YouSaid · the spoken record

Dave Barry

lines on the record: 75
first: 2017-08-16
most recent: 2017-08-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I'm way past that. So I'm on the downhill slope. So I'm looking to my dog for help And if she doesn't give it, I'm going to bite her.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Continued immaturity, followed by death is my plan. Now I'm writing a book. Like I said, it's about dogs. It's about my dog whose name is Lucy. And it'll be called, I think, Lessons from Lucy. But it was like, I'm going to turn 70 this year and Lucy's going to turn 70. She's 10. So in dog year 70. And I was thinking about it, or I was thinking about a dog book. And I was thinking, she's still really happy. She is unchanged in that sense, in the happiness that she's changed in her, you know, in her appearance and what she can do and everything. But she's still pretty happy all the time. And I'm thinking like, what does she do that I don't do? Because I'm pretty clear I'm not as happy as I was when I was 19, you know.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there are a couple scenes where I go for humor, but one of the things I like about writing novels is that you don't have that burden on you. When I write a humor book, it's my feeling is every sentence is supposed to be funny or leading to the next sentence, which will be funny. And with a nova, you're telling a story, which to me is a much more kind of relaxed process, less frantic when I'm writing it. What would he say then and what would he say then and what would they do then that would keep you engaged, but it doesn't have to make you laugh, which is a lot of pressure.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not to get all heavy on it, but in our books, we do try to deal with the fact that Peter has to accept that his friends are all going to grow old and leave him. As Jan Berry does, I mean, I'm not, you know, that is in a way the sad part of it, although mostly it's like, isn't it cool that he can fly?”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is strange, but I've always kind of felt that what they were attached to because if you listen to people, they don't quote long passages from Peter Pan. In the end, it's like when you ask almost anybody, certainly any American, what's Peter Pan about? It's a little boy who never grows old and can fly, all of which is true, but you don't get that.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I went back and read it. And yeah, it's more, I would say more weird than anything else, just kind of a strange story the way it's told. And I honestly can't say I was a huge fan of it.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. They don't like Americans anyway, you know, kinds of things. So we got a certain amount of grief from purists. And we had it from the start say we are not trying to, you know, we don't say we own this story. We're not saying we're experts on this. We're just, here's what we're doing. There were a couple of American guys taking the American view. That was our idea. And it worked out really well for us”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were really naive. Neither one of us had really spent much time on J.M. Barry. Both of us had been raised in the United States, and our view of the Peter Pan story was the Disney cartoon, the famous Disney cartoon, and Mary Martin on Broadway hanging on wires, you know, this 43-year-old lady swinging around the stage. That was our view of the Peter Pan story. And so all we were thinking about was that the American version of the Peter Pan story, the myth, you know, which is a few simple elements he can fly, Tinkerbell, Captain Hook, the Alligator, I mean, the crocodile, that kind of, you know, the simple elements, how could we put those together in a backstory that would be entertaining?”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is looking at my left hand to see how to play a lick on the guitar. And to me, that's like better than winning a Pulitzer Prize. It was really much more fun.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's the nicest man, and that's been the thing, the consistent thing with these musicians who have played with, well, I guess you kind of have to be nice to be a great musician who's willing to play with a bunch of incompetent authors. But Roger is like, I'll never forget the first time we play it. I can't even, you know. Oh, yeah. Okay. We were playing somewhere and Roger wanted to stay on stage with us for he had done a series of bird songs with Roger. And I said, the last line we're going to do after that is Labamba, you know, Richie Valen's song. And he goes, oh, okay, I can do that. And he goes, what Keith do you do? And I go, gee. And he goes, well, how does that lick go? And I happen to know. I can play that lick. And it goes like this. And Roger's looking at it. I'm like, Roger.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fun thing because it is unlike what I was just talking about, where you want to be in your wheelhouse, you want to be where you can be competent. It's an area where I know I'm not competent. I don't belong, and yet I get to be on the stage with this guy who's really, really great.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This would have embarrassing myself. This has been the most fun thing I have done as a grown-up. I'm writing a book now about things I've learned from my dog essentially. And one of the lessons I've learned from my dog is that you should not stop trying to have fun when you get old. And the most fun thing I have done as a grown-up is be part of this rock band called the Rock Bottom Remainders, which is not a good rock band. And I'm not a good musician. What do you play? I play guitar. And I did it in college, and I'm good enough that if you didn't know anything, you might think I could play guitar. But if you know anything, you would know immediately that I can't, that I just can fake it reasonably well. But anyway, I got to play with not just Roger McGuinn, but Bruce Springsteen and Warren Zivon. But Roger plays with us regularly, still does, although it's been a couple years I got to admit. And that has been the most fun single.