Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. 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 stand-up, 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'm too old to change. I basically do what I've always done. I do think YouTube and the internet in general have radically changed the humor industry, especially for younger audiences, which are much more oriented towards memey things that they see. Other people look at shorter things, shorter bits, things that require a lot of inside knowledge, which everybody seems to have now thanks to the internet. And I mean, if I can extend it to not just YouTube, but Twitter and Instagram 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 instantaneously. It's really hard to keep up, which is That's 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 amateurs. So there's some 1-star reviews on Amazon 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 2 children barge into 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 act it, you could not possibly have outdone that particular 30-second sequence. I mean, it 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 lifetime, and some of that gets captured on YouTube and you have aggregators or filters, as a professional comedian, You're competing against the funniest moment of each amateur, often unintentional. So do you think it's the case that professionals now, they become more like brands? So if I watch Stephen Colbert 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, deliberately not that funny. They play a different role. Or how do you see that?

I don't know, I think that the real comedians, like Colbert, he's basically delivering jokes written by a staff of writers and curating whatever they got from the internet, or presenting whatever they curated from the internet. But guys like Louis C.K. and David Chappelle are still creating their own humor and it's still really funny. And it's them, it's not anybody else, it doesn't look like anybody else. So yeah, there's way, way more of it out there, and it's probably tougher to be really original, to sound really original than it used to be. But I think there's an awful lot of consumers as well, and there just seems to be this huge appetite for more funny. So I don't know that it's worse for— and in some ways it may be easier. Like if you are a a kid who wants to get, you know, known as a comedian, you don't really have to anymore go the, you know, incredibly difficult route that most of the stand-up comedians I know went, which is, you know, starting out at Catch a Rising Star or someplace much worse than that, and, you know, and doing all those stand-ups in front of, you know, 3 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 produce fantastic results for you.

Is the half-life of a joke much shorter now?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, everything— as I say, I cannot keep up. Personally, I don't even try to keep up. I see something that everybody tells me is funny, I look at it, but to try to stay on top of all the stuff that's coming out, you can't do it.

But does it mean we end up in a world where, in a sense, humor is rarely intentional, and it's the moments that weren't expected to be captured that's what we laugh at, and humor as a kind of science will dwindle, or?

No, I mean, but that is still gonna be— yes, that's part of it, but there's still, as I said, there's still a lot of people who are very creative and are gonna continue to be funny. They're just gonna use whatever is going on around them, and it may be a lot more internet-oriented than it used to be, but in the end, I 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 know.

I do not represent the Humor Bureau. I have no earthly idea. I do think that, like, in the particular field that I'm in, which is writing humor, you know, with like the archaic form of actually writing words down. Right. It's certainly changed. You know, the day of the newspaper humor columnist, which is what I was, is pretty much over.

Because the newspaper's over.

Newspapers are over. There's no more audience for it. People have no more time for it. So longer-form humor does seem to be disappearing. On the other hand, there's a million good TV shows, I think more than there ever used to be, funny TV shows that keep popping up. They're in all the— you know, they're on Amazon, they're on Netflix. Some of them are really pretty fun. I can't keep up with them all, but I'm always surprised at the quality. 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 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 Pryor. What's funny at that time, it seems mostly to be anti-establishment in some way or left-wing. Jon Stewart today, again Colbert, there's some conservative or libertarian comedians, there's PJ O'Rourke, there's yourself, there's Drew Carey. 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, it is a leftist slant. But why? Well, because that's what the cool kids think, all the other cool kids are doing. It's kind of funny because it's not very subversive anymore. What could be less subversive than the humor industry during the 8 years of Barack Obama where we never made fun of Barack Obama?

Correct.

