dave barry essays pdf

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July 3, 1947 -

David McAlister "Dave" Barry is a Pulitzer Prize winning American author and columnist, who wrote a nationally syndicated humor column for the Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005. He has also written numerous books of humor and parody, as well as comedic novels. - Wikipedia

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Big Trouble: A Novel

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Chicken soup for the mother's soul

Chicken soup for the woman's soul: 101 stories to open the hearts and rekindle the spirits of women

Peter and the Starcatchers

Tricky business

Dave Barry hits below the Beltway: a vicious and unprovoked attack on our most cherished political institutions.

Peter and the secret of Rundoon

Peter and the shadow thieves

You've got to read this book!: 55 people tell the story of the book that changed their life

Dave Barry's Complete guide to guys: a fairly short book

Dave Barry's greatest hits

Boogers Are My Beat

Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down

Dave Barry does Japan: Deibu Barī ga "Nihon o suru"

Chicken soup for the father's soul: stories to open the hearts and rekindle the spirits of fathers

Escape From The Carnivale

Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far)

Chicken Soup for the College Soul: Inspiring and Humorous Stories About College

Bad habits: a 100% fact-free book

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Dave Barry: ‘I Became a Humor Writer Because I Had No Plan’

In conversation with mitchell kaplan on the literary life podcast.

From the first-ever episode of The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan , re-listen to Dave Barry as he joined Mitchell to discuss the turbulent eighties Miami, his days as a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, and the time Bruce Springsteen played in Dave’s band, with Dave’s guitar. We can all use some Dave Barry humor these days.

From the episode:

Dave Barry: My career has been entirely accidental. I get asked a lot by younger people, how do you become a humor writer? And I say, well, don’t. I did it because I had no plan. I went to work at a little newspaper called the Daily Local News , and I was there and then I went to the Associated Press. So far, so good. This would be a traditional path to becoming a humor columnist. Then I was at the A.P. Associate Press in Philadelphia, and I did not like it. I called it the word army. You know, the goal with the AP is that nobody could tell which writer wrote what stories. … I get that, but I hated it.

While unhappily at the A.P. in Philly, a friend of mine’s father had a heart attack and he needed somebody to replace him in his business, which was teaching effective writing seminars to business people, which I knew nothing about but sounds like technical writing. You would go to a group of engineers or accountants or computer programmers or chemists, people who had to write reports but were not writers. I wasn’t teaching them anything technical; they knew all the technical stuff. Instead, I was teaching the simplest things in the world, to use normal language. If you’ve discovered something important, put that in the first paragraph, which is heretical in the business world where you never put anything important in the first paragraph because then people can find it. They just don’t think about it anyway. So I did that. I was going around the country to all these businesses. … I would say I was completely out of the newspaper business but several things happened that made it good. Although I never would’ve predicted this, I thought I was going to be this man the rest of my life, teaching effective writing seminars to accountants. I would have been okay with it, but I was traveling a lot. I spent a lot of my spare time in hotels and in airports. I would buy a legal pad and write humor columns. I just did that because I loved doing it and it was something to do. I would send them back to the daily local news in Westchester, Pennsylvania, where I’d started out, and they would print them once a week and paid me $22 per week to write this column. Suddenly, I had time to write and I was writing.

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This episode of The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan was recorded at Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida. Subscribe now on iTunes , Spotify , or wherever else you find your podcasts!

Dave Barry has been a professional humorist ever since he discovered that professional humor was a lot easier than working. For many years he wrote a newspaper column that appeared in more than 500 newspapers and generated thousands of letters from readers who thought he should be fired. Despite this, Barry won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, although he misplaced it for several years, which is why his wife now keeps it in a secure location that he does not know about. Barry has written more than 30 books, including the novels Big Trouble , Lunatics , Tricky Business and, most recently, Insane City . Barry lives in Miami with his family and a dog that is determined to urinate on every square inch of North America.

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Dave Barry's colonoscopy journal

I called my friend Andy Sable, a gastroenterologist, to make an appointment for a colonoscopy.

A few days later, in his office, Andy showed me a color diagram of the colon, a lengthy organ that appears to go all over the place, at one point passing briefly through Minneapolis.

Then Andy explained the colonoscopy procedure to me in a thorough, reassuring and patient manner.

I nodded thoughtfully, but I didn't really hear anything he said, because my brain was shrieking, "HE'S GOING TO STICK A TUBE 17,000 FEET UP YOUR BEHIND!"