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stretching too far. I don't know anything about being a player. I wasn't trained, I haven't studied, whatever. But I did feel that if I could go from writing funny essays to maybe trying to write a funny novel, if I looked at the funny novel as a series of funny scenes with some kind of plot, which is a crude way of looking at it, but at least it was connected in a way that I thought maybe it could make it work. So it's kind of a combination of insecurity needing to keep producing and kind of being Fear boredom wanting to do something new that you still felt you could do competently, or at least not embarrass yourself.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the constant worry that you no longer can do it and that you're not funny anymore. So as soon as you start to be just pretty confident that anything you write is great, then you're going to suck in any creative field, I think. But then also certain impatience or fear of getting into too much of a rut. wanting to try new things that aren't that you feel like in your wheelhouse like if I had said that I wanted to become a playwright I think I would have been”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But anyway, well, part of it is like insecurity. So I want to keep producing always. So fear in despair. Fear in despair.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think as long as they're, I mean, you know, at least where I live in coral gables, which is a city, but it's really a suburb of Miami, it's a pretty great place to live. And it's kind of what it has in common with the other places I've lived is it has access to a major metropolitan area with kind of the excitement and the diversity that that implies, but you can be physically more comfortable. And I like that. I think there's nothing wrong with that. I think there's a reason people want to have a yard and a driveway. And I think every American should have a right to yard in a driveway.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, absolutely not. The closest you would get would be Carl Hyacinth. And he kind of represents the, I'm really sick of what's happened to my state side of it. Carl does not embrace the changes of Florida. Carl will be happy if I went back to just being mostly snakes and lizards.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, definitely. Miami is not American, it's Latin American. It is Nicaraguans and Colombians and Venezuelans and Dominicans and all of these people like the United States, but a lot of them I'm not really assimilated to the United States particularly well yet. The one that everybody talks about is Cubans. My wife is Cuban. My in-laws are Cuban. They are Americans. I mean, they have total, I mean, they've lost their country and they're okay with that. They're still very Latin, but they're Americans. But there are large sections of Miami where people are still living essentially in Colombia or might as well be.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it isn't in linear distance, it's a million trillion miles away in culture. Palm Beach in Miami are separated by Boca, which is Long Island, basically. I mean, Miami is, when you get across the Dade Broward line, you are in Latin America. 80% of the city, I think, speaks Spanish as its first language, and a lot of people don't speak any English at all. You can function comfortably in Miami your entire life and never speak a word of English, read a word of English. You just don't need it. Whereas if you are in business in Miami, you don't speak Spanish, you are in big trouble. You're going to need it. So it's still a very, very, very Latin city. But when you get to like Fort Lauderdale and then Boca, you're in New York. Then you get a little farther and you're Palm Beach, you're just a rich person land.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think maybe in the sense that everybody's more used to it now, that Miami is really the capital of Latin America, but I don't think it's any more than New York has become, you know. Passe. I mean, it's just cemented. That's what it is. Miami is the center of Latin America, but it's like exploding right now. And I don't have any statistics to back up this feeling I have, but I haven't noticed that Miami's turned into some kind of backwater, no.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably because I'm guessing it has something to do with unions more than anything else. Yeah, it's warm, you know, so you don't have to worry quite as much about the weather down there. It has an image to it, Florida. It's not, people don't think of Florida the way they think of Alabama, even though Alabama's right next door. They think of Florida as more exotic. And they're right. It is more exotic. It's more exotic than any other state as far as I can tell.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we eventually do arrest people, usually, but sometimes it's the police officers doing these things. No, we just, I don't know. And, you know, it's a state where every day is a thousand more people than there were the day before. So there's a lot of people that just showed up, ready, you know, looking for something in the heat and the humidity with the bugs and the lizards and the booze. And it's just a toxic stew of weird is what it is”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People don't go, I'm a proud Floridian. They just don't. So it's kind of like nobody owns the state. And there are people just constantly showing up in the state for various reasons. I would say we're like the Ellis Island for stupid, weird people. You want to pleasure yourself into a stuffed animal in a Walmart, you're going to go to Florida to do that. You want to get naked by the side of the road for no apparent reason. Yes, Florida is the place you're like, just nothing else because it's warmer there.