He was the president of the United States. And there were some funny— he got a Nobel Prize for doing absolutely nothing. But nobody made fun of him as they continued pounding on I'll never forget, it was— I'll never forget, and here I will be unable to summon up the details, but it was one of the many White House Press Association dinners while Barack Obama was president. And he's there, and Donald Trump's there. And I can't remember who the comedian was, but he spent the whole time ripping Donald Trump, who was, at the time, some schmo in the audience. He wasn't the president sitting right next to him. And to me, it kind of epitomized the way it is. We're allowed to, in the humor biz, beat up all we want on Republicans, 'cause they're stupid idiot Republicans and their followers are all redneck morons and everything, but at some point that ceases to be even remotely creative. I mean, that point was reached a long, long time ago. 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 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 is it really that isn't that funny, it isn't that creative, it's just sort of, I'm gonna smear— how many times do 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 not.

Do you think there's room for a new right-wing kind of humor? Maybe not a right kind of right-wing that you like, but say now there's alt-right, it's at least perceived as new, it's outrageous to many people, Is this the new direction of funny?

I know, I don't think—

Or is there something intrinsic about humor that it's left-wing?

There's a left-wing slant to all humor. No, no, definitely not. I mean, humor should be subversive. And it's a lot more subversive to be right-wing than left-wing these days. You know, a pro-Trump humorist, I don't know if any exist, would be a lot more subversive than any of the 9/11—

Trump himself is the pro-Trump humorist. In a sense, he's too funny to make fun of.

Yeah, or just too out there to— you know, he's such a caricature by himself that it's hard to caricature him. But, you know, like, okay, there's a guy— 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 him, but he's funny. He's really good. And he's viciously anti-left.

Yes.

And that's rare, 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.

Malcolm Gladwell, in one of his podcasts, he criticized the Tina Fey skits of Sarah Palin. Gladwell, of course, doesn't like Sarah Palin. And he thought that Tina Fey, even by mocking Sarah Palin, since Tina Fey was a likable person, a likable character, it humanized Sarah Palin for the audience. And that the satire was counterproductive. What do you think of that argument?

It's just like overthinking it so badly, you know? That's not how any normal person reacted to Tina Fey's Sarah Palin, which was brilliant, you know? So no, I'm sorry, that's a— 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 you think that is?

It's pretty funny, but again, it's like this is a pretty easy target to be taking a swing. I mean, there's a big piñata up there and everybody's got a stick and everybody likes to swing at the Trump piñata. I personally have just kind of gotten to the point where I don't pay that much attention to Trump jokes anymore because they all seem to be the same joke to me. Hey, look what he said, like, he doesn't know what he's doing, he's a moron, you know.

Now, some things cross borders fairly easily, a lot of different kinds of foods, though not all kinds of foods. Some but not all kinds of music. It's striking to me that humorous movies cross borders less, it seems, from box 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 I just speak from personal experience, what little I know of, you know, anything I've seen of mine that was translated and what little I understand of the other language, It's extremely difficult to translate humor and have it come off the same way. It's easy to, you know, translate somebody beating the crap out of somebody else. So action movies are gonna lend themselves, I think, far better. Now if it's English to English, I think probably American comedies do okay in English-speaking countries. I don't know for sure. I know English-speaking comedies from England do pretty well over here.

Canadians on average seem funnier to me. That would be a selection mechanism.

Canada is the funniest country in the world. 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 me in a sense that the British audience or in New Zealand, they're guffawing. And that word guffaw, I would never use the word guffaw to apply to myself. Well, they don't actually laugh out loud a lot of times.

They just acknowledge the humor of it.

That's right.

British way. But yeah, I mean, yeah, you have to accept with British humor 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.

So it's because they're less direct?

They are 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 old slapstick, it doesn't seem funny at all. Intuitively, you would think slapstick being only physical would have a much longer half-life. What I find funny is very culturally specific references. Am I strange?

Well, not about slapstick. I never thought that— I mean, when I was a little guy, I maybe thought the Three Stooges were kind of funny, but that stopped a long time ago. Some physical humor is still funny to me. Abbott and Costello were pretty physical, but they were funny without being slapstick. Just punch, you know, hitting each other in the nose and going, "Yuck, yuck, yuck," never struck me as as funny at all. I missed the second part of your— I've forgotten the second part of your question.

