Conversations with Tyler - Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man

Episode Date: August 16, 2017

Though most know him first as a humor columnist, Dave Barry's career has spanned many forms of media, including books, movies, TV, and music. Driving this relentless output, says Barry, is the constant worry he'll find himself stuck in a rut — or worse — no longer funny. And do we even need professional comedians in an age where so many funny amateurs are readily available online? Tyler and Dave discuss all these topics and more, including the weirdness of Peter Pan, what makes Florida special, how it felt to teach Roger McQuinn a lick on the guitar, and why business writing is so terrible. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded April 21st, 2017 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Dave on Twitter Email us: [e-mail] Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

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 Mercadis.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. My first question about humor has to do with you.

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. 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. 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 me-me-me-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 instant. It's really 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 amateurs. So there's some one-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 two 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 professional actors to act in 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 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 ammuter, 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 someone, in a sense, deliberately not that funny.

They play a different role. How do you see that? I don't know. I just think that the real comedians, like Colbert, you know, 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, you know, 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, it's probably tougher to be really original, the sound really original than it used to be.

but I think there's, you know, 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 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, 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 produce fantastic results for you. Is the half-life 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, you know, 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 is a kind of science, what will dwindle? No. I mean, but that is still going to be, yes, that's part of it.

But as I say, there's 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. 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 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, you know, with like the archaic form of actually writing words down. Right. It 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 they're ever used to be funny TV shows. They keep popping up there in all the, you know, they're on Amazon. on there in 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. John 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? Definitely, I mean, it is a leftist slant. But why? Well, because that's what the cool kids think they're, you know, all the other cool kids are doing. It's kind of funny because it's not very subversive anymore. It's, I mean, what could be less aversive than the, than the humor industry during the eight years of Barack Obama where, like, we never made fun of Barack Obama. Correct.

You know, it's the president. 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 them. So they continued pounding on, you know, I never forget. It was that, 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, 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 allowed to, you know, in the humor biz, beat up all we want on Republicans because they're stupid idiot Republicans and their, and their followers were 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. And some of them are very clever and some of them are very funny. But it isn't that funny. It isn't that creative. It's just sort of, I'm going to smear, 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 not. Do you think there's room for a new right-wing kind of humor?

Maybe not a 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-one. No, no, no. Definitely not. I mean, humor should be subversive. And it's a lot more subversive to be right-wing than the left-wing. stay. You know, a pro-Trump humorist, I don't know if any exist, would be a lot more subversive than any of the nine billion.

Trump himself is the pro-tron humorous. 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 caricatured. But, 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, funny writer.

You know, I don't always agree with him, but he's, but he's, you know, 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 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 Faye's Sarah Palin, which was brilliant. You know, so no. I'm sorry. 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 pinata up there, and everybody's got a stick, and everybody likes to swing at the Trump pinata.

I personally have just kind of gotten 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 at what he said. Like, he doesn't know what he's doing. He's a moron, you know. Now, some things cross-border is fairly easily. A lot of different kinds of foods, so 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 translate somebody beating a crap out of somebody else.

So action movies are going to lend themselves, I think, far better. Now, if it's English to English, I think probably American comedies do okay. And 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, 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 are in New Zealand, they're guffawing. And that word guffaw, I would never use the word guffaw to apply to myself. I might giggle or snore. 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 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. is. 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 I'd 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 yon, yon, yon, never struck me as funny at all. I missed the second part of your, I've forgotten the second part of your question. You mentioned Abedent 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 Abedent 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 Abedon Costello? Yeah, I can see the connection there. It's more relies on you. letting it, 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 three or four 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 and humor anymore, the way they, you know, I don't think the audience

as generous as it used to be a wowing humor to build the way it did in an Abbott and Costello's stature. And is Abbott or Costello funnier to you? Abbott being the straight man. Yeah, I think Abbott is funny. 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 performs 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 they just you know it was just that he said something that 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, 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 stereotype. that everybody is aware of, whereas it can't say. But I see non-white comedians being much more deploying racial humor than white comedians. Generally, 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, nobody's a lot of 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 just 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 Cicay did a really edgy joke not too long ago, basically about pederests that, you know, that came really close to, you know, And even that, everybody kind of winced when he did it, but it was 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. And 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 bad Eddie Murphy? How funny is he?

Well, it 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 of 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, you know, maybe he just got tired of it, which I think happens. And, you know, 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 a 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, you know, would have been able to have a quite successful career as a theater critic or a literary critic. He was a smart guy. 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. Yeah. But the other thing, the reason that I loved him and still loved 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 of, then just be out there and being

genuinely silly. Robert Benchley was silly. He would take, you know, extreme left turns in the middle 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, you know, 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. Brother eventually 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 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. Is that a joke? Because I missed the... No, that's just only the punchline. The joke is 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 Lasterman and these scenarios.

