Seeing Dave Barry

It’s been two months, but the birth of my son got in the way of me completing this post – and some other stuff. I wanted to get this down before I couldn’t remember anything.

My wife scored two tickets to see Dave Barry at his Fort Worth appearance to promote his latest book, Dave Barry’s History of the Millennium (So Far).

All things considered, this was a good alignment of the planets. The presentation was on Monday, both of our nights off, and Dave Barry is one of the few writers out there I’d pay to see.

The presentation at Bass Hall basically consisted of the host, Star-Telegram feature writer Jeff Guinn, treating Dave Barry as if he was an imminent historian, and Dave Barry blowing off the question:

Guinn: So how were you able to gain the incredible amounts of knowledge necessary to write such a complex work as this?

Barry: I made it up.

Guinn: What was your educational background? How did you arrive at your pre-eminent position among American historians?

Barry: Actually I get angry letters from American historians all the time, telling me it’s not funny what I said about Missouri.

And so on and so forth. Guinn became grating after a bit, but he needed to play the part so Barry could work his shtick. After a while, Barry was just giving the spoken version of his greatest hits – talking about having a sewage pump station in North Dakota named after him, about his college band Federal Duck, and about the time that he drove the Wienermobile to pick up his kid at school.

All in all he had the crowd rolling. His presentation is generally flawless and he knows how to tell a story.

It was a contrast from the first time I saw him on TV, back when Jay Leno was still guest hosting the Tonight Show. Barry was introduced as the funniest man in America and came out stiff. It was like he was mentally reading bits from his columns at pre-determined points in the conversation.

Leno: You travel a lot, is there anything out there that annoys you?

Barry: I hate these people who I call "hall talkers." They stand in the hotel hallway late at night and say things like, "Well, I should be going to bed now," or "I guess it’s time to leave."

Heh, that’s not bad once you write it down. Anyway, he bombed.

I took this as a good thing. If Dave Barry isn’t funny in person, I thought, "Perhaps I, too, have a future in writing comedy."

His presentation at Bass Hall wound down after about 90 minutes, at which time Guinn announced that they could take a few questions. And, in what is still a shock to my wife, I stood up and walked towards a microphone.

I’m not much of a public speaker. (Or private speaker for that matter.) I hate talking to more than two people at a time.

A lot of people talk about a book that changed their life. Generally it’s something for a pretentious teenage male to brag about, like Catcher in the Rye. On the other hand, in the summer before my sophomore year in high school, my mom brought home a copy of Barry’s "Stay Fit and Healthy Until You’re Dead."

I’d read a lot of comedy before, but never something this outlandish and this well done. It was like seeing Monty Python for the first time after a steady diet of Benny Hill. And it changed my life.

I read everything by Barry I could get me hands on and was imitating or outright stealing his jokes for the column I wrote in the Monterey High School newspaper.

Nowadays, I only read him occasionally. It’s not that he’s less funny, it’s just that, once you come to know someone well enough you begin to complete his sentences.

So, there I stood in a sitting crowd of about 2,000 people, behind a woman who struck me as an overenthusiastic English teacher. I was fighting off a panic attack and drawing a blank while trying to come up with a question.

Thankfully, I had the right read on the woman in front of me.

"Are you still amazed at all the things that are under the sea?"

Barry kind of gives her a "huh?" look. She repeats the question, then says that she was referring to a piece he wrote some years back on scuba diving. And, you know, surely he has an instant memory of EVERY SINGLE FREAKING THING HE’S EVER WRITTEN OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS.

The question is flubbed. The pressure on me lightens.

I step forward and put my mouth near the mike. I haven’t come up with anything good, so I ask the question that all struggling writers submit to the successful ones.

"What do you do when you run out of ideas?"

Dave Barry: "What? You mean with writing?"

In my defense, I knew as soon as the question left my mouth that I’d left an opening. And at least it wasn’t about looking at crap under water.

Barry then got a little bit more serious and gave the answer all successful writers give to the struggling ones (None of the quotes here are exact, by the way):

"I don’t really run out of ideas. I don’t sit down with an entire column in my head and just write it out. Usually I may have one or two jokes in mind and then try to come up with something that connects them.

"And that’s generally the way that most writers work. It’s mainly a question of making yourself sit down and work. I know a lot of writers who are waiting to be inspired. You’re not always going to have some great thought come to you. It’s not inspiration, it’s work."

I heard a person sitting behind me say, "Good question."

It was a great moment. Save for that awkward feeling that happens when you ask someone a question in front of crowd: "OK, he’s looking at me so I won’t sit down ... There he’s looking at the crowd, I’ll sit down ... No he’s looking at me again ..."