Interviewing Dave Barry
A long time ago, humorist Dave Barry granted 25 minutes of free interview time to a young college intern who had dreams of being a writer.
Back when I was finishing at the University of Michigan, I landed an unpaid internship at The Dearborn Press & Guide, a local newspaper catering to the Dearborn, Michigan area and surrounding communities.
Towards the end of my internship, I gathered up the courage to ask the Editor if I could try something different. I had always been a tremendous fan of Dave Barry’s humor, and I wanted to interview him. I still remember the Editor looking at me, taking his glasses off, and saying something to the effect of, “You think a Pulitzer-prize winning columnist is going to take a call from an intern at a local Michigan newspaper?”
He said it with the measured disdain of someone trying to get a hair out of his mouth. “I don’t know,” I said, “but we can try.”
He looked at me for a second, put his glasses back on, and said, “Go for it, I guess.” He had other things to worry about than some intern’s pipe dream.
That was all I needed. A couple weeks later, I managed to scrounge an interview with Dave Barry himself. Nobody was more surprised than me, not even the Editor who thought I was messing with him for a few days straight.
The final column I wrote for The Dearborn Press & Guide is below, in its entirety.
A PHONE, 32 MINUTES, AND THE GURU OF BOOGER JOKES
Hi there! If you're calling because you don't like something we did, we're very, very sorry and we'll never, ever do it again, okay? If you're calling because you want us to do something, we'll get right on it, okay? If you're calling for any other reason, here's the . . .
*Beep*
I left a message requesting an interview with Dave Barry, the Pulitzer prize-winning humorist for the Miami Herald, whose work is syndicated to more than 400 newspapers across the country. My message was probably no different than the countless other requests for interviews his office must receive every week, so I was more than a little surprised when Judy Smith, Dave's secretary, returned my call to discuss my request.
After some strategic bargaining ("Oh please oh please please please please PLEASE let me talk to Mr. Barry…") and a brief explanation of myself as a student who would love to talk to America's premier humorist, Judy puts me on hold, returning just moments later to tell me that Dave would be happy to talk to me.
She gives me a day on which I was to call back and told me I would have 25 minutes with him, during which I could ask anything I wanted.
A week passes. Before I actually feel ready to conduct the interview, I find myself on hold with the Miami Herald, waiting for Dave to pick up the line. The hold music was horrible, and I began wondering if it was meant to discourage waiting callers into hanging up and never calling again. In an effort to pass the time more constructively, I began to visualize the scenario on the other end of the line, some 1,500 miles away.
Dave describes himself as “about six feet tall” in some of his columns, and I know by the photographs on his book covers that he wears his medium-length, straight brown hair parted slightly to the left of center. Aside from these very basic details, I can only make random, probably mistaken, assumptions as to the rest Dave's world. I decide to forget about it and concentrate on the hold music.
After about two minutes, right about the time I was thinking that the person responsible for the music should be shot without trial, Dave mercifully answers.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Barry?”
“Call me Dave. Really.”
And we're off. Some introductory small talk ensues (“How's the weather down there, Dave?” “Hot.” “Hot? Really? Wow.”), and I decide to stun him with a question that is sure to take him by surprise: I ask him how one becomes a feature writer.
“Newspapers look for experience; they look for clips,” he says. “You're not probably going to get hired anywhere, just starting out, as a feature writer. You need to get some paper, somewhere, to let you write something for them…until you've written enough that they'll let you try a feature.”
I ask him how he started his writing career.
“I started as a general assignment reporter,” he explains. He pauses, then laughs, “I was doing obituaries and meetings. Stuff like that.”
I hear Judy talking in the background; the only word I can make out is “important.” Dave politely excuses himself and puts me on hold. Within seconds, he returns.
Some small part of me, perhaps a part unrealistically expecting a Dave Barry who is Perpetually Funny, feels that, as a humorist, Dave is far too lucid. I expect zaniness. I expect eccentricity. I expect hilarity. By the way this interview is going, you would never know I'm talking to Dave Barry, America's Humor Person. This, to me, is somehow unacceptable. So I ask: “How did you come to realize you could successfully write humor?”