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it the giant insects that make them weird? A lot of them drunk is what it makes them. We have ready access to alcohol and drugs of every kind in Florida. We have a lot of different communities that have absolutely nothing to do with each other living in close proximity. Miami where I live is a good example, but the whole state is like 10 different weird little communities. There is no Florida. There's no sense of state pride.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, quite a bit warmer than Alabama. Warmer than Alabama. Come to Alabama in January, and then you'll want to come to Miami. It's warmer. It's a much more known as a vacation destination. It's got beaches everywhere. People come there, not particularly serious reasons coming there.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The dog a lesson Dogs are fine. The people are not. Yeah, Florida. The guy who bit the dog, I didn't, you know, after hearing the expression, man bites dog nine trillion times. I don't think I've ever actually seen an example where a man did bite a dog. But if it did, naturally it had happened in Florida. And that dog will not do that again, whatever it was.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you're old me, and they still showed the movies when we were younger, but you don't go see anymore in Mark's brother. Yeah, Duck Sub holds up great.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody knows who Robert Benchley is anymore. This is one of the things I've been using for years as an example of why I don't expect to be famous for anything in 20 years except for talk like a pirate day, which wasn't even my idea. People who do humor with so the rarest of exceptions do not last in the culture the way people who write Tender is the night hang around for a much longer like even like we talk about the Marx brothers but Who goes to see Mark's Brothers movies anymore? You know, we know who they are, but people still go to see Shakespeare performed, you know, not to compare.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just took it and they would go. They were never apologetic. It was like, oh, I meant, you know, I just thought it was so great. You put your name on it. They didn't get that that was wrong. But I think it's harder and harder to get away with that if you are a successful comedian. People are going to catch you if you're stealing somebody else's jokes. There's just too much too many people out there consuming it, seeing it in too many different forms.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not underproduced. There's plenty of it out there. I think it's kind of self-policing. People do steal. I have had over the years ridiculous experiences, especially when my column was syndicated. And somebody would send me a copy of his local shopper and the local orthodontist wrote a weekly column. And one week I would look at it and it would be my entire column word for word with my name changed to his name. write or call these people when I was younger and more naive and had more energy. And I'd say you stole my...”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I did not notice a difference based on gender. I just found very few people are naturally clear, concise writers. That's not a common trait, but it was more of a thinking issue than it was a writing issue. It was just this inability to see the purpose of the document as anything other than a diary sort of to make you see what I did as opposed to to convey important information to you.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody else was doing it. I mean, if I got, when I would get, when I would start to class, I have 32 people in the class typically. And when they would turn in all their samples of writing, every one of them wrote the same way. They all wrote business ease writing. This is my parody of it, but it's enclosed, please find the enclosed enclosure, that kind of formal, nonsensical, meaningless flow of words somewhere in there would be something important, something significant, or maybe not, but...”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drag everybody through. And it was the one thing the newspaper people were taught to do that made more sense. You don't have your reader's attention very long, so get to the point. And I found it was very difficult to get even really smart business people to get to the point. And sometimes it was because they really couldn't tell you what the point was. And what I wanted to say, but rarely felt comfortable saying, was if you can't tell them, if you don't know what the point is, then you can't really write this report. But it was always too complicated for a layperson like me to understand. You know, that was the way they viewed it. But then I was being hired by their bosses to tell them, no, we want you to write clearly and we want you to get to the point. And we want you to.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, the most consistent Not mistake, but inefficiency of business writing, and it was very consistent, is the absolute refusal on the part of the writer to tell you right away what the message he or she is trying to deliver. And I say to them, the most important thing you have to say should be in the first sentence. And, oh, no, you can't. I'm an engineer. We did a 10-year study. This is way too complicated. And inevitably they were wrong. Inevitably, if they really thought about it, they were able to, in one sentence, summarize why it was really important. But they refused to do that because the way they found out was by spending 10 years of study and all this data and everything. And that's the way they wanted everyone to look at what they did. They wanted their supervisors to go plowing through all they had done to come to this brilliant conclusion that they had come to.