Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

by Dave Barry

  Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

  Dave Barry

  Dave Barry is the author of Babies and Other Hazards of Sex, Homes and Other Black Holes, Stay Fit and Healthy Until You’re Dead, Bad Habits, and Dave Barry’s Guide to Marriage and/or Sex. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his syndicated column. He lives in Coral Gables, Florida, with his family.

  Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

  Why Humor Is Funny

  As a professional humorist, I often get letters from readers who are interested in the basic nature of humor. “What kind of a sick, perverted, disgusting person are you, “ these letters typically ask, “that you make jokes about setting fire to a goat?”

  And that, of course, is the wonderful thing about humor. What may seem depressing or even tragic to one person may seem like an absolute scream to another person, especially if he has had between four and seven beers. But most people agree on what is funny, and most people like to be around a person with a great sense of humor, provided he also has reasonable hygiene habits. This is why people so often ask me: “Dave, I’d like to be popular, too. How can I get a sense of humor like yours, only with less of a dependence on jokes that are primarily excuses to use the word ‘booger’?”

  This is not an easy question. Ever since prehistoric times, wise men have tried to understand what exactly makes people laugh. That’s why they were called wise men. All the other prehistoric people were out puncturing each other with spears, and the wise men were back in the cave saying:

  “How about: Here’s my wife, please take her right now. No. How about: Would you like to take something? My wife is available. No. How about ...”

  Mankind didn’t develop a logical system of humor until thousands of years later when Aristotle discovered, while shaving, the famous Humor Syllogism, which states, “If A is equal to B, and B is equal to C, then it would not be particularly amusing if the three of them went around poking each other in the eyes and going ‘Nyuk nyuk nyuk.’ At least I don’t think it would be.”

  By the Elizabethan era, humor had become extremely popular. The works of Shakespeare, for example, are filled with scenes that English teachers always claim are real thighslappers, although when you actually decode them, it turns out they mostly depend on the use of the Elizabethan word for “booger.” In America today, of course, our humor is much more sophisticated, ranging all the way from television shows featuring outtakes of situation comedies where the actors can’t get the words right to television shows featuring outtakes of commercials where the actors can’t get the words right. Also we have Woody Allen, whose humor has become so sophisticated that nobody gets it anymore except Mia Farrow. All those who think Mia Farrow should go back to making movies where the devil gets her pregnant and Woody Allen should go back to dressing up as a human sperm, please raise your hands. Thank you.

  If you want to develop a sense of humor of your own, you need to learn some jokes. Notice I do not say “puns.” Puns are little “plays on words” that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.

  So what you want is real jokes. The best source for these is the authoritative Encyclopedia Britannica article entitled “Humor and Wit,” which is in volume 99 (Humidity-Ivory Coast). This is where Carson gets all his material. It’s a regular treasure trove of fun. Here Is a real corker from right at the beginning:

  “A masochist is a person who likes a cold shower in the morning, so he takes a hot one.”

  Whoooeee! That is one authoritative joke! Tell that one at a dull party, and just watch as the other guests suddenly come to life and remember important dental appointments!

  But it is not enough merely to know a lot of great jokes. You also have to be able to tell them properly. Here are some tips:

  1. When you tell vicious racist jokes, you should first announce that you were a liberal back when it was legal to be one.

  2. Men have a certain body part that women do not have, and men always think jokes about it are a stone riot, but if you tell such a joke to a woman, she will look at you as though you are a Baggie filled with mouse remains. I don’t know why this is, but it never fails. So you want to avoid this particular type of joke in coeducational social settings such as Windsor Castle.

  3. If, after you tell a joke, somebody attempts to tell you one back, you should keep assuring him that you haven’t heard it, and then, when he gets to the punchline, no matter how funny it is, you should react as though he just told you the relative humidity and say: “Yeah, I heard that.”

  4. Never attend a large dinner party with my former mother-in-law, because she will shout across the table at you: “Tell the one about the man who’s seeking the truth and he finally gets all the way to Tibet and the wise man tells him that a wet bird doesn’t fly at night,” and then she’ll insist that you tell it, and then she’ll tell you you told it wrong, and you might have to kill her with a fork.

  Snews

  Readers are sometimes critical of me because just about everything I write about is an irresponsible lie. But now I’m going to write a column in which everything is true. See how you like it.

  Our first true item comes from a news release from the j I Case company. For the benefit of those of you who have real jobs and are not involved in the news business, I should first explain that a news release is an article that has been typed up by a public-relations professional hired by a client who wants to get certain information published, which is then mailed out to several thousand newspapers, almost all of which throw it away without reading it. If you ever commit a really horrible crime and you want to keep it out of the papers, you should have a public-relations professional issue a news release about it.

  You ask: “Wouldn’t it be more efficient if the public-relations professionals simply threw the releases away themselves?” Frankly, that is the kind of ignorant question that makes us journalists want to forget about trying to inform the public and instead just sit around awarding journalism prizes to each other. But I’ll tell you the answer: Because this is America. Because two hundred years ago, a band of brave men got extremely cold at Valley Forge so that the press would have the freedom to throw away its own releases without prior censorship, that’s why.

