slept with is invited to a banquet where you are the guest of honor no one will be in attendance except you the collection of your former lovers in the catering service after the meal you're asked to
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give a 15-minute speech to the assembly what do you talk about I would try to seduce the catering service if you know they be the only people there I haven't already slept oh man um that would be I would complain about the catering
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service I I would I think I would have to spend boy first of all it might be in my case not that huge a group to be to be honest you be like I could just address them individually it wouldn't take that long but it would include your
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wife yes yes I have slept with my wife are there common targets of humor you think are unfairly maligned other than just the common tendency to attack say Republicans or the right but at the social level um well not not so much anymore I mean
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there was a time when the the almost you know half the jokes you heard this was in my lifetime were like polish jokes whatever MH and is think back was kind of stupid Polish people are not less intelligent chopan right let's joke
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about chopan and and yet that was a staple of humor and and some of those were pretty funny jokes you know you don't hear them anymore um but now yeah I think now it's more likely to be a political Target um and E which
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whichever side it is I'm I'm I'm Le I'm inclined to few that kind of humor as as lazier it's more like I know you're on my team so if I mock that person we'll both get a good laugh and it also will prove we're smarter than they that's
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like a kind of the format the template for a lot of the humor now and for the most part it's not really based on anything real it's like it's kind of silly to pretend that all Republicans are stupider than all Democrat in my opinion or or the other way around it's kind of either way it's kind of a dumb template to start with uh and yet that is sort of the template now you know for both sides one of my readers sent in a question uh would love
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to hear him talk about sentence structure and its relationship to the effectiveness of written humor well there you have any comments on that I do I do I this is my life is is writing sentences that are intended to make
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people laugh and you start with the idea of the joke but then to execute it so that it actually works it's very similar to what a standup comedian does but he does it with timing and emphasis and in written humor you do it with spacing and
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punctuation and and a few other tricks but yeah the key and this is the most obvious example of why sruct is important and yet it is violated all the time in human writing by amateurs is that the funny part has to come last and
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then when it comes it has to end there and go on to something new and you know very often the funniest part of the sentence if if it's poorly done will be in the middle and then there'll be words after uh if you watch a standup comedian he'll
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never deliver a joke where there's more words after the funny part right uh but in written humor that's done a lot by you know by people who don't know what they're doing s structure is really important and how formally do you think
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about grammar when you do this a lot I for a long time well for it seemed like a long time at the time seven eight years I taught effective writing seminars to business people I was young and I looked even younger but I had to
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get up in front of Engineers chemists lawyers sometimes accountants people who were accomplished in their fields and but were not necessarily good at writing and I was supposed to talk to them about how to write reports and letters and memos and they challenged me because I looked like I was 10 years old yes and who was and they were expected to be bored also uh so I became a grammar fanatic um just in self-defense because
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I got challenged so often why why do I say it's okay to send end a sentence with a preposition when they were told that you can't do that why did I say it was okay to start a sentence with and or but when they were they were told you
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can't do they had all these rules that they were told that aren't rules of all of grammar and never were and uh so I became um I could I don't think I can anymore I could diagram sentences I I could cite you know usage experts uh so