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not as on top of it as I was when I was reading hundreds of letters and memos every week. But my guess is no. There are certain fundamental things that business people have trouble with.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usage experts. So I became very interested in grammar. I was always a pretty good writer, but I was a much more aware writer when I came out of that experience. Now, I mean, I use grammar more to mess it up for humorous effect than I do. You know, I don't try to teach anybody grammar, but I did find the grounding I got was helpful.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we're not necessarily good at writing. And I was supposed to talk to them about how to write reports and letters and memos. And they challenged me because I looked like I was 10 years old. And they were expected to be bored also. So I became a grammar fanatic just in self-defense because I got challenged so often. Why do I say it's okay to end a sentence with a preposition when they were told that you can't do that? Why did I say it was okay to start a sentence with and or but when they were told you can't do they had all these rules that they were told that aren't rules of grammar and never were and so I became I could I don't think I can anymore I could diagram sentences I could cite”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that the funny part has to come last? And then when it comes, it has to end there and go on to something new. And very often the funniest part of the sentence, if it's poorly done, we'll be in the middle and then there'll be words after. If you watch a stand-up comedian, he'll never deliver a joke where there's more words after the funny part. But in written humor, that's done a lot by people who don't know what they're doing. So sentence structure is really important. And how formally do you think about grammar when you do this? A lot. A long time, well, it seemed like a long time at the time. Seven, eight years, I taught effective writing seminars to business people. I was young and I looked even younger, but I had to get up in front of engineers, chemists, lawyers sometimes, accountants, people who were”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That all Republicans are stupider than all Democrats, in my opinion, or the other way around. Either way, it's kind of a dumb template to start with. And yet that is sort of the template now for both sides. One of my readers sent in a question. Would love to hear him talk about sentence structure and its relationship to the effectiveness of written humor. Well, there is. Do you have any comments on that? I do. I do. This is my life is writing sentences that are intended to make people laugh. And you start with the idea of the joke, but then to execute it so that it actually works, it's very similar to what a stand-up comedian does, but he does it with timing and emphasis. And in written humor, you do it with spacing and punctuation and a few other tricks. But yeah, the key, and this is the most obvious example of why sentence structure is important, and yet it has violated all the time in human writing by amateur.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, not so much anymore. I mean, there was a time when half the jokes you heard, and this was in my lifetime were like Polish jokes, whatever. And as we think back, it was kind of stupid. Polish people are not less intelligent. Chopin, right? Let's joke about Chopin. And yet that was a staple of humor. And some of those were pretty funny jokes. You don't hear them anymore. But now, yeah, I think now it's more likely to be a political target, whichever side it is. I'm inclined to view that kind of humor as lazier. It's more like I know you're on my team. So if I mock that person, we'll both get a good laugh at it. And it also will prove we're smarter. That's like kind of the format, the template for a lot of the humor now. And for the most part, it's not really based on anything real. It's like, it's kind of silly to.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I would have to spend, boy, first of all, in my case, not that huge a group, to be honest, like I could just address them individually. It wouldn't take that long. But it would include your wife. Yes, yes, I have slept with my wife. Are there common targets of humor you think are unfairly maligned, other than just the common tendency to attack, say, Republicans or the right? But at the social level.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think to be funny. Here's a question from Chuck Clostroman from his Cocoa Puffs book. See what your answer is. Every person you have ever slept with is invited to a banquet where you are the guest of honor. No one will be in attendance except you, the collection of your former lovers, and the catering service. After the meal, you're asked to give a 15-minute speech to the assembly. What do you talk about? I would try to seduce the catering service. Being the only people there haven't already slept. Oh, man. That would be, I would complain about the catering service.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Social conservatives. Yeah, people who think there should be strict drug laws and have a prudish approach to sex. Can't they be funny about something else? You're not going to see that much, no, I don't think so. But our ability to compartmentalize as human beings, just the fact that we could say at times find a joke about the Holocaust funny, that suggests we're wonderful compartmentalizers, but the people who are social conservatives, they can't compartmentalize. What does that tell us about humor? Well, I think you have to look at the reason they are socially conservatives to begin with, and it's probably in part because they are religious people, which goes back to my feeling. It's not that it's funny that the world is set up the way it is, it's because there's a divine plan for it and rules we need to follow. This is not how a humorist thinks. The humorist thinks, no, there's no divine plan and these rules are stupid. You kind of have to be on some level pretty subversive.