Pun Salad

I've been a Dave Barry fanboy for a Real Long Time Now. I snapped up his early Rodale Press books as he emitted them. (Earliest: The Taming of the Screw, from 1983. Forty-two years ago! Beat that!) My first blog reference to Dave was when Pun Salad was less than a month old in March 2005, and I grep about 150 references here since then.

I haunted his Miami Herald website, and now subscribe to his Substack. As far as his books go, I'm not a completist, but I'm on the edge.

His latest book is a memoir, and it is pretty good. It is deeply personal in spots, for example in detailing the health woes of his parents. (Dad was an alcoholic; Mom was funny, but also suffered from chronic depression, eventually committing suicide.) Other areas are off-limits: nothing about his first two wives, other than to point out he's not writing anything about his first two wives.

Like me, he's a boomer (only a few years older than I). So there are a number of shared experiences, at which I nodded my head in recognition. Like, we both went to college.

The book is peppered with sharp observations, like this, on the state of the book biz:

Guess how many copies a book has to sell in a week to make it onto a [New York Times] list. Never mind, I'll tell you: a thousand books, give or take. That's right: If, in a given week, the number of people in the entire world who buy your book is slightly less than the average attendance at a single game of the Central California minor league baseball team the Modesto Nuts, then your book could be a New York Times bestseller.

This is supported by a definitive-looking footnote.

But there are also plenty of anecdotes. many hilarious. For example, the tales surrounding the "Rock Bottom Remainders", the sub-mediocre band composed of relatively famous authors. They occasionally drew actual musicians as temporary members, like Bruce Springsteen. (Yes, Dave recounts, the Boss was his backup singer on "Gloria". That would have been something to experience.)

He also excerpts a lot from his past writings. Which is a cheap way to get your page count up there, but I'm not complaining. His example "Mr. Language Person" column was funny enough to bring tears to my eyes.

There's a chapter devoted to politics; for a few election cycles, Dave followed the candidates even up to the frozen wasteland that is New Hampshire during the primary season. His odyssey over the years went from mildly Democrat to mostly-libertarian (with a very small l). (I'm pretty much a mirror image. A funhouse mirror.) He observes, correctly, that politics ain't that funny any more.