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I became very interested in grammar I was always a pretty good writer but I I was a much more aware writer when I came out of that experience now I mean I use grammar more to mess it up for humorous effect than I do you know I don't try to teach anybody grammar but I did I did find the grounding I got was helpful now you once wrote that after eight years of trying to teach business writing you became convinced it would never get any
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better but this is now later we're in a different time there's the internet which actually gets many people writing much more not not always for the better but do you think you know fast forward into 2017 has business writing in any
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way improved I'm not as on top of it as I was when I was reading hundreds of letters and memos you know every week but my guess is no uh there are certain fundamental things that business people have trouble with um and what's the main
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thing they get wrong from the business mentality okay the the the the most consistent mistake not mistake but uh inefficiency of business writing with and it was very consistent is the absolute refusal on the part of the
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writer to tell you right away what it is what the message he or she is trying to deliver and I used to say to them the most important thing you have to say should be in the first sentence and they all know you can't I'm an engineer we
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did a 10year study this is way too complicated you know or and and inevitably they were wrong inevitably if they really thought about it they were able to in one sentence summarize why it was really important but they refused to
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do that because the way they found out was by spending 10 years of study and all this data and everything and that's the way they wanted everyone to look at what they did they wanted their supervisors to go plowing through all
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they had done to come to this brilliant conclusion that they had come to through their history through their thought drag drag everybody through and it was the one thing newspaper people were taught to do that was that made more sense you know you don't have your reader attention very long so get to the point um and I found it was very difficult to get even really smart business people to get to the point and sometimes it was
33:23
cuz they really couldn't tell you what the point was and what I wanted to say and but rarely felt comfortable saying was if you can't tell them if you don't know what the point is then you can't really write this you know report but
33:34
they it it was always too complicated for a lay person like me to understand uh you know that was the way they viewed it but you know then I was being hired by their bosses to tell them no we want you to write clearly and we want you to
33:48
get to the point and we want you to and why were they at this meta level resistant to your message because nobody else was doing it I mean if you if I got when I would get uh when I would start the class I have 32 people in the class
34:01
typically and when they would turn in all their You Know sample samples of writing every one of them wrote the same way they all wrote businesses writing you know this is my parody of it but it's enclos please find the enclosed
34:13
enclosure you know that kind of kind of formal uh nonsensical meaningless you know flow of words somewhere in there would be something important something sign ific you know or or maybe not but and were the women worse or the men
34:31
worse both sides were equally bad in the same ways very yeah I did not notice a difference based on gender I know you know I just found very few people yeah the very few people are naturally clear concise writers that's not a common
34:46
trait but but it was more of a thinking issue than it was a writing issue it was just this inability to see the the purpose of the document as anything other than a diary sort of to make you see what I did as opposed to convey
35:01
important information to you humor is one area where the enforcement of intellectual property law tends to be weak or maybe even non-existent so there are always issues or problems with comedians stealing jokes from other people whether standup
35:16
routines or or in writing uh do you think it works having an area such as humor where basically IP law isn't applied and there are various conventions and you hope that other people punish those who break the conventions but you can't rely on that or is humor this public good that is actually underproductive it out there I it's kind of self- policing and people do steal I have had over the years ridiculous experiences especially when my column
35:50
was syndicated and you know somebody would send me a copy of his local Shopper and there you know the local orthodontist wrote a weekly column and one week I would look at it and it would be my entire column word for word with
36:02
his my name changed to his name you know and I'd write or call these people though when I was younger and more naive and had more energy and I'd say you you stole my con you just took it and they would go they were never they were never
36:16