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's probably part of why there are so many Jewish comedians that in the fact that everybody, if you're Jewish, everybody you know is funny, like trying to be funny anyway. It's like revered in that community, that skill, the ability to make people laugh. Mormons historically have been a persecuted community. It could be a wacky fun group once against no, no. I don't know if there's any Mormon comedians. Cyrus Silverman. But they came along just for the purpose of giving who are those guys, the South Park guys, something to make fun of. And that may be their divine purpose on earth. They're also too libertarian-oriented comedies. Yeah, yeah. And we libertarians love the Mormons. But social conservatives as comedians, that's a lot tougher, right?”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is not to dismiss religious people. My dad was a religious person and he was a funny guy, but that generally the two things, one tends to mitigate the other. And to be really edgy funny, it's probably better if you don't believe in anything good is coming. Is this why so many successful comedians have been Jewish in this country? Well, that's assuming that Jewish people are more likely to be atheists. Which is probably a pretty good assumption. That and the fact that there are historically persecuted group that managed to somehow find ways to survive using often their wits.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ridiculously unfair place. I mean, things keep happening to people that should never happen to anybody. And it seems to be pretty random how they happen. And I think basically the two reactions to that are religion. In other words, there really is a reason for all this, and it really is going to end up okay. And if you don't buy that, then there's humor. Which is to me just this kind of weird psychological reaction human beings have developed to tolerate how scary and unfair the world is. I mean, there's no good reason to have humor, no practical reason that I can think of no evolutionary benefit to it other than it keeps us from going insane. So in your theory, religious people are less funny because religion is their substitute, or they become more skilled at dealing with despair, and so they're more funny. I think they're less fun. So comedians tend to be atheists. I think that's true. I mean, I think that...”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is it you think that we fear and are despairing of so much? Well, the simplest thing is we fear that we're going to die and that before we do, our lives are really pretty meaningless. I mean, they're basically, you know, the world is a completely unfair.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outrageous anymore? Do you think that's it? It could be. And then we had a crossover into television, like Saturday night live, brought the sensibility of my generation to TV on the complete willingness to mock everything, mock commercials, the way Mad used to. But nobody on television mocked television. And suddenly there was this show that was mocking everything about television. And then the Larry Schandling show and where it became kind of a staple of television to mock television and Letterman, which is going to make a whole career out of that. So maybe we didn't need a magazine anymore to say, hey, look at how silly TV is anymore. CV was doing that for us. You've said in one of your essays that you can't really pin down what makes things funny in a consistent sense, that there's something surprising about it, but you think a lot of humor stems from fear and despair.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way in the field, like some professional wrestlers, the president of the United States, and everyone's an idiot. The first half hour is brilliant, I think. At least watch that much of it. When did Mad magazine stop being funny? And why did that happen when it did? I don't know if it stopped being funny. I stopped reading it when I started reading National Lampoon, which stuck me as more, I don't know, a little more grown-up. And maybe I was wrong because Mad Magazine was some of the old parodies in Mad were just brilliant. It seems it was an influence on you, right? It was. I read a lot of Mad, I mean, the issue of Mad magazine when I was, you know, like 10, 11, 12, 13. And I can't honestly say that it stopped being funny. I stopped reading it, so I don't know. But maybe by the mid-80s, it became harder for it to be daring because you have other comedians in mainstream media. Well, before the internet, but being more daring, Eddie Murphy would be an example, so Matt didn't seem so.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jokes listed in both. Is that a joke? Because I missed the. No, that's just only the punchline. Joke is not funny. I missed that one. Okay. Go ahead. I'm sorry. How funny are jokes listed in books? It used to be you could buy these books all the time and now you don't see them much. Well, now as you say we have now we have Twitter and now we have the internet. But even before Twitter, it seems those books were disappearing. They were because they were in function. I'm trying to remember the link. No, people don't have people don't read books anymore as far as I can tell but if they want they look on their phone, whatever was funny now on their phone, that's what they're looking at. They don't printed page with a bunch of jokes on it would seem incredibly archaic to somebody like my daughter. She was a movie, if you don't know it will just pass. But Mike Judge is idiocracy. Yeah, I never saw the movie. So I do know the principle of it.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source