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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
What I do remember is I wrote maybe three or four of them and then the editor said, you know, they used to be funnier. Which is actually something I've heard for the whole rest of my life. Whatever phase I am in my life, somebody will come up to me and say, you used to be funnier, Dave.
Well, when I was in high school, I wrote humor pieces for my high school newspaper, like one or two, because it only came out one or two times a year. And in college, I wrote what I thought were funny things. for the Haverford College newspaper.
Years later I went back for a reunion and somebody had gotten my columns from the newspaper when we were students and blown them up and put them all around the wall of the gym and I went around reading them and I didn't get any of the jokes. That's because I was smoking a tremendous amount of marijuana, I think, back then when I wrote these columns. They didn't hold up.
I didn't get any of the jokes. But then what I really started doing was at the Daily Local News, these ad libs when I would write every week. And when I left the paper, I kept writing them. So that's really how I always wanted to write humor. I just never thought you could make a living doing it. You know, I always thought I would have to do something else.
I know. I am honored. I often get confused for Carl. People will tell me how much they love my book, and it'll turn out that it's actually Carl's. Okay. Do you go with it? What do you do? I say, no, you're thinking of Carl Hiaasen. Then they always go, no, I love you too. But anyway, Carl's my very good friend, has been for many years.
And I'm honored to be in any way mentioned in the same sentence as Carl. He's brilliant. The guy's brilliant.
I mean, I really don't want to retire. My wife is an active sports writer. I'm not going to sit around the house. Well, I am still sitting around the house, but I'm writing while I'm sitting around the house. I don't know. I just you know, writing is it's you don't have to retire from writing because it's not hard. I mean, well, it's not physically hard. So I like it. I like writing novels.
I like writing others. I mean, I just finished a memoir, which is very much like this interview. Like many of the things we've discussed, I talk about in this is this memoir. But I can't stop writing. I like to do it.
That's a really good question. Good question. And I don't have a really good answer. I'm doing it because I discussed it at length with my agent and my editor, two women who I really trust and respect. And they both said you should write a memoir. And my big concern was and this is not this is not false modesty. It's like who's going to care about my work? You know, who is going to care?
What do you mean? I appreciate that. I hope you're right. I hope you're right. I just like it goes back to what you're saying about my parents from the Midwest. You just don't toot your own horn. Right.
But it was always like a humorous persona doing that. This is like pretty serious parts of it. I mean, part of – I talk at length about my humor career and the – The things my readers got me to do look like going to Orlando and that sort of thing. David, Dave, you have a thousand of those like, you know, where I was born and raised and how I went to school. I just still do this.
I mean, the book hasn't come out yet, but I am worried about that. Well, they can edit out the boring stuff.
Well, I'll tell you, I mean, the, the one, okay, this, um, name dropping here, but Steve Martin is a friend of mine.
Yeah. So I sent him the memoir to get a blurb cause that's what you do. And, um, And, you know, usually it's like pro forma. They write a blurb. Like Steve wrote one of my books by saying, I love it. I haven't read it, but I, you know, it's like, and he wasn't kidding. He hadn't read it, but, you know. He's written a few of those. He's been asked to write a few of those.
Yeah, he knows about blurbs. So anyway, but in this case, he wrote me an email and said, I'm really liking this. Can I call you? And I go, yeah. And he called me up and said, I just want you to know I really like your memoir. And I'll tell you why I like it. Because you talk about how it works, how the humor works. And he said, and people really like to know stuff like that, like how.
So that gave me a lot of hope. If he liked it, then maybe other people will like it.
That guy, he's amazing to me. He is a wildly successful entrepreneur. Still, he has a hit TV show now. He's older than I am. Not many people are older than I am. And he was by far the most successful stand-up comedian who ever lived. He was the first guy to ever do stadiums and stuff like that.
threw it away just nope it's an amazing story he decided he didn't want to do the most successful stand-up career any of us have ever seen he just stopped and he said i'm gonna make movies now successful at movies art collects art very successful writes books anyway so yeah he's an amazing guy and you're right he i mean i don't know him intimately you know we're friends well you've written for him haven't you i have you wrote for the oscars yeah for him right yeah
which was really interesting. I mean, that was a, um, I was terrified, you know, cause I hadn't met him at that point. He had, he and I had corresponded for years, but I'd never met him. And I was quite surprised when he asked me to come, this is in 2003 when he was hosting the Oscars and he asked me to, to come write jokes for him.
And I had never written jokes for anybody but me, you know, I sit in a room and my name goes on it and, And so I got out there, and we're in this hotel room, conference room, and every single person besides Steve Martin and all the other people with Steve were all professional joke writers. I mean, the guys who wrote for the, Bruce Valanche was one of them, and John Max, who was.
Showing 121–140 of 175 · page 7 of 9
← Previous
Next →