Dave Barry
speaker
175 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Dave Barry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And you're like, okay, I'm the young sports writer, and you're the star columnist, so you'll just pick my brain. No, that's not what it was. That wasn't the goal at all. The goal was just to go have a few drinks. I mean, speaking of tropic things that we could do, I don't know how you could do them now, but when the Miami Heat – became a franchise.
The only other franchise in Florida was the Orlando Magic, and they were both brand new, as I recall. And we decided to start a rivalry. When I say we, Tropic Magazine, So we ran a cover story of me spinning a basketball on my middle finger. And I wrote this just absolute vicious attack on the city. On Orlando. On the city of Orlando.
But this is where it was like went beyond just like a regular newspaper thing and just into performance art. We rented a bus. And we we we ran a competition in the in the in Tropic for people to come up with anti Orlando slogans. We were determined to start a bitter rivalry because we figured there's only one other team we could beat in the NBA, which would be Orlando.
And so we we we get a bus like 40, 50 people get on the bus with the winners of the the He would written the most vicious anti Orlando cheers, rode up to Orlando on the bus, had to stop on the way to get more alcohol because we ran out on the way up. And we get there and and we they had Pat. Remember Pat?
So we show up having written this vicious story, and the Orlando Sentinel columnist, Bob Morris, they printed it, and here they come with these Miami people. And Pat Williams had... cordoned off a section for us to sit, and they put crime scene tape around it, and then they put baking soda all around, which they claimed was cocaine.
You're saying that was why the newspapers went right down the toilet. That's correct. You bankrupted newspapers with your expense account.
Wow, it was so much fun.
But it's not just here. It's everywhere. I mean, it's really sad what's happened to – newspapers. I always say it's really bad to be in an industry run by English majors, but that's kind of what happened to us. You know, like, well, the internet? What internet? You know, we didn't really catch that wave is what I'm saying. And we ended up being destroyed by it. But it's everywhere.
I mean, there's no local journalism left. You know, there's big papers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. But There's very few successful local papers. They're just all struggling. They're all out of money. There can't be a new Dave Barry, correct? No, I agree.
I mean, I think there are a lot of funny people, but they're writing substacks and they're writing Twitter and they're writing for TV shows. But there's no, yeah, I was pretty much the end of that line. And I was lucky enough to get to know like Art Buchwald and Russell Baker and Irma Bombeck, the kind of generation I had in me.
when it was, you know, every newspaper wanted to have a humor columnist and there were a million local humor columnists. And I was one of the more successful of those.
I was for a while.
Women's Olympic team. And I'm just going to say, this is going to sound like I'm blowing smoke up your ass, but you wrote a funnier column than I did about that. I don't believe that. But just so the listeners know what we're talking about, Dan and I were covering the Olympics in 1996 in Atlanta, the bomb Olympics. And I think it was my idea, but you agreed to go along.
He was wrong. You wrote a really funny column. But we went to the Emory University pool and both almost drowned trying to stay up with, I don't know if it was the U.S. National. Yeah, I kicked a girl in the face. It was bad. I was not good. I was not graceful in the water. Somewhere is my favorite picture of all time of me. And it's you and me trying to keep all around us are these women.
like ballerinas with their hands over their heads and there's you and I disappearing beneath the surface of the Emory University pool.
Okay, if you say so.
No, when my mom committed suicide, I wrote about that. And when my son Rob was in a bike accident, I wrote about that. And people said very nice things sometimes about when I wrote serious things, like, why don't you write more serious? Because the only times I did it was some horrible thing happened that I had to get it out of me. I don't want more horrible things to happen to me.
I want to go back to writing booger jokes.
Paid to write humor. Yeah. It was kind of not quite the same. I went to work when I got out of college for a little newspaper in Pennsylvania, Westchester, Pennsylvania, the Daily Local News. which was tiny, which is by which I mean to say it's about the same circulation as the Miami Herald is today. But but but they it was like you did everything there.
You know, you wrote a lot of obituaries and covered meetings and police and fire and stuff like that. But you could write what they called it, an ad lib, an op ed little column if you wanted to. and like a 500 word thing. Most people would write about their cat or whatever. And I wrote what I thought was humor. Wrote a couple of those. So technically I guess I was getting paid to do that.
Showing 101–120 of 175 · page 6 of 9
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