[329] in Humor
HUMOR: Dave's New Book
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Wed Jun 15 22:09:56 1994
From: abennett@MIT.EDU
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 94 22:07:36 EDT
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 94 15:06:02 PDT
From: Connie_Kleinjans@Novell.COM (Connie Kleinjans)
Subject: HUMOR: "Dave Barry Is NOT Making This Up" book review
DB has a new book out! I got it in hardcover, of course. But this column
amuses me because it's written in a sesquipedalian ;) style that is so
different from Dave's. (Maybe when your first name is "L.S." instead of
Dave--or Bob--you write that way.)
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>From the June 10, 1994 Entertainment Weekly "Books" column:
DAVE'S NEW WORLD
In his latest collection, 'Dave Barry Is NOT Making This Up', the humorist
scientifically proves that he is more than just the inspiration for a TV
sitcom.
by L.S. Klepp
It's often assumed that Dave Barry has a wild comic imagination, like
Rabelais, Swift, and Paula Jones. This is a common misconception. He
actually has one of the finest scientific minds of our times.
The confusion arises because he doesn't investigate the things prominent
scientists usually investigate, such as quarks, black holes, mitochondria, and
movie popcorn. Instead, he ventures into areas so chaotic and controversial
that most scientists won't go anywhere near them--income tax forms,
easy-assembly instructions, snakes in toilets, bad songs, science-fair
projects.
Naturally, in contending with these little-understood phenomena, he has to
invent his own units of measurement, such as the breath mint ("This ploy is
effective only if the observer has the IQ of a breath mint, so it worked
perfectly on my dogs"). But the unfamiliar territory shouldn't be allowed to
obscure Barry's commitment to hard facts, and if there were a Nobel Prize--or
at least a stiff fine--for the study of exploding cows, he would deserve it.
The point about his basic ruthless objectivity is nicely made by the title of
his new book, "Dave Barry is NOT Making This Up" (Crown, $20), which includes
fieldwork in Gulf Breeze, Florida (UFO sightings), and Memphis (the Elvis
cult), as well as an impressive shapeless mass of fact-based newspaper
columns.
Much of the book, like much modern science, is devoted to previously
underestimated risk factors: "Contrary to what you hear from the 'experts',
it's a bad idea for parents and teenagers to attempt to communicate ...
because there's always the risk that one of you will actually find out what
the other one is thinking". Boats, ants, left-handedness, children, and
winning lottery tickets also fall into this category.
Often Barry is only carrying on research begun by illustrious predecessors.
Like Robert Benchley, he explores the possibility that common objects--
lawn-mowers, for instance--have petty, malicious minds of their own. Like S.J.
Perelman, he experimentally allows idioms to run amok: "A hush fell over the
courtroom, injuring six". When Barry discovers, in an extended account of a
visit to Hong Kong, that foreigners are numerous and eat strange things, he's
following in the serenely philistine footsteps of Mark Twain in "Innocents
Abroad".
Twain said that for humor to live forever ("by forever, I mean thirty years"),
it has to have a sermon behind it, cleverly disguised so that no preaching is
done on the premises. And in Barry's best work, he's more than the
connoisseur of slapstick oddities. He is, like Russell Baker or Calvin
Trillin, a man with an ethical yen for simplicity, contemplating bureaucracy
and consumerism in their baroque phases.
He has a particularly subversive instinct for the hollow assurances that
accompany official incompetence or paralysis: "Until the authorities come up
with a plan of action, I am urging everybody to take the sensible precaution
of developing a nervous facial tic."
Admittedly, Barry has superb comic reflexes rather than a polished comic style
comparable to Twain's mock-decorous deadpan, Benchley's whimsical urbanity, or
Perelman's pyrotechnics. He's more artless and bookless and lacks their
parodic virtuosity, though he does bring off a rapid-fire send-up of legal
thrillers here.
But his best pieces still transcend the general run of humorous journalism;
the CBS sitcom based on his life, "Dave's World", does not do justice to his
writing. Not only does he make you laugh out loud, he demonstrates--with
scientific rigor--that the rituals of our suburban middle-class shopping-mall
culture are as weird and fearsome, in their own ways, as all the rites of the
Druids, Hottentots, Whirling Dervishes, and solemn scientific experts put
together.
Rating: A-
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