Dave Barry

Dave Barry

David McAlister Barry, born July 3, 1947, is an American author and columnist whose comic eye found a large audience in newspapers, books, television, and even rock music. He is best known for the nationally syndicated humor column he wrote for the Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005. In an era when newspaper columns could still become part of the weekly routine for readers across the country, Barry used jokes, exaggeration, and plainspoken absurdity to get at serious concerns without sounding solemn.

Barry was born in Armonk, New York, where his father, David W. Barry, was a Presbyterian minister. He attended Wampus Elementary School, Harold C. Crittenden Junior High School, and Pleasantville High School, where he was elected “Class Clown” in 1965. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Haverford College in 1969. As an alumnus of a Quaker-affiliated college, he avoided military service during the Vietnam War by registering as a religious conscientious objector. He decided “early on” that he was an atheist, a position that later fit with his wary, comic view of certainty and authority.

Barry began in journalism in 1971 as a general-assignment reporter for the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He covered local government and civic events, became city editor after about two years, and began writing a weekly humor column there. After leaving in 1974, he worked briefly as a copy editor at the Philadelphia bureau of the Associated Press, then joined Burger Associates, where he taught effective writing to businesspeople. He later joked that he spent nearly eight years trying to stop businesspersons from writing phrases such as “Enclosed please find the enclosed enclosures,” before deciding it was hopeless.

A 1981 humorous guest column in The Philadelphia Inquirer about watching the birth of his son drew the attention of Gene Weingarten, then an editor of the Miami Herald Sunday magazine Tropic. Weingarten hired him as a humor columnist in 1983, and Barry’s column became nationally syndicated. In 1988, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for “his consistently effective use of humor as a device for presenting fresh insights into serious concerns.” He later received the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2005.

Barry wrote numerous books of humor and parody, along with comic novels and children’s novels, and his books have frequently appeared on The New York Times Best Seller list. His first novel, Big Trouble, was published in 1999 and adapted into a 2002 film directed by Barry Sonnenfeld and starring Tim Allen, Rene Russo, and Patrick Warburton. From 1993 to 1997, CBS broadcast Dave’s World, a sitcom based on Dave Barry Turns 40 and Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits, with Harry Anderson playing Barry. He also helped organize the Tropic Hunt, later the Herald Hunt, beginning in 1984, and played lead guitar in the author band the Rock Bottom Remainders beginning in 1992.

Barry announced in 2004 that he would take an indefinite leave from his weekly column to spend more time with his family, and in 2005 said he would not resume it, though he would continue features such as his yearly gift guide, year-in-review piece, blog, and occasional articles or columns. His own definition of humor captures much of his appeal: it is “a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason.” Barry’s work still connects because it treats confusion, anxiety, and foolishness as shared conditions, and finds laughter in the fact that everyone is stuck here together.