  Anyway, this release from the j I Case company opens with this statement: “j I Case and Burlington, Iowa, the loader/backhoe capital of the world, today jointly celebrated the production of the 175,000th Case loader/backhoe.” The release said they had a nice ceremony attended by the mayor of Burlington, a person named Wayne W. Hogberg, so I called him up to confirm the story. He works at the post office.

  “Does Burlington really call itself the loader/backhoe capital of the world?” I asked. Newsmen are paid to ask the hard questions.

  “Oh yes,” replied Mayor Hogberg. “We definitely lay claim to that. We use it whenever we have the opportunity. As a mayor I sort of rub it in with any other mayors I have occasion to meet.”

  I bet that really steams the other mayors, don’t you? I bet they are consumed with jealousy, when mayors get together.

  Our second completely true news item was sent to me by Mr. H. Boyce Connell Jr. of Atlanta, Georgia, where he is involved in a law firm. One thing I like about the South is, folks there care about tradition. If somebody gets handed a name like “H. Boyce,” he hangs on to it, puts it on his legal stationery, even passes it on to his son, rather th
an do what a lesser person would do, such as get it changed or kill himself.

  What H. Boyce sent was a copy of a decision handed down by the Georgia Court of Appeals in the case of Apostol Athanasiou vs. White. It seems the former had hired the latter to mow her lawn. What happened next, in the words of the court, is that “White allegedly slipped on some dog feces concealed in the tall grass, and his left foot was severely cut as it slid under the lawnmower.” I am not going to tell you how this case came out, because you’ll want to find out for yourself in the event that it is released as a major motion picture, but I will say, by way of a hint, that in the court’s opinion “neither party had actual knowledge of the specific deposit of dog feces on which White apparently slipped.”

  Our next item comes from a release sent out by the Vodka Information Bureau, in New York City. The Vodka Information Bureau has learned that a whopping 42 percent of the women surveyed consider themselves “primary decision makers” in deciding what brand of vodka to buy. This raises in my mind, as I am sure it does in yours, a number of questions, primarily: What, exactly, do we mean by the verb “to whop”? So I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and there I found—remember, this is the column where we are not making things up—these helpful examples:

  “In less time than you can think whop comes a big black thing down. as big as the stone of a cheese-press.” “Mother would whop me if I came home without the basket.”

  So I called my mother, who said, and I quote, “I always make the vodka-buying decision as follows: the largest bottle for the smallest amount of money.” So I called the Vodka Information Bureau and told them what my mother said, and they said, sure, you can buy the cheapest vodka if you don’t mind getting a lot of impurities, but if you want a nice clean vodka, you want a brand such as is manufactured by the company that sponsors the Vodka Information Bureau.

  Finally, and sadly, we have received word of the death, at age 85, of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, who of course was governor general of the island nation of Mauritius from 1968 to 1982. Mauritius has an area of 720 square miles and was once the home of the dodo bird, which is now extinct. It is hard, at a time of such tragedy—I refer to the demise of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam—to find words to express our feelings, but I think that I speak for all of us when I say that a cheese-press is “an apparatus for pressing the curds in cheese-making.”

  Public-Spirited Citizens Such As You

  I love jokes. The worse the better. Among the happiest moments of my life were those at summer camp when I was 11, lying in my bunk at night just after the counselor, Mr. Newton, had gone off to play cards with the other counselors, which meant that Eugene was going to tell the joke whose punchline is: “Ding dong, dammit! Ding DONG!” Maybe you know this joke. It involves marital infidelity and a closet. By the second week of camp, Eugene had developed a half-hour version, and campers were creeping over from the other cabins to hear it.

  So there we’d all be, listening in the dark with lunatic grins of anticipation on our faces, barely able to restrain ourselves, until finally Eugene would reach the punchline. “Ding dong, dammit,” he’d say, and we’d start vibrating like tuning forks, and then Eugene would say “Ding DONG,” and we’d dive down into the depths of our sleeping bags, out of control, howling and snorting, thinking nobody could hear us, although of course in the peaceful stillness of the forest night we must have sounded like water buffalo giving birth over a public-address system.

  Mr. Newton would slam his cards down and come storming over, and he’d tell us that he was really sick of this, night after night, and if he heard one more sound out of us we’d have to clean the latrine the next day. This was a serious threat, because it was the kind of highly odorous summer camp latrine where you wondered how it could possibly be so disgusting when nobody ever had the courage to use it. Evidently somewhere along the line it had reached Critical Latrine Mass and developed a life-style of its own.

  After making this threat, Mr. Newton would stalk off back to his cards, and there would be silence for maybe a minute, and then there would be this tiny whisper from Eugene’s direction, so faint that only a trained ear could discern it:

  “Ding,” said the whisper, “DONG.”

  And of course this resulted in a situation where, never mind having to clean the latrine, never mind that Mr. Newton was now standing in the middle of the cabin clutching a weighty flashlight and threatening to break everybody’s heads, the only thing any of us could think about was whether we would ever be able to draw breath again.

