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