apologetic I was like oh I meant you know I just thought it was so great you know I but you stole it you put your name on it you know they didn't like get that that was wrong um but I think it's harder and harder to get away with that if you are a successful comedian um people are going to catch you if you're stealing somebody else's jokes there's just too much too many people out there consuming it you know seeing it in too
36:41
many different forms who's a comedian who's not so well known who you think is fantastic and ought to be better known written standup television whatever that's I don't know I mean there the ones I would name are known uh I'm not
36:55
that um but even someone like Robert benchley while he's on one hand famous his Wikipedia page is quite long he's not actually known most people haven't heard of him nobody knows who Robert benley is anymore this is one of the
37:06
things um I've been using for years as an example of why I don't expect to be famous for anything in 20 years except for Talk Like a Pirate Day which wasn't even my idea you know but did you know the humor people who do humor with so
37:21
even you know the rarest of exceptions do not last in the culture the way people who write uh you know Tender Is the Night hang around for much longer like even like we talk about the Marx Brothers but who goes to see marks Brothers
37:36
movies anymore you know they we know who they are but people still go to see Shakespeare performed you know not to compare when there were repertoire theaters I went to see Marx brother's movies and Duck Soup at least I think
37:49
hel held up pretty well and they still showed the movies when we were younger but you don't go see anymore and Mark's brother yeah duck sou holds up great that's the best one yeah yes I think yes but even then like there's stretches in
37:59
Duck Soup where it's just like oh man he's like really kind of dumb it's so dumb it's kind of funny now your latest book is about Florida so I thought uh I would go to news.google.com and just enter uh Miami and this is one
38:16
of the first articles that came back quote Miami Beach police say Sigman Hernandez confessed Wednesday to quote slapping and possibly choking his tiny Yorkshire Terrier and leaving her in a Public's parking garage the reason he
38:31
told police the dog vomited in his car I then went to your blog and there is a story there of quote Zachary Kelly 30 became upset with Phoebe a four-month-old puppy who was acting up they said he held the animal down and bit her on the ears and he was quote just trying to teach the dog a lesson the dog a lesson now what is wrong with the dogs in your state the dogs are fine the people are not uh yeah yeah Florida the the guy who bit
39:04
the dog I didn't know you know after hearing the expression man bites dog nine trillion times I don't think I've ever actually seen an example where a man did bite a dog but if it did naturally it had happened in Florida and that dog will not do that
39:20
again whatever it was why has Florida evolved to become weirder say than neighboring states well well many reasons first of all it's warmer than you know is it much warmer than Alabama yes quite a bit warmer than Alabama
39:34
warmer than Alabama come to Alabama in January and then you'll want to come to Miami um it's warmer it's it's a much more known as a vacation destination it's got beaches everywhere people come there not not particularly serious
39:45
reasons coming there um doesn't that make them calm though rather than weird is it the giant insects make them weird a lot of them drunk is what it makes them we have a ready access to alcohol and and drugs of every kind in in
39:58
Florida we have a lot of uh a lot of different communities that have absolutely nothing to do with each other living in close proximity Miami where I live is a good example but the whole state is it's like 10 different weird
40:10
little communities there is no Florida there's no sense of State pride like you know people don't go I'm I'm a proud Floridian they just don't um it's so it's kind of like nobody owns the state and there are people just constantly
40:24
showing up in the state uh for various reason I I would say we're like we're like the Ellis Island for stupid weird people if you you know if you want to plure yourself into a into a stuffed animal in a Walmart you're going to go
40:36
to Florida to do that you know you want to get naked um by the side of the road for no apparent reason yes Florida is the place you like just nothing else cuz it's warmer there and the law enforcement is different we have but
40:47
they caught the this man biting the dog they caught the man who you know kicked the dog through the parking garage so it's it's tough on WE EV do arrest people usually but sometimes it's the police officers doing doing these things
41:01
no we just I don't know and you know it's it's a state where every day is a thousand more people than there were the day before so there's a lot of people that just showed up ready you know looking for something um in in the in
41:14
the Heat and the humidity with the bugs and the lizards and the booze and it's just a toxic stew of weird is what it is I was thinking like what to me is special about Florida and one thing that struck me asking some others as well is
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how many wonderful or at least interesting movies are set there so a simple list would be body heat Spring Breakers body heat was an incredibly good movie of course it is as is Spring Breakers Key Largo contact dece Bigalow
