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Published:
Sunday, January 2, 2005
THE MIAMI HERALD
THE LAST WORD, FOR NOW; HUMORIST
GIVES JOKES A REST
By DAVE BARRY
There
comes a time in the life of every writer when he asks himself
- as Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Hemingway all surely asked themselves
- if he has any booger jokes left in him.
For me, that time has come. I've been trying to entertain
newspaper readers since the '60s, when I wrote "humor"
columns for the Haverford College News. I put "humor"
in quotation marks because when I go back and read those columns
today, I don't get any of the jokes. But at the time, they
were a big hit with my readership, which consisted pretty
much of my roommates.
After
college, I got a job as a reporter at the West Chester, Pa.,
Daily Local News, where I was also allowed to write humor
columns. I thought they were pretty good, but after my third
one, an editor took me aside and told me - this is an absolutely
true quote - "you used to be funnier."
That was more than 30 years ago, and since then, hardly a
week has gone by during which somebody has not told me that
I used to be funnier. I sometimes got discouraged, but I kept
at it, year after year, the past 22 of them at The Herald.
Why didn't I give up? I'll tell you why: I have no useful
skills.
Also, this job has been a lot of fun. Here are just a few
of the things that, as a professional humor columnist, I have
actually been paid to do:
* I picked up my son, Rob, at his junior high school in the
Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. (Rob, now 24, claims he has forgiven
me. Although, to be safe, I'm still in the federal witness
protection program.)
* After I wrote a column suggesting that opera might be fatal
to humans, I was invited to Eugene, Ore., to participate in
the Eugene Opera's performance of the Puccini opera Gianni
Schicchi. I played the part of a corpse.
* An Air Force pilot took me for an F-16 fighter-jet ride,
during which - while hurtling through the brilliant-blue sky
high above the Straits of Florida at faster than the speed
of sound - I threw up.
* After I made fun of North Dakota, the city of Grand Forks,
N.D., invited me up there one January, and, in a deeply moving
(also deeply cold) ceremony attended by a crowd of dozens,
the mayor of Grand Forks, Mike Brown, dedicated a new sewage-lifting
station in my honor. (Mayor Brown's official proclamation
very eloquently compared my work to the production of human
excrement.)
* I went on the David Letterman show and demonstrated to a
nationwide television audience that it was possible to set
fire to a pair of hair spray-soaked men's underpants using
a Rollerblade Barbie doll. (To my knowledge, Rollerblade Barbie
is the only Barbie ever recalled as a fire hazard, although
I am not taking credit.)
These were all fun things to write about. But many of my favorite
columns were suggested by you readers, an amazingly alert
group. If an important news event occurs - a toilet exploding,
for example; or a boat being sunk by a falling cow; or a cow
exploding - I can count on my readers to let me know about
it. On the other hand, if I write something that turns out
- despite my relentless fact-checking - to be inaccurate,
such as that Thomas Jefferson invented the atomic bomb, I
will receive dozens of letters, often very irate, correcting
me. I cherish those letters most of all.
So this is a great job. And yet I'm quitting it, at least
for now. I want to stop before I join the horde of people
who think I used to be funnier. And I want to work on some
other stuff.
So for the next year, I won't be writing regular columns,
though I hope to weigh in from time to time if something really
important happens, such as a cow exploding in a boat toilet.
At some point in the next year, I hope to figure out whether
I want to resume the column. Right now, I truly don't know.
So in case I don't get to say this later: Thanks to all you
editors for printing my column, and thanks especially to all
you readers for reading it. You've given me the most wonderful
career an English major could hope to have. I am very grateful.
And I'm not making that up.
© 2005 Dave Barry
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