  And so we had a terrific summer, and all because of one idiot joke, which, although I would not tell it in public except under the influence of sodium pentothal, still does a better job of cheering me up than any major religion. I’d like to meet the person who made that joke up, but of course that’s always one of the big mysteries about jokes: Nobody knows who makes them up. They’re just there, floating around and lowering the productivity of offices and factories everywhere. And they’ve been there throughout human history. Archaeologists found this joke in an Egyptian tomb:

  HE: Did you hear about the Sumerian? SHE: No. What about the Sumerian? HE: He was extremely stupid. Ha ha! SHE: No, I had not heard about him.

  This, of course, is a primitive version of the modern ethnic joke, which still carries the same basic message, although it has become much more sophisticated over the years thanks to the introduction of such innovations as the light bulb. But who introduced them?

  Other mysteries about jokes are: How come you can remember extremely complex jokes involving a minister, a priest, and a rabbi, but you can’t remember your mother’s birthday? How do jokes travel so fast, and so far? (The Apollo 7 astronauts found traces of a joke on the moon!) Also: Does Queen Elizabeth ever hear any jokes? Who tells them to her? What about the pope?

  To answer these and other questions, I think we should set up a research project wherein we scientifically track the progress of a specified joke, similar to the way the flight patterns of birds are tracked by scientists called ornithologists, who attach metal wires and rubber bands to the birds’ beaks and make them come back every week for appointments. No! Hold it! My mistake! I’m thinking of “orthodontists.” What ornithologists do is attach bands of metal to a bird’s leg, then toss it gently off the roof of a tall building and watch it splat into the pavement below at upwards of 100 miles an hour. People try to tell the ornithologists that the metal bands they’re using are too heavy, but they just laugh. Recently they dropped a common wood warbler to which they had attached a 1983 Chevette.

  But the theory is sound, and I was thinking maybe we could come up with some kind of similar system for tracking a joke. What I propose to do is inject a brand-new joke into the population at certain known places and times. This joke will have a distinguishing characteristic, so that as it spreads around the country, public-spirited citizens such as yourself can act as spotters. As soon as you hear this joke, I want you to report it via postal card to: The Joke Tracking Center, P.O. Box 0 1 1509, Miami, FL 33 1 0 1.

  Please include a summary of the joke, where and when you heard it, who told it to you, and any other helpful background information such as whether you were drinking liquor right out of the bottle at the time.

  Obviously, I cannot reveal the joke here, but its distinguishing characteristic is that it answers the question: “Why is Walter Mondale nicknamed ‘Fritz’?” Everybody got that? I have tested this joke on a carefully selected panel of lowlifes, all sworn to secrecy, and they assure me that it is in very poor taste and should spread like wildfire.

  So let’s all Simonize our watches and keep a sharp ear out for this joke. I’m very serious about this. Trained personnel are standing by now at the joke Tracking Center. So report those sightings! Together, we have a chance here to obtain scientific findings of great significance, and possibly a large federal grant. Remember: This chain has never been broken.

  The Snake

  The way I picture it, adulthood
is a big, sleek jungle snake, swimming just around the bend in the River of Life. It swallows you subtly, an inch at a time, so you barely notice the signs: You start reading the labels on things before you eat them, rather than to pass the time while you eat them; you find yourself listening to talk radio because the hit songs they play on the rock stations (can this really be you, thinking this?) all begin to sound the same. Before you know it, you have monogrammed towels in your bathroom, and all your furniture is nice. And suddenly you realize it’s too late, that you’d rather sit around on your furniture and talk about the warning signs of colon cancer with other grown-ups than, for example, find out what happens when you set one of those plastic milk jugs on fire. And if your kid sets a milk jug on fire, you yell at him, “Somebody could get hurt,” and really mean it, from inside the snake.

  I mention all this to explain how I came to buy, at age 38, an electric guitar. I had one once before, from 1965 through 1969 when I was in college. It was a Fender jazzmaster, and I played lead guitar in a band called The Federal Duck, which is the kind of name that was popular in the sixties as a result of controlled substances being in widespread use. Back then, there were no restrictions, in terms of talent, on who could make an album, so we made one, and it sounds like a group of people who have been given powerful but unfamiliar instruments as a therapy for a degenerative nerve disease.

  We mainly played songs like “Gloria,” which was great for sixties bands, because it had only three chords; it had a solo that was so simple it could be learned in minutes, even by a nonmusical person or an advanced fish; and it had great lyrics.

  My band career ended late in my senior year when John Cooper and I threw my amplifier out the dormitory window. We did not act in haste. First we checked to make sure the amplifier would fit through the frame, using the belt from my bathrobe to measure, then we picked up the amplifier and backed up to my bedroom door. Then we rushed forward shouting “The WHO! The WHO!” and we launched my amplifier perfectly, as though we had been doing it all our lives, clean through the window and down onto the sidewalk, where a small but appreciative crowd had gathered. I would like to be able to say that this was a symbolic act, an effort on my part to break cleanly away from one stage in my life and move on to another, but the truth is, Cooper and I really just wanted to find out what it would sound like. It sounded OK.