Writing Careers: The World of Dave Barry
by Julia H. Jackson
Dave Barry is a Pulitzer-award winning humor writer with more than 25 years of professional writing under his belt. He got his start writing humor columns for The Miami Herald, where he later became a nationally syndicated columnist. This is the man who brought us such classics as Dave Barry’s Guide to Marriage And/Or Sex and Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway: A Vicious and Unprovoked Attack on our Most Cherished Political Institutions, newspaper column collections such as Boogers Are My Beat: More Lies and Some Actual Journalism! and Dave Barry is NOT Making This Up, and novels like Big Trouble and Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys that later translated to the big screen. Most recently, Dave has partnered with Ridley Pearson to write the Disney Edition Starcatcher series for kids, with titles such as Peter and the Sword of Mercy and Science Fair. Dave agreed to share some Writing Careers tips with us, just as soon as he’d polished his annual “Year in Review” column, which readers can read at The Miami Herald on December 26.
Photo by Daniel Portnoy
JHJ: How did you get your start as a writer?
DB: I always liked to write humor. I wrote humor columns (at least I thought they were funny) for my high school and college newspapers. When I got out of college I went to work for a small newspaper, and when I could I wrote humor columns there. Eventually I got some larger newspapers to publish my work, and I just kept building on that until humor-writing was my only job.
JHJ: You’ve accomplished so much, between your newspaper columns, books (both fiction and nonfiction), and films. How do you approach writing for different media while still preserving your signature style?
DB: I don’t really think about the medium; I think about the audience, and what would likely entertain them. My main goal is not to be boring.
JHJ: How do you define “humor?”
DB: It’s anything that’s intended to make people laugh and actually succeeds.
JHJ: Who or what inspires you?
DB: More than anything, deep down inside, it’s a need to be liked, and a fear of failing at that. This is not a very noble motive, I admit, but I think it’s true of most of us in the humor business.
DB: If you want to be funny, be funny quickly — get the joke out there, end with a punchline, and don’t dwell on it. Move right on to the next joke. And give your audience credit for being at least as smart as you are.