41:39
Ace Ventura Canadian comic by the way Some Like It Hot all kinds of space movies oie's gold an old movie with Peter Fonda parts of Midnight Cowboy uh all kinds of gangster movies have scenes set in Florida so why is Florida such a wonderful place to set your movie movie probably CU I I'm guessing has something to do with unions more than anything else um yeah it's warm you know so you don't have to worry quite as much about the weather
42:05
down there um and yeah just it's has a has a an image to it Florida it's not people don't think of Florida the way they think of Alabama even though Alabama's right next door um they think of Florida is more exotic and they're right it is
42:22
more exotic it's more exotic than any other state as far as I can tell and uh you live near Miami let me ask you a question about that place which I've been to many times am I wrong in thinking that maybe 15 years ago Miami
42:35
was more culturally Central than it is today uh Spanish as a rising language was arguably more important there was a sense Miami might become or be cemented as a capital of Latin America it seems now even Latin America in some ways has just turned its back a bit on Miami not in a hostile way but they've developed their their own Urban centers more media Empires outside of Miami more and uh it seems to me a slightly forgotten City
43:02
along with Los Angeles Art Deco people aren't as interested in anymore uh maybe for the better of Miami I don't want to get all chauvinistic but I dis all of those all of those no Miami is grown like crazy um oh it's grown but is it as
43:18
Central to the American Consciousness as a rising urban center as it was 10 15 years ago I think May in the sense that everybody more used to it now that you know Miami is really the C the capital of Latin America but I don't think it's
43:32
it's be any more than New York has become you know pass I mean it's just cemented that's what it is Miami is the center of Latin America but it's but it's like exploding right now um and you know I I I I don't have any statistics to back up this feeling I have but I don't I haven't noticed that Miami is turned into some kind of Backwater no we run our government out of Florida now right at least the executive well yeah up that's up up the
44:01
coast a little bit with the rich people but yeah but it's not very far no it isn't in in linear distance it's a million trillion miles away in culture Palm Beach and Miami are separated by La you know bokeh which is Long Island
44:15
basically I mean Miami is when you get in across the Dade Broward line you are in Latin America 80% of the city I think speaks uh Spanish as its first language and a lot of people don't speak any English at all um you can function
44:29
comfortably in Miami your entire life and never speak a word of English read a word of English you just don't need it whereas if you are in business in Miami you don't speak Spanish you in big trouble you you're going to need it so it's still a very very very Latin City but when you get to like Fort Lauderdale and then bokeh you're in New York you know then you get a little farther and you're Palm Beach you're just a rich
44:51
person land I sometimes feel that parts of Puerto Rico are more American than parts of Miami actually oh definitely Miami Miami is not American it's Latin American it is nicaraguans and Colombians and Venezuelans and and
45:07
Dominicans and and you know all of these people like the United States but a lot of them are not really assimilated to the United States particularly well yet and the the one that everybody talks about is Cubans my my wife is Cuban my
45:21
my my in-laws are Cuban they are Americans I mean they have totally I mean they've lost their country and they're okay with that you know they are they're still very Latin but they're Americans but the there are large
45:33
sections of Miami where people are still living essentially in Colombia or might as well be and is there to you a central author or cultural figure who represents Florida in some way absolutely not the closest get would be Carl yeah that's
45:46
what comes to mind and he kind of represents the I'm really sick of what's happened to my state side of it you know he's he's Carl does not embrace the changes of of Florida Carl would be happy if went back to just being mostly
45:59
snakes and lizards you have zor Neil Hurston and also grah Parsons was from Florida even though people think of him as somehow Southwestern uh his country sensibility is very much uh Eastern actually you said uh in in one of your
46:12
writings you've lived in the suburbs of New York City Philadelphia and now Miami maybe other stops in between do you think the suburbs are underrated yeah I I think if as long as they I mean you know the at least where I live in in in
46:27
Coral Gables which is a city but it's really a suburb of of Miami uh it's a pretty great place to live um it's and it's kind of I what it has in common with the other places I've lived is it has access to um you know a major
46:44
metropolitan area with kind of the excitement and the and the the diversity that that implies but you can be physically more comfortable um and I like that you know I think there's nothing wrong wrong with that I think