You mentioned Abbott and Costello. 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. Let's start with Abbott and Costello, 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 Abbott and Costello?

Yeah, I can see the connection there. It more relies on you letting the humor slowly develop and the characters themselves being the humor without coming right out and saying what's funny about it. The one who never understands what's going on, the one who's always losing his patience with the other one. And the first maybe 3 or 4 times, it's just mildly amusing, but after a while, when you see it coming,— that becomes very funny to you. It's very rare to find that kind of patience in humor anymore, the way they— 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 Costello sketch.

And is Abbott or Costello funnier to you, Abbott being the straight man?

Yeah, I think Abbott is funnier.

I think he's much funnier. Someone who just passed away, I was watching him on YouTube recently, Don Rickles.

Don Rickles was a funny man. And I always felt that he was— one of the things I liked about him, I saw he's a little out of control. And I know that was contrived, but I think at least early in his career, it was pretty real. You see some of the older performance. He says things sometimes on the old Tonight Shows that everybody's just dying. And then you realize none of them really knows exactly why that was so funny. It just, you know, it was just that he said something that nobody would have thought to say.

But he says some things 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 seem to be in bad taste, but since it's applied so liberally—

to everybody—

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 we have to distinguish between college campuses and comedy clubs. Comedy clubs, you can still say pretty much— you can be racial, you know, a lot of comedians still are very racial and, you know, everybody says, "Yeah, it's fine, he's kidding. He's not really a racist, he's just, you know, he's going on the stereotypes that everybody is aware of." Whereas you can't say that.

But I see non-white comedians being much more deploying racial humor than white comedians.

Generally they can because they can.

Because they can.

But even, 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 anymore. Because nobody's allowed a kid.

Do you think there's anything people don't find funny anymore, even in a comedy club, campuses aside?

If I saw— I mean, yeah, I will speak for my own personal experience as a dad of a daughter. If I saw a guy get up and doing, you know, underage rape jokes, it just wouldn't— even if it were really brilliantly funny. The only guy who even came close was Louis C.K. did a really edgy joke not too long ago, basically about pederasts, that, you know, that came really close to, you know, and even then everybody kind of winced when he did it, but it was daring and funny. But I myself would draw a line there. 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 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 around it. But that takes certain skill on the part of the comedian. You know, it's kind of hard to say in general.

How about Eddie Murphy? How funny is he?

Well, he used to be really funny. I mean, his stand-up in his day was as good as it got. And his, you know, what was it, Beverly Hills Cop and a couple movies like that.

Yes. Coming to America is one of my favorites.

He was really— I don't know what happened. I guess he just got too successful to need to be funny anymore, or maybe he just got tired of it, which I think happens. And God bless him, if you get tired of it, you don't have to keep doing it, then 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 of 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 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 intelligent. He, you know, this was a very well-educated, cultured man who made a very good living as a critic and would have been able to have a quite successful career as a theater critic or a literary critic. He was a smart guy, but—

And he was in the movies like you. His career in some ways—

He sort of, he was sorry that he did that in a way. He took the money and, you know, he regretted, I think, at least on a—

He might have regretted more if he didn't do it.

Maybe so, maybe so. And he did make some pretty funny shorts. But the other thing, the reason that I loved him and still love him It was that he was that rare comic writer who was willing to be really silly. Silliness is an underrated part of humor. Most people in the end would rather be cool than silly, and, you know, snide and condescending, and a lot— than just be out there and being genuinely silly. Robert Benchley was silly. He would take extreme left turns in the middle of a 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 for it. And that was the thing that when I was a kid just drew me to him, that he didn't— 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— well, you maybe do once every in a great while reading Mark Twain. You smile and chuckle. Robert Benchley made me laugh out loud when I was a kid, and I thought that's what I wanted to do.

How about jokes in books? So say when I was a kid, I think I was 8, I had a book of jokes and there was one I kept on bringing around to my mother. I read it to her about 5 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.

