In the 1980s, when I graduated college, the newspaper industry was doing pretty well. Granted, it’s monopoly on information was long over, and it had to compete with younger, newer media for its advertising life blood.
While magazines had always been around, in the 20th century that industry grew dramatically. And for 60 years, newspapers had faced the serious encroachment on ad revenue of first radio and then TV.
But the American economy was, for most of the 20th century (most but clearly not all, there was a Great Depression and a 1980s farm crisis, but still) booming. The ad revenue pie was being sliced into more pieces, but the pie was itself growing so much that newspapers 20 years before the current century were still a very profitable industry.
But that was all about to change. The spread of personal computers and online connections was expanding the nascent internet.
Book cover from Simon and Schuster web site.
I just finished reading “Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass” by Dave Barry. It’s a good book, worth a read, even if I can’t figure out why it’s “the memoirs” rather than “the memoir.” Was there a sale on the letter S when the accomplished newspaper humor columnist came up with the title?
I guess, despite being a fairly quick read, Barry’s autobiography does span multiple topics, so I’ll grant the S. You’re welcome, Mr. Language Person (Dave Barry’s alter ego who appeared in many columns).
Anyway, Barry is a humor writer, and was a popular syndicated weekly newspaper columnist in the waning decades of the newspaper industry. I don’t blame him for that fading, by the way—it was waning despite, not because, of him. His story is personal, starting with growing up in a small town in New York. In the first chapter, his father died and his mother, who had lived with depression for years, eventually took her own life—not exactly the light comedy one expects from a humorist.
Barry clearly appreciated his parents and has positive things to write about his upbringing, despite tragedies he also recounts. I suppose that’s true for many of us. I think the chapter about his upbringing really resonated with me—I feel largely the same way about my own flawed parents. They were, in many ways, loving and kind and deeply troubled.
He even says his mother, who struggled for serious depression for years, was also very funny. Then again, as he notes: “But funny is not the same thing as happy.”
That relatable early biography is just the start of the tale—once Barry gets into his career, the tone of the book shifts and the stories grow funnier.
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| Author in 2011 from Wikimedia Commons. |
He wrote some humor columns on the side. In 1981, one described his experience of becoming a father—what it was like to be educated about childbirth before the event. That column led to writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, which led, in 1983, to a job with the Miami Herald and a weekly nationally syndicated column. Barry won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1988.
So I liked the many characters and anecdotes about the newspaper life that existed before it mostly went poof as information became less of a valuable commodity and people learned to follow, and be deceived by, social media.
One of the pleasing aspects of this satisfying book is the Oz-like peek behind the curtain to how writing is work, and what that work is like. Writers are, after all, people. “In real life, we humor columnists don’t go around being wacky all the time, any more than professional magicians go around pulling quarters out of people’s ears. In real life we spend most of our time trying to crank out yet another humor column, which is not as much wacky fun as it sounds. The rest of the time we’re engaged in regular boring human activities such as being with our families or buying tires.”
In the late 1990s, Barry’s career went in new directions as he began to write first a novel and then other books and a screenplay.
Anyway, in 2004, Barry announced he was leaving behind his weekly column. In his book, he explains that his career had shifted, and he wanted to do other things. Well, he had over 20 years of column writing. I’m not sure how many Scaramuccis that is, but it is vastly longer than Katie Zacharia was White House press secretary (and infinitely longer than she’s been a lawyer).
Barry’s specialty has been the quick comic shift. That, and the booger joke. Reading his autobiography was a poignant good time, with lots of laughs along the way. And in the end, he concludes, it’s not prizes nor achievements of a writing career that matter, but rather the people in your life.
And I believe him. No kidding.