46:56
there's a reason why people want to have a yard and a driveway um and I think every every American should have a right to yard and a driveway now one thing that really struck me going through your life history is of the the depth and
47:09
breadth and and comprehensiveness of what you've done in so many different media you've written uh children's books you've been involved with television uh you've obviously been on the internet you wrote a weekly column for many years
47:23
uh business writing worked with Walt Disney Disney uh there a rock group called The Rock Bottom remainders that you are in for a while uh so my sense is there's something quite special about your work habits that is maybe the most
47:37
remarkable feature about you so if someone were trying to build a career in some way and they said well I want to learn from the work habits or career management of Dave Barry what has been going on behind the scenes that accounts for your
47:51
extraordinary productivity defined along a number of different dimensions um well first of all thank you that's the most complimentary thing the's ever said about my it's really strike work but anyway uh well part of it is like
48:06
insecurity so I want to keep producing always I always so fear and despair fear fear and despair makes you funny and and the constant worry that you you no longer can do it and that you're not funny anymore and you know so you know if you as soon as you start to be just pretty confident that anything you write is great then you're going to suck um as a you know in any creative field I think uh but then also like certain like uh
48:30
impatience or um fear of getting into too much of a rut um so like wanting to try new things that aren't that you feel like are you know in your wheelhouse like if I had said that I wanted to become a uh a playright I I know I think
48:48
I would have been um you know stretching too far I don't know anything about being a player I wasn't trained I haven't studied whatever but I I did feel that if I I could go from writing funny essays to maybe trying to write a funny novel if I
49:03
looked at the funny novel as a series of funny scenes with some kind of plot which is you know crude way of looking at it but at least it was connected in a way that um that I thought maybe it could make it work um so it's kind of
49:16
combination of insecurity needing to keep producing and and and kind of being fear of boredom wanting to do something new that you still felt you could do uh competently or at least not embarrass yourself what was it like
49:31
playing music with Roger McGuinn there is sort of embarrassing myself um this has been the the most fun thing I have done as a grownup I think I'm writing a book now about uh things I've learned from my my dog essentially
49:45
and one of the lessons I've learned from my dog is that you you you should not stop trying to have fun even when you get old and the most fun thing I have done as a grown-up is become is is be part of this rock band called The Rock
49:59
Bottom remainders which is not a good rock band I'm not a good musician what do you play I play guitar and I did it in college and I'm good enough that if you didn't know anything you might think I could play guitar but if you know
50:10
anything you would know immediately that I can't that I just can fake it reasonably well but anyway I got to play with not just Roger McGuinn but Bruce Springstein and Warren zon and but Roger plays with us regularly still does
50:23
although it's been a couple years I got to admit um and that that has been the most fun single fun thing cuz it is unlike what I was just talking about where you want to be in your wheelhouse you want to be where you can be
50:34
competent it's an area where I know I'm not competent I don't belong and yet I get to be on the stage with this guy who's really really great and what's Roger McGuinn like's he's the nicest man and that's been the thing the consistent
50:49
thing with these musicians who have played with well I guess you kind of have to be nice to be a great musician who's willing to play with a bunch bunch of incompetent authors but Roger is like I'll never forget like the first time we played I can't even remember you know oh yeah okay we were playing somewhere and Roger wanted to stay on stage with us first he he had done us we did a series of bird songs with Roger and I said the
51:15
last song we're going to do after that is is lab bambba but you know Richie Val song and he goes oh okay I can I'll you know do that you know and he goes what can you do and I go gee and he goes well how does that how does that look go and I hav to know I can play that look and I it goes like this and Roger's looking at I'm like Roger mcin is looking at my left hand to see how to play a lick on the guitar and to me that like better than winning a
51:43
Pulitzer Prize it was really more much more fun now you have a whole series of books Peter and the star catcher is based on Peter Pan many have been best sellers uh it's believed that more than half of the the audience for these books
51:56
is adults although superficially they might seem to be children's books they're that too uh the original novel Peter Pan by JM Barry I mean how do you understand that book it's a deeply weird book and what's your sense of that book
