Dave Barry
Honored with the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, Dave Barry was born in Armonk, New York, in 1947 and has been steadily growing older ever since without ever actually reaching maturity. He attended public schools, where he distinguished himself by not getting in nearly as much trouble as he would have if the authorities had been aware of everything. He is proud to have been elected Class Clown by the Pleasantville High School class of 1965.
Barry went to Haverford College, where he majored in English and wrote lengthy scholarly papers filled with sentences that even he did not understand. He graduated in 1969 and eventually got a job with the Daily Local News, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where he covered a series of incredibly dull municipal meetings, some of which are still going on.
In 1975 Barry joined Burger Associates, a consulting firm that teaches effective writing to businesspersons. He spent nearly eight years trying to get various businesspersons to for God's sake stop writing things like, "Enclosed please find the enclosed enclosure," but he eventually realized that it was hopeless. So in 1983 he took a job at the Miami Herald, and he has been there ever since, although he never answers the phone. In 1988, he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, pending a recount.
Barry's first novel, "Big Trouble," was published in 1999. He has written a number of short, but harmful books, including "Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States" (Ballantine Books) and "Babies and Other Hazards of Sex" (Rodale Press). His recent books, "Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down" (Crown Publishing), "Dave Barry Turns 50" (Random House), "Dave Barry in Cyberspace" (Random House) and "Dave Barry's Complete Guide To Guys" (Random House), have been hailed by the critics as "containing a tremendous amount of white space."
The CBS television series "Dave's World" was based on two of Barry's books. Barry performs with a less-than-stellar band called the Rock Bottom Remainders with fellow writers Amy Tan, Stephen King, Matt Groening and several others.
Dave Barry Samples
Dave Barry's 2012 Holiday Gift Guide
The holiday season is here: It’s time to do your gift shopping!
This is assuming, of course, that you live in 1985. If you live in the current year (2012), you’re too late. You were supposed to do your holiday gift shopping on Thanksgiving.
In the old days, Thanksgiving was not a shopping day. It was a day when we expressed gratitude for our many God-given blessings in the same way our Pilgrim forefathers did: by eating a 27,000-calorie meal, then spending the rest of the day lying motionless watching televised football while burping out gravy fumes.
Download the teaser sample article in pdf format. (For more info contact Desiree Dawson or Patricia Patino)
Dave Barry's 2011 Holiday Gift Guide
The holiday season is a time of traditions. Here in America, the most popular holiday tradition, observed by millions, is to celebrate the birth of Jesus by going to a Walmart at 4 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving and getting into fistfights over steeply discounted TV sets.
But many other nations around the world have equally colorful holiday traditions of their own. For example:
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Dave Barry's Year in Review 2011
It was the kind of year that made a person look back fondly on the Gulf oil spill.
Granted, the oil spill was bad. But it did not result in a high-decibel, weeks-long national conversation about a bulge in a congressman's underpants. Which is exactly what we had in the Festival of Sleaze that was 2011. Remember? There were days when you could not escape The Bulge. At dinnertime, parents of young children had to be constantly ready to hurl themselves in front of their TV screens, for fear that it would suddenly appear on the news in high definition. For a brief (Har!) period, The Bulge was more famous than Justin Bieber.
Download the entire sample article in pdf format. (2012 Year in Review coming soon. For more info contact Desiree Dawson or Patricia Patino)
Dave Barry's 2010 Holiday Gift Guide
The holiday season is a good time to ponder the lesson of "A Christmas Carol," the heartwarming classic story by the beloved dead English writer Charles Dickens. The story begins on Christmas Eve with mean old miser Ebenezer Scrooge being mean to his lowly clerk, Bob Cratchit, who is a good and humble man despite having a last name that sounds like an intestinal mishap, as in "The dog made cratchit on the rug."
Scrooge then goes home, and during the night he is visited by a series of ghosts, including the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Stranded in a Motel 6 in Albany, N.Y. Horrified, Scrooge rushes to the Cratchit home the next morning to atone for his meanness by giving the Cratchits a turkey, and everybody rejoices except Tiny Tim, who was hoping for an Xbox 360, so his Christmas is ruined.
Download the entire sample article in pdf format. (For more info contact Desiree Dawson or Patricia Patino)
Dave Barry's Year in Review: Crossing our fingers after 2010
Let's put things into perspective: 2010 was not the worst year ever. There have been MUCH worse years. For example, toward the end of the Cretaceous Period, the Earth was struck by an asteroid that wiped out 75 percent of all the species on the planet. Can we honestly say that we had a worse year than those species did? Yes we can, because they were not exposed to "Jersey Shore."