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. They are. Because they weren't funny? I'm trying to remember the, no, it's just people, people don't read, people don't read, people don't read books anymore as far like it. 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 will just pass. but Mike Judge is idiocracy.

Yeah, I never saw the movie. So I do know the principle of it. It's a way in the field. 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 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 and Mad were just brilliant. It seems it was an influence on you, right? It was. I read a lot of Mad.

I mean, every 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? It 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 or 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 television and then the Larry shandling show 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 anymore. 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 before we do, our lives are really pretty meaningless. I mean, they're basically, you know, the world is a 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 going to 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 people. 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 atheists, which I think atheistic in regards, probably a good assumption. That and the, you know, the fact that they're, you know, a historically persecuted group that managed to somehow find ways to survive using often their wits.

Yeah, you know, 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, it's funny. Like, trying to be funny anyway. It's like revered in that community, that skill, the ability to make people laugh. Mormons historically have been a persecuted community. And they're a wacky fun group. Are they? Are they against?

No. No. No. But why? I don't know if there's any Mormon communities. 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 comments. Yeah, yeah. And we libertarians love the Mormons, so. But social conservatives as comedians, that's a lot tougher, right? Social conservatives.

Yeah, people who, like, think there should be strict drug laws and... Has 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 the fact that we could say, at times, find a joke about the Holocaust funny, that suggests for 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 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 the world is set up the way it is because there's a divine plan for it and rules we need to follow. This is not how a humorist thinks. The humerus 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 Coco Puff's 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. its speech to the assembly. What do you talk about? I would try to seduce the catering service. They're being the only people there. I 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, to be honest, 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? 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? The 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 that. 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 Democrat, in my opinion, or the other way around. 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. I 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. I mean, this is my life 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. instruction 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 very often the funniest part of the sentence, if it's poorly done, we'll 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. But in written humor, that's done a lot by people who don't know what they're doing. So you think that instruction is really a lot. important. And how formally do you think about grammar when you do this? A lot. I, for a long time, well, it seemed like a long time of 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 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. And who was, and they were expected to be bored also. So I 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 butt? When they were, they were told you can't do, they had all these rules that they were told that aren't rules of all of grammar and never were. And so I became, I could, I don't think I can anymore.

I could diagram sentences. I could cite, you know, 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, 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 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, you know, 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?

Okay. 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're oh, no, you can't, I'm an engineer. We did a 10-year study. This is way too complicated. 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. 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 readers' 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, the report. But it was always too complicated for a layperson like me to understand. 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 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, when I would start the class, I have 32 people in the class typically. and when they would turn in all their, you know, samples of writing, every one of them wrote the same way. They all wrote business ease writing, you know. This is my parody of it, but as enclosed, please find the enclosed enclosure, you know, that kind of formal, nonsensical, meaningless, you know, flow of words. Somewhere in there would be something important, something significant, you know, or maybe not. And were the women worse or the men worse? Both sides were equally bad.

In the same ways? Yeah, I did not notice a difference based on gender. I just found very few people, yeah, I mean, the 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 to convey 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 stand-up routines or in writing. Do you think it works having an area such as humor where basically IP law isn't applied? And there's a way. 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 and 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, you know, the local orthodont. wrote a weekly column. And one week I would look at it and it would be my entire column word for word with his, 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, you just took it. And they would go, they were never, they were never apologetic.

I was like, oh, I met, you know, I just thought it was so great. You know, but you stole it. Put your name on it, you know?

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 many people out there consuming it, 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. 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. Nobody knows who Robert Benchley has he more. 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. You know, but the humor, people who do humor with so, you know, the rarest of exceptions, Do not last in the culture the way people who write, you know, tender is the night hang around for much longer. Like even, like we talk about the Marks Brothers, but who goes to see Marks Brothers movies anymore?

You know, we know who they are, but people still go to see Shakespeare performed, you know, not to compare. When there were repertory theaters, I went to see Mark's Brothers movies, and Duck Soup, at least, I think, held up pretty well. Yeah, because you're old like me, and they still showed the movies when we were younger, but you don't go see anymore. Mark's brother. 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. We're 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 I would go to news.govgle.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's parking garage. The reason he told police, the dog vomited in his car. I then went to your blog, and there was 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 bitter 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. Yeah, Florida, the guy who bit 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 the dog. But if it did, naturally it had happened in Florida. And that dog will not do that again, whatever it was. Why has Florida evolved to become weirder, say, the neighboring states? Well, many reasons.

First of all, it's warmer than Alabama? Yes, quite a bit warmer than Alabama. Come to Alabama in January and then you'll want to come to Miami. It's warmer. It's much more known as a vacation destination. It's got beaches everywhere. People come there are not particularly serious reasons coming there. Doesn't that make them calm, though, rather than weird?