Is that a joke? Because I missed the—

No, that's just only the punchline. The joke is not funny.

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 Klosterman.

Well, now, as you say, we have—

Sam Harris is you, but—

We have— now we have Twitter, and now we have the internet.

But even before Twitter, it seems those books were disappearing.

They were.

Is it because they weren't funny?

I'm trying to remember the— no, it's just people don't have— 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 page 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, we'll just pass, but Mike Judge's Idiocracy.

Yeah, I never saw the movie, so I do know the principle of it. It's Wayne and Fields, like some professional wrestlers, the President of the United States.

And everyone's an idiot. The first half hour is brilliant, I think. At least watch that much of is it, when did Mad Magazine stop being funny? And why did that happen when it did?

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 grown-up. And maybe I was wrong because Mad 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, I read an issue of Mad Magazine when I was, you know, like 10, 11, 12, 13. And I can't honestly say that 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 in mainstream media, well before the internet, but being more daring. Eddie 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 television, like Saturday Night Live. Brought the sensibility of my generation to TV, a complete willingness to mock everything, mock commercials the way MAD used to, but nobody on television mocked television. And suddenly there was this show that was mocking everything about television, and then the Larry Shandling Show and the thing where it became kind of a staple of television to mock television. And Letterman was going to make a whole career out of that. So maybe we didn't need a magazine anymore to say, hey, look at the— look how silly TV is. Is anymore. So, you know, C.V. 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 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 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, ridiculously unfair place. I mean, things keep happening to people that should never happen to anybody, and it seems to be pretty random how they happen. And I think basically the two reactions to that are religion. In other words, there really is a reason for all this, and it really is gonna end up okay. And if you don't buy that, then there's humor, 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 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 religion is their substitute, or they become more skilled at dealing with despair and so they're more funny?

I think they're less funny.

So comedians tend to be atheists?

I think that's true. I mean, I think that this is— and this is not to dismiss religious— my dad was a religious person and he was a funny guy, but that 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 able to— which I think is probably a pretty good assumption. That and the fact that they're a historically persecuted group that managed to somehow find ways to survive using often their wits. Yeah, that's probably part of why there are so many Jewish comedians. That and the fact that everybody— if you're Jewish, everybody you know is funny. Like trying to be funny anyway.

Mormons—

It's like revered in that community, that skill, the ability to make people laugh.

Mormons historically have been a persecuted community.

It could be their wacky fun group. Are they? No, no, no.

But why?

I don't know if there's any Mormon comedians.

Sarah Silverman.

But they came along just for the purpose of giving— who are those guys? The South Park guys? Yes. Something to make fun of. And that may be their divine purpose on Earth.

They're also two libertarian-oriented comedians. Yeah, yeah.

And we libertarians love the Mormons, so.

But social conservatives as comedians, that's a lot tougher, right?

Social conservatives?

Yes.

Yeah, people who like think there should be strict drug laws and have a prudish approach to sex.

Can't they be funny about something else?

You're not gonna see that much. No, I don't think so.

But our ability to compartmentalize as human beings, just the fact that we could say at times find a joke about the Holocaust funny, that suggests we're wonderful compartmentalizers, but the people who are social conservatives, they can't compartmentalize? I mean, what does that tell us about humor?

Well, I think 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 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." You kind of have to be on some level pretty subversive, I think, to be funny.

Here's a question from Chuck Klosterman from his Cocoa Puffs book. See what your answer is. 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, and the catering service. After the meal, you're asked to give a 15-minute speech to the assembly. What do you talk about?

I would try to seduce the catering service. They'd be the only people there who haven't already slept. Oh man, that would be—

I would complain about the catering service.

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 honest. It'd be like I could just address them individually. It wouldn't take that long.

But it would include your 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 so much anymore. I mean, there was a time when the almost, you know, half the jokes you heard, and this was in my lifetime, were like Polish jokes, whatever. And as we think back, it was kind of stupid. Polish people are not less intelligent.