The lesson we learn from this timeless story is that it's important to get the right gift. All too often we give people gifts that they don't want, or can't use.
Download the entire sample article in pdf format. (2012 Year in Review coming soon. For more info contact Desiree Dawson or Patricia Patino)
Dave Barry's 2009 Holiday Gift Guide
In these troubled economic times, when money is scarce for many people, it's important that we remind ourselves, and our loved ones, that the holiday season is not about buying things.
Then we and our loved ones can enjoy a hearty laugh, because, of COURSE the holiday season is about buying things. Now more than ever, the U.S. retail economy depends on consumers spending money they don't actually have on gifts that nobody actually needs.
Download the entire sample article in pdf format. (For more info contact Desiree Dawson or Patricia Patino)
Dave Barry's Year in Review: Crossing our fingers after 2009
It was a year of Hope _ at first in the sense of, "I feel hopeful!" and later in the sense of "I hope this year ends soon!"
It was also a year of Change, especially in Washington, where the tired old hacks of yesteryear finally yielded the reins of power to a group of fresh, young, idealistic, new-idea outsiders such as Nancy Pelosi. As a result Washington, rejecting "business as usual," finally stopped trying to solve every problem by throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at it and instead started trying to solve every problem by throwing "trillions" of taxpayer dollars at it.
Download the entire sample article in pdf format. (2012 Year in Review coming soon. For more info contact Desiree Dawson or Patricia Patino)
Olympic columns
Now we can add another name to the list of legendary Olympians
LONDON — To the list of legendary athletes who have won Olympic gold medals under great pressure — names such as Jesse Owens, Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh — we can now add another name, a name that will stand as a symbol of a person who, when the chips were down, the irons were in the fire, the backs were against the wall, the wolves were at the door, push had come to shove and there was no tomorrow, stepped up to the plate and gave 110 percent, sucking it up, reaching deep down inside, seizing the baton of effort and banging it upon the gong of competition with a ringing sound that will echo down the hallowed halls of sporting history and into the trophy case of athletic immortality.
That name is Dong Dong.
Until these Olympic games, few people had ever heard of Dong Dong, outside of roughly 1.3 billion Chinese. Because Dong Dong — or, as he is known in China, where the surname comes first, “Dong Dong” — competes in the trampoline, which a lot of people didn’t even realize was an Olympic sport. There are quite a few sports like that here. For example, did you know that there is an Olympic event called “Women’s Laser Radial?” Well there is. It is also known as (really) “Women’s Singlehanded Dinghy.” I don’t know what goes on in that event, and I frankly don’t want to know.
Dave Barry: There's nothing like representing a country in competition
LONDON — Few of you will ever know what it feels like to represent a country in international competition — to have to perform under great pressure, carrying on your shoulders the hopes of an entire nation.
Notice I say few of YOU. I, on the other hand, know exactly how it feels, because on Wednesday night I did indeed represent a nation in an international tournament. The nation was San Marino; the tournament was the International Rock, Paper, Scissors Team Championships.
An Olympic gambling scandal? You bet
LONDON — I’ll get to Olympic wrestling in a moment, but first you need to know about the gambling scandal.
I found out about this while walking back to my hotel one evening, when I passed a business called “Ladbrokes.” Through the window I could see men shouting passionately at a TV screen, which was showing a dog race. Right away I suspected that these men were bettors, because (a) only bettors believe that televised racing dogs can hear them, and (b) most of them were missing key teeth (the men, I mean).
Dave Barry: Equestrian competition is a royal bummer
GREENWICH, England — I came out here to watch the Olympic equestrian competition, which is being held in a lovely park next to the Thames.
The word “equestrian” comes from two Greek words: “eques,” meaning “horses,” and “trian,” meaning “being ridden by people with large inheritances and names like Edwina Ponce-Twickendale.” There was indeed a time when the only people who could participate in horse-related sports were wealthy members of the nobility. But times have changed; in the 21st century, equestrian sports, even at the Olympic level, are wide open to anybody, regardless of birth or background, who has billions of dollars.
Human race is doomed, so you might want to ‘SCUTTLE!’
LONDON — I’ll get to the Olympics in a moment, but first a few words about humanity, which is doomed.
I found out about this from a woman who was dressed as a giant cockroach. For the record, at the time I was also dressed as a giant cockroach. This happened in the London Science Museum, which offers an activity called the Cockroach Tour, in which you tour the museum wearing a cockroach costume consisting of a big black headpiece with antennae sticking out of it, and a large shell with legs sticking out, which you wear on your back. When you put on this costume, from behind you really do look like an enormous cockroach. From the front you just look like an idiot.
Republican convention columns
Coming when available
Democratic convention columns
Coming when available
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