Dave prefaces his answer by explaining that he has always enjoyed writing humor, and that he wrote for his high school newspaper whenever they would let him. Starting in humor writing, he says, is a gradual process; nobody starts from zero and goes to writing pure humor overnight. When I ask him to elaborate, he traces his own steps from reporter to humor columnist.
“It's a matter of edging into it,” he remembers. “At first, I would try to write funny features. The thing about humor is that if it works, you can put it in anywhere…it's not inaccurate, and it never hurts a story, in my opinion, unless it's totally inappropriate.”
Sound logic, I figure. But is there a next step? Or do most potential humorists lose their momentum moving from writing occasionally funny features to sitting around for hours on end thinking up booger jokes?
“There's a step from there to writing pure humor,” he says. “In other words, writing something that has no point other than to amuse - that's a scarier step.”
I ask him what training he feels he has to qualify him for the career and creative license he enjoys as a professional humorist.
“I was an English major,” he says, laughing, “which means I spent a lot of time writing long papers about books I had not actually read.”
For no discernible reason, I recall an anecdote from a piece published in Dave Barry's Greatest Hits in which Dave presents his former editor, Gene Weingarten, with a newly written column. Gene gives the piece a once-over, looks Dave dead in the eye and says, “Dave, this column bites the big one.”
“How do you handle criticism?” I ask.
He laughs. “You have to learn to handle criticism; I think you also have to learn to ignore it sometimes.” He continues on a more serious note: “What's invaluable is an editor you trust.” Long pause. “Especially if you write humor.”
I ask him if he knows what makes humor work.
He goes straight for the conceptual throat. “It's not funny if people don't laugh,” he says, simply. “You can think it's funny, but you cannot tell people it's funny.”
This is what I want. This is what makes Dave Barry tick. America's funniest writer talks about his craft. I prompt him to continue.
“There's room for so many [humor writers],” he explains. “And if you write something that's amusing, it really doesn't matter if it's like anybody else or not - if people laugh when they read it, that's all they'll care about.”
He pauses, clears his throat, and continues, slightly more serious. “Aspiring humor writers need to develop their own style, however, and not assume that the humor comes from a specific word, but from a way of thinking that's unique to the person.”
Humor has always struck me as something that demands a certain mood to be effectively written. I doubt very much if I could write something funny if I were angry or depressed, and wonder if someone making his or her living writing humor finds this to be a truism of the profession.
“I have not noticed that there's a correlation between your mood and what you write,” he admits. “If you make a living at it, you go about it a certain way, no matter how you feel.”
He continues: “People who don't write for a living tend to assume there's much more emotion and intuition and non-mechanical elements to it than there really are. They tend to underestimate the importance of technique and discipline.”
Dave speaks with conviction on writing. I realize that Dave has risen to the top of his field as a professional writer. He is among the best in the world at what he does. The public thinks so: his books have consistently placed on The New York Times bestsellers list. The Pulitzer Prize Board thinks so: they awarded him the 1988 award for Distinguished Commentary. So who, in terms of humor writers, does Dave Barry hold in high regard?
“I admire Roy Blount Jr. tremendously,” he says. “I think he is one of the funniest men ever.”
I hear Judy's voice again, and Dave muffles the phone and says something to her that I cannot make out. I expect to be put on hold, but I'm not. Instead, Dave returns and regretfully explains that he must be going. I look at my watch; I've been talking to him for 32 minutes, seven minutes longer that I had been allotted by Judy. I feel mildly victorious.
We exchange parting pleasantries. I thank him for his time, he thanks me for mine. The interview officially ends.
As I'm about to hang up, I remember. “Dave?”
He's still there. “Yes?”
“I forgot to ask: do you enjoy what you do?”
He chuckles. “Oh, I love it,” he says. He's laughing now. “I mean, who wouldn't? I sit around in front of a computer all day and get paid to make stuff up.”
Great article