Chopin, right? Let's joke about Chopin.

And yet that was a staple of humor. And some of those were pretty funny jokes. You know, you don't hear them anymore. But now, yeah, I think now it's more likely to be a political target. And whichever side it is, I'm inclined to view that kind of humor 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 are. That's like 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 Democrats, in my opinion, or the other way around. It's kind of either way, it's kind of a dumb template to start with. 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 to hear him talk about sentence structure and its relationship to the effectiveness of written humor. Well, there is any comments on that?

I do, I do. This is my life, is, is writing sentences that are intended to make 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 stand-up comedian does, but he does it with timing and emphasis. And in written humor, you do it with spacing and punctuation and a few other tricks. But yeah, the key— and this is the most obvious example of why sentence structure is important, and yet it is violated all the time in humor writing by amateurs— is that the funny part has to come last, and 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 it's poorly done, will be in the middle, and then there'll be words after. If you watch a stand-up comedian, he'll never deliver a joke where there's more words after the funny part, right? But in written humor, that's done a lot by, you know, by people who don't know what they're doing. So yes, sentence structure is really important.

And how formally do you think about grammar when you do this?

A lot. I, for a long time— well, for— it seemed like a long time at the time— 7, 8 years, I taught effective writing seminars to business people.— I was young and I looked even younger, but I had to get up in front of engineers, chemists, lawyers sometimes, accountants, people who were accomplished in their fields 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 they expected to be bored also. Became a grammar fanatic just in self-defense because I got challenged so often. Why do I say it's okay to 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 told you can't do— they had all these rules that they were told that aren't rules of grammar and never were. And so I became— I don't think I can anymore. I could diagram sentences. I could cite usage experts. So I became very interested in grammar. I was always a pretty good writer, but 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— I don't try to teach anybody grammar. But I did find the grounding I got was helpful.

Now, you once wrote that after 8 years of trying to teach business writing, you became convinced it would never get any 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 always for the better. But do you think, fast-forwarding to 2017, has business writing in any way improved?

I'm not as on top of it as I was when I was reading hundreds of letters and memos every week, but my guess is no. There are certain fundamental things that business people have trouble with.

What's the main thing they get wrong from the business mentality?

The most consistent mistake— not mistake, but inefficiency of business writing, and it was very consistent, is the absolute refusal on the part of the 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, oh no, you can't. I'm an engineer. We did a 10-year study. This is way too complicated. You know, 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 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 they had done to come to this brilliant conclusion that they had come to.

Through their history, through their thought patterns.

Drag everybody through. And it was the one thing the newspaper people were taught to do that made more sense. You don't have your reader's attention very long, so get to the point. And I found it was very difficult to get even really smart business people to get to the point. And sometimes it was because they really couldn't tell you what the point was. And what I wanted to say, 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 report. But it was always too complicated for a layperson like me to understand. That was the way they viewed it. But then I was being hired by their bosses to tell them, no, we want you to write clearly. And we want you to 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, when I would start the class, I have 32 people in the class typically. And when they would turn in all their samples of writing, every one of them wrote the same way. They all wrote businessese writing. This is my parody of it, but it's, "Enclosed, please find the enclosed enclosure." That kind of formal, nonsensical, meaningless flow of words. Somewhere in there would be something important, something significant, or Or maybe not, but—

And were the women worse or the men worse?

Both sides were equally bad.

In the same ways?

Very, yeah. I did not notice a difference based on gender. I just found very few people— yeah, I mean, very few people are naturally clear, concise writers. That's not a common trait. But it was more of a thinking issue than it was a writing issue. It was just this inability to see the purpose of the document as anything other than a diary, sort of to make you see what I did. As opposed to convey important information to you.

Humor is one area where the enforcement of intellectual property law tends to be weak or maybe even nonexistent. So there are always issues or problems with comedians stealing jokes from other people, whether stand-up 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 underproduced because we don't have property rights in jokes?