I left Andy's office with some written instructions and a prescription for a product called 'MoviPrep,' which comes in a box large enough to hold a microwave oven. I will discuss MoviPrep in detail later; for now suffice it to say that we must never allow it to fall into the hands of America's enemies.

I spent the next several days productively sitting around being nervous.

Then, on the day before my colonoscopy, I began my preparation. In accordance with my instructions, I didn't eat any solid food that day; all I had was chicken broth, which is basically water, only with less flavor.

Then, in the evening, I took the MoviPrep. You mix two packets of powder together in a one-liter plastic jug, then you fill it with lukewarm water. (For those unfamiliar with the metric system, a liter is about 32 gallons). Then you have to drink the whole jug. This takes about an hour, because MoviPrep tastes - and here I am being kind - like a mixture of goat spit and urinal cleanser, with just a hint of lemon.

The instructions for MoviPrep, clearly written by somebody with a great sense of humor, state that after you drink it, "a loose, watery bowel movement may result."

This is kind of like saying that after you jump off your roof, you may experience contact with the ground.

MoviPrep is a nuclear laxative. I don't want to be too graphic here, but have you ever seen a space-shuttle launch? This is pretty much the MoviPrep experience, with you as the shuttle. There are times when you wish the commode had a seat belt. You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another litre of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.

After an action-packed evening, I finally got to sleep.

The next morning my wife drove me to the clinic. I was very nervous. Not only was I worried about the procedure, but I had been experiencing occasional return bouts of MoviPrep spurtage. I was thinking, "What if I spurt on Andy?" How do you apologize to a friend for something like that? Flowers would not be enough.

At the clinic, I had to sign many forms acknowledging that I understood and totally agreed with whatever the heck the forms said. Then they led me to a room full of other colonoscopy people, where I went inside a little curtained space and took off my clothes and put on one of those hospital garments designed by sadist perverts, the kind that, when you put it on, makes you feel even more naked than when you are actually naked.

Then a nurse named Eddie put a little needle in a vein in my left hand. Ordinarily I would have fainted, but Eddie was very good, and I was already lying down. Eddie also told me that some people put vodka in their MoviPrep.

At first I was ticked off that I hadn't thought of this, but then I pondered what would happen if you got yourself too tipsy to make it to the bathroom, so you were staggering around in full Fire Hose Mode. You would have no choice but to burn your house.

When everything was ready, Eddie wheeled me into the procedure room, where Andy was waiting with a nurse and an anaesthesiologist. I did not see the 17,000-foot tube, but I knew Andy had it hidden around there somewhere. I was seriously nervous at this point.

Andy had me roll over on my left side, and the anaesthesiologist began hooking something up to the needle in my hand.

There was music playing in the room, and I realized that the song was "Dancing Queen" by ABBA. I remarked to Andy that, of all the songs that could be playing during this particular procedure, "Dancing Queen" had to be the least appropriate.

"You want me to turn it up?" said Andy, from somewhere behind me.

"Ha ha," I said. And then it was time, the moment I had been dreading for more than a decade. If you are squeamish, prepare yourself, because I am going to tell you, in explicit detail, exactly what it was like.

I have no idea. Really. I slept through it. One moment, ABBA was yelling "Dancing Queen, feel the beat of the tambourine," and the next moment, I was back in the other room, waking up in a very mellow mood.

Andy was looking down at me and asking me how I felt. I felt excellent. I felt even more excellent when Andy told me that it was all over, and that my colon had passed with flying colors. I have never been prouder of an internal organ.

On the subject of colonoscopies

Colonoscopies are no joke, but these comments during the exam were quite humorous. A physician claimed that the following are actual comments made by his patients (predominately male) while he was performing their colonoscopies:

1. "Take it easy Doc. You're boldly going where no man has gone before."

2. "Find Amelia Earhart yet?"

3. "Can you hear me NOW?"

4. "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?"

5. "You know, in Arkansas, we're now legally married."

6. "Any sign of the trapped miners, Chief?"

7. "You put your left hand in, you take your left hand out..."

8. "Hey! Now I know how a Muppet feels!"

9. "If your hand doesn't fit, you must quit!"

10. "Hey Doc, let me know if you find my dignity."

11. "You used to be an executive at Enron, didn't you?"

12. "God, now I know why I am not gay."

13. "Could you write a note for my wife saying that my head is not up there?"

Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist for the Miami Herald.

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