52:08
and then how you and your co-author Ridley Pearson modified Peter Pan we were really naive uh neither one of us had really spent much time on JM Barry both of us had been raised in the United States and our view of the Peter Pan
52:24
story was the Disney cartoon the leg famous Disney cartoon and Mary Martin on Broadway hanging on wires you know this 43-year-old lady swinging around the stage that was our view of the Peter Pan story um and so and and all we were
52:40
thinking about was that the American version of the Peter Pan story The Myth you know the you know which just a few simple elements he can fly Tinkerbell Captain Hook the alligator I mean the crocodile that kind of you know the
52:54
simple elements how could we put those together in in a backstory that would be entertaining for kids little did we know we were you know sticking a stick into a a hornet nest of British people who very take take their Jamberry very seriously
53:10
don't like Amer try to revise Star Wars right they don't like Americans anyway you know kind so we got we got a you know certain amount of grief from purists and you know we we had to from the start say we are not trying to you
53:24
know we don't say we own this story we're going to say we're experts on this we're just here's what we're doing we're a couple of American guys taking the American view that was that was our that was our idea um and it worked out really
53:35
well for us one of JM Barry's siblings claimed that JM had never had sex now we know from one of your earlier answers that's not the case with you uh is this a dark vision Peter Pan well I went back and read it and yeah it it's more I would say more weird than anything else just kind of a strange Story the way it's told um and I honestly can't say I was a huge fan of it um you know it's hard to you know Mary gateskill wrote recently that it's
54:07
about how young men are not interesting and women of All Sorts are completely replaceable and you go through life with these relationships and they're all transitory and meaningless and somehow from that comes a book that people are
54:23
dearly attached to and that to me is strange it is strange but I I always kind of felt that what they were attached to because if you listen to people they don't quote you know long passages from Peter Pan in the end it's
54:35
like when you ask almost anybody certainly any American what's Peter Pan about it's a little boy who never grows old and can fly all of which is true but you don't get that's a little sick in a way right a little boy who never grows
54:48
old and who can fly I mean would you want that life when I was eight yeah and in retrospect yeah no I could I could not it's a kind of punishment you know one of Dante's circles of hell and not to get all heavy on it but in our books we
55:05
do try to deal with the fact that Peter has to accept that his friends are all going to gold and leave him as as Jamberry does I mean I'm not you know that is in a way the the the sad part of it um although mostly it's like isn't it cool that he can fly but your Peter Pan is more of a buildings Raman where Peter develops in a healthy direction yeah so it's like more for American and there's a girl who's who's really great and
55:28
strong and nice and you know Brave and does she really love him she does they do but they can't ever be really in love because he's keeps the same age and she keeps getting older and are you ever tempted to be funny in those books yeah
55:43
uh the um there are a couple scenes where where I go for humor but the one of the things I like about writing novels is that you don't have that burden on you when I write a humor book it's my feeling is every sentence is
55:57
supposed to be funny or leading to the next sentence which will be funny um and with with with an NAA you're telling a story which to me is a much more kind of relaxed process less frantic when I'm writing it like what
56:12
would he say then and what would he say then and what would they do then you know that would keep you engaged but it doesn't have to make you laugh which is a lot of pressure and to close could you give us any hint as to what you're
56:22
planning on doing next um continue to maturity followed by death is my plan now I I'm I'm I'm writing a book it's like I said it's about dogs it's about my dog whose name is Lucy and it's it'll be called I think lessons from Lucy but
56:38
it was like I'm going to turn 70 this year and Lucy's going to turn 70 she's 10 so in dog you're 70 and I was thinking about it when I was thinking about a dog book I was thinking she's still really happy she is unchanged in
56:52
in in that sense uh um in the happiness that she's changed in her you know her appearance and what she can do and everything but she's still pretty happy all the time and I'm thinking like what did what does she do that I don't do cuz
57:04
I I can I'm pretty clear I'm not as happy as I was when I was 19 you know oh I'm happier than I was 19 were you really yeah are you I think for most men happiness between 30 and 60 are the peak years well I'm way past that so I'm on
57:19
downhill slope so I'm looking to my dog for help yeah and if she doesn't give it I'm going to bite her Dave Barry it's been a pleasure chatting same here thank [Music] you thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show