Well, it's not underproduced. There's like plenty of it out there. I think it's kind of self-policing. People do steal. I have had over the years ridiculous experiences, especially when my column was syndicated, and, you know, somebody would send me a copy of his local shopper, and 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 my name changed to his name. And I'd write or call these people when I was younger and more naive and had more energy. And I'd say, "You stole my column. You just took it." And they would go— they were never apologetic. It was like, "Oh, I meant, I just thought it was so great." But you stole it. You put your name on it. They didn't, like, get that that was wrong. But I think it's harder and harder to get away with that. If you are a successful comedian, 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 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, stand-up, television, whatever?

That's a— I don't know. I mean, the ones I would name are known. I'm not that—

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 Benchley is anymore. This is one of the things 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. But humor— people who do humor with so— the rarest of exceptions do not last in the culture the way people who write Tender Is the Night hang around for much longer. Like, even— like, we talk about the Marx Brothers, but who goes to see Marx Brothers movies anymore? We know who they are, but people still go to see Shakespeare performed, you know, not to compare.

But when there were repertory theaters, I went to see Marx Brothers movies and Duck Soup at least, I think, held up pretty well.

Yeah, because you're older than me and they still showed the movies when we were younger, but you don't go see any more of Marx Brothers. Yeah, Duck Soup holds up great.

That's the best one.

Yes.

I think.

Yes. But even then, like, there's stretches in Duck Soup where it's just like, oh man, he's like really kind of dumb, but it's so dumb, it's kind of funny.

Now, your latest book is about Florida, so I thought I would go to news.google.com and just enter Miami, and this is one of the first articles that came back. Quote, Miami Beach police say Sigmund Hernandez confessed Wednesday to, quote, slapping and possibly choking his tiny Yorkshire terrier and leaving her in a public parking garage. The reason, he 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 4-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.

Teach the dog a lesson.

Now, what is wrong with the dogs in your state?

Dogs are fine. The people are not. Yeah, yeah, Florida. The guy who bit the dog, I didn't know, you know, after hearing the expression "man bites dog" 9 trillion times, I don't think I've ever actually seen an example where a man did bite his dog. But if he did, naturally it had to happen in Florida. And that dog will not do that again, whatever it was.

Why has Florida evolved to become weirder, say, than neighboring states?

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.

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 much more known as a vacation destination. It's got beaches everywhere. People come there not, not particularly serious reasons coming there.

Um, doesn't that make them calm though rather than weird? Is it the giant insects that make them weird?

A lot of them drunk is what it makes them. We have ready access to alcohol and drugs of every kind in Florida. We have 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 like 10 different weird little communities. There is no Florida. There's no sense of state pride. Like, you know, people don't go, "I'm a proud Floridian." They just don't. So it's kind of like nobody owns the state, and there are people just constantly showing up in the state for various reasons. I would say we're like the Ellis Island for stupid, weird people. If you want to pleasure yourself into a stuffed animal in a Walmart, you're going to go to Florida to do that. You want to get naked by the side of the road for no apparent reason, Florida is the place you would like. Just nothing else because it's warmer there.

And the law enforcement is different. We have, but they caught this man biting the dog. They caught the man who, you know, kicked the dog through the parking garage. So it's tough on law enforcement.

No, we eventually do arrest people usually, but sometimes it's the police officers doing these things. No, we just, I don't know. And you know, it's a state where every day is 1,000 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. In 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 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, Do Bigelow, Ace Ventura— Canadian comic, by the way— Some Like It Hot, all kinds of space movies, Ulee'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?

Probably because I'm guessing it's 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 down there. And I get it, it has an image to it. Florida, it's not— people don't think of Florida the way they think of Alabama, even though Alabama is right next door. They think of Florida as more exotic, and they're right, it is more exotic. It's more exotic than any other state as far as I can tell.

And 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 was more culturally central than it is today. 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 own urban centers more, media empires outside of Miami more. And it seems to me a slightly forgotten city along with Los Angeles. Art Deco people aren't as interested in anymore. Maybe for the better of Miami.

I don't want to get all chauvinistic, but I'd dispute all of those.

Okay, tell us.

All of those. No, Miami has grown like crazy.

Oh, it's grown, but is it as central to the American consciousness as a rising urban center as it was 10, 15 years ago?

I think maybe in the sense that everybody's more used to it now, that Miami is really the capital of Latin America, but I don't think it's anymore than New York has become passé. I mean, it's just cemented that that's what it is. Miami is the center of Latin America, but it's exploding right now. And I don't have any statistics to back up this feeling I have, but I haven't noticed that Miami's turned into some kind of backwater, no.

We run our government out of Florida now, right? At least the executive branch.

You want to ask Marlon, will you? That's up the coast a little bit with the rich people, but yeah.

But it's not very far.

No, it isn't in linear distance. It's a million trillion miles away in culture. Palm Beach and Miami are separated by Boca, which is Long Island basically. Miami is, when you get across the Dade-Broward line, you are in Latin America. 80% of the city, I think, speaks Spanish as its first language, and a lot of people don't speak any English at all. You can function 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're in big trouble. You're gonna need it. So it's still a very, very, very Latin city. But when you get to like Fort Lauderdale and then Boca, you're in New York, you know. Then you get a little farther and you're Palm Beach, you're just in rich person land.

I sometimes feel that parts of Puerto Rico are more American than parts of Miami. Actually.

Oh, definitely. Miami is not American, it's Latin American. It is Nicaraguans and Colombians and Venezuelans and Dominicans and all of these people like the United States, but a lot of them are not really assimilated to the United States particularly well yet. The one that everybody talks about is Cubans. My wife is Cuban, 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 there are large 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?

No, absolutely not. The closest I would get would be Carl Hyasson.

Yeah, that's who 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— Carl does not embrace the changes of Florida. Carl would be happy if it went back to just being mostly snakes and lizards.

You have Zora Neale Hurston, and also Graham Parsons was from Florida, even though people think of him as somehow Southwestern. His country sensibility is very much Eastern, actually. You said in one of your 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 think as long as they're— I mean, at least where I live in Coral Gables, which is a city, but it's really a suburb of Miami, it's a pretty great place to live. And it's kind of what it has in common with the other places I've lived is it has access to a major metropolitan area. With the excitement and the diversity that that implies, but you can be physically more comfortable. I like that. I think there's nothing wrong with that. I think there's a reason people want to have a yard and a driveway. I think every American should have a right to yard and driveway.

One thing that really struck me going through your life history is the depth and breadth and comprehensiveness of what you've done. In so many different media. You've written children's books, you've been involved with television, you've obviously been on the internet, you wrote a weekly column for many years, business writing, worked with Walt Disney, a rock group called the Rock Bottom Remainders that you were in for a while. So my sense is there's something quite special about your work habits that is maybe the most 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 extraordinary productivity defined along a number of different dimensions?" Well, first of all, thank you.

That's the most complimentary thing anyone's ever said about my work.

It's really striking.

But anyway, well, part of it is insecurity, so I want to keep producing always. So fear and despair. Fear and despair.

Despair. Which makes you funny.

And the constant worry that you no longer can do it and that you're not funny anymore. And so as soon as you start to be just pretty confident that anything you write is great, then you're going to suck in any creative field, I think. But then also a certain impatience or fear of getting into too much of a rut, so wanting to try new things that you feel like are in your wheelhouse. Like if I had said that I wanted to become a playwright, I think I would have been stretching too far. I don't know anything about being a playwright. I wasn't trained. I haven't studied, whatever. But I did feel that if I could go from writing funny essays to maybe trying to write a funny novel, if I looked at the funny novel as a series of funny scenes with some kind of plot, which is, you know, a crude way of looking at it. But at least it was connected in a way that I thought maybe you can make it work. So it's kind of a combination of insecurity, needing to keep producing, and kind of being— fear of boredom, wanting to do something new that you still felt you could do competently, or at least not embarrass yourself.

What was it like playing music with Roger McGuinn?

There's a way of embarrassing myself. This has been the most fun thing I have done as a grown-up. I'm writing a book now about things I've learned from my dog, essentially. And one of the lessons I've learned from my dog is that 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 be part of this rock band called the Rock 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 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 Springsteen and Warren Zevon. And Roger plays with us regularly, still does, although it's been a couple of years, I got to admit. And that has been the most fun, single fun thing, because 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 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?

He's the nicest man. And that's been the thing, the consistent 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 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 had done, we did a series of bird songs with Roger. And I said, the last song we're going to do after that is La Bamba, but you know, Ritchie Valens song. And he goes, oh, okay, I can do that. You know, and he goes, what key do you do it? I go, G. And he goes, well, how does that lick go? And I am going to know.— I can play that lick. And it goes like this. And Roger's looking at it. I'm like, Roger McGuinn is looking at my left hand to see how to play a lick on the guitar. And to me, that's like better than winning a Pulitzer Prize. It's really much more fun.

Now, you have a whole series of books. Peter and the Starcatcher is based on Peter Pan. Many have been bestsellers. It's believed that more than half of the audience for these books is adults, although superficially they might seem to be children's books. They're that too. Uh, the original novel Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, I mean, how do you understand that book? It's a deeply weird book. And what's your sense of that book? 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 J.M. Barrie. Both of us had been raised in the United States, and our view of the Peter Pan story was the Disney cartoon, the 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. And so, and all we were thinking about was that, the American version of the Peter Pan story the myth, which is a few simple elements. He can fly. Tinker Bell, Captain Hook, the alligator, I mean the crocodile, the simple elements. How could we put those together in a backstory that would be entertaining for kids? Little did we know we were sticking a stick into a hornet's nest of British people who take their J.M. Barrie very seriously.

It's like trying to revive Star Wars.

Right. They don't like Americans anyway. So we got a certain amount of grief from purists. And we had it from the start, say we are not trying to— we don't say we own this story. We're not saying 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 our idea. And it worked out really well for us.

One of J.M. Barrie's siblings claimed that J.M. had never had sex. Now we know from one of your earlier answers that's not the case with you. Is this a dark vision, Peter Pan?

Well, I went back and read it, and yeah, it's more, I would say, more weird than anything else. Just kind of a strange story, the way it's told. And I honestly can't say I was a huge fan of it.

You know, it's hard to, you know, Mary Gaitskill wrote recently that it's 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 dearly attached to. And that to me is strange.

It is strange, but I've 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 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 old and who can fly. I mean, would you want that life?

When I was 8, yeah.

And in retrospect?

Yeah, no, 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 book, books, we do try to deal with the fact that Peter has to accept that his friends are all going to grow old and leave him, as Jan Berry does. I mean, I'm not— that is in a way the sad part of it, although mostly it's like, isn't it cool that he can fly?

But your Peter Pan is more of a Bildungsroman, where Peter develops in a healthy direction.

Yeah.

So it's like more for Americans.

And there's a girl who's really great and 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 keeps the same age and she keeps getting older.

And are you ever tempted to be funny in those books?

Yeah. The— there are a couple scenes where I go for humor, but 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 supposed to be funny or leading to the next sentence, which will be funny. And with a novel, 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 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 planning on doing next?

Continued immaturity followed by death is my plan. Now 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'll be called, I think, Lessons from Lucy. But it was like, I'm going to turn 70 this year and Lucy's going to turn 70. She's 10. So in dog years, 70. And I was thinking about it, I was thinking about a dog book and I was thinking, she's still really happy. She is unchanged in that sense. The happiness that she's changed in her, you know, in appearance and what she can do and everything, but she's still pretty happy all the time. And I'm thinking like, what does she do that I don't do? Because 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.

Really? Yeah.

I think for most men, happiness between 30 and 60 are the peak years.

Well, I'm way past that, so I'm on the downhill slope now. 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 you.

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