Is it the giant insects that make them weird? a lot of 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 always 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're 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 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 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, Deuce Bigelow, Ace Ventura, Canadian comic, by the way, some like it hot, all kinds of space movies. Uli's gold, an old movie with Peter Fonda, parts of midnight cowboy. 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 has something to do with unions, more than anything else. Yeah, it's warm, you know, so you'd have to worry quite as much about the weather down there. And 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's 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 too 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 at 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 dispute all of those. All of those. No, Miami is grown like crazy. Oh, it's grown, but it's grown. 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, you know, Miami is really the capital of Latin America. But I don't think it's any more than New York has become, you know, passe. 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. and, you know, I don't have any statistics to back up this feeling I have, but I don't, 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 ranch. 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, you know, both. which is Long Island, basically.

I mean, Miami is, when you get across the day at 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 going to need it. So it's still a very, very, very Latin city. But when you get to, like, Fort Lauderdale and then Boka, 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, 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. The one that everybody talks about is Cubans. My wife is Cuban. My in-laws are Cuban. They are Americans. I mean, they've lost their country, and they're okay with that.

They are 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 a cultural figure who represents Florida in some way? Absolutely not. The closest you would get would be Carl Hyacson, yeah. That's who comes from mine.

And he kind of represents the, I'm really sick of what's happened to my state side of it, you know. 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 and Neil Hurston and also Graham Parsons was from Florida.

Even though people think of him as somehow southwestern, his country's 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, you know, 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 kind of the excitement and the diversity that that implies.

But you can be physically more comfortable. And I like that. I think there's nothing wrong with that. I think there's a reason that people want to have a yard and a driveway. And I think 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 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. There's a rock group called The Rock Bottom Remainters 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 that one's ever said about mine. It's really striking. But anyway, well, part of it is like insecurity. So I want to keep producing always. So fear and despair.

Fear and despair. Which makes you funny. And the constant worry that you no longer can do it and that you're not funny anymore. And, you know, so as soon as you start to be just pretty confident that anything you write is great, then you're going to suck. As, you know, in any creative field, I think. But then also, like, certain, like, impatience or, or, or, all. fear of getting into too much of a rut. So, like, wanting to try new things that aren't,

that you feel like, you know, in your wheelhouse, like if I had said that I wanted to become a playwright, I think I would have been, you know, stretching too far. I don't know anything about being a play. 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 a crude way of looking at it. But at least it was connected in a way that I thought maybe it could make it work. So it's a 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 rock?

Roger McGuin. This is what I'm 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 Reminders, which is not a good rock band. and 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 McGuin, but Bruce Springsteen and Warren Zivon. But Roger plays with us regularly, still does,

although it's been a couple years, I've 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 McGuin like?

He's the nicest man. And that's been 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 his first. He had done, we did a series of bird songs with Roger, and I said, the last time we're going to do if that is La Bamba, but, you know, Richie Valenzelon. And he goes, oh, okay, I can, you know, do that, you know, and he goes, what

can he do? And I go, gee. And he goes, well, how does that, how does that lick go? And I have a note. I can play that lick. And it goes like this. And Roger's looking at it. I'm like, Roger McGuitt 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 was 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 a adults, although superficially they might seem to be children's books. They're that too. The original novel, Peter Pan by J.M. Barry, 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. Neither one of us had really spent much time on J.M. Barry. Both of us had been raised in the United States, and our view of the Peter Pan's story was the Disney cartoon. The last one of us. legend famous Disney cartoon and Mary Martin on Broadway hanging on wires you know this 43 year old lady swinging around stage that was our view of the Peter Pan story and so and and all we were thinking about was that the American version of the Peter Pan story the myth you know the which just a few simple elements he can fly tinkerbell Captain Hook the alligator I mean the crocodile that kind of you know the simple elements how could we put those together

in a backstory that would be entertaining for kids. Little did we know we were, you know, sticking a stick into a hornet nest of British people who very, take their Jamberry very seriously. It's like trying to revise store. Right. They don't like Americans anyway, you know, kinds of. So we got, we got a certain amount of grief from purists. And, you know, we had from the start say we are not trying to, you know, we don't say we

own this story. We're not going to say we're experts on us. We're just, here's what we're doing. We're a couple of American guys taking the American view. That was our, that was our idea. And it worked out really well for us. One of J.M. Barry'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. I know. 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.

It's hard to, you know, Mary Gateskill 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 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 it. 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 eight, 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 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 Jamberry does. I mean, 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 a morphic-bilt-Ram-on, where Peter develops in a healthy direction. Yeah. So it's like more for America. 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. 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. 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? 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, you're 70. And I was thinking about it, when I was thinking about a dog book, and I was thinking, she's still really happy. she is unchanged in that sense

in the happiness that she's changed in her 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 were 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 downhill slow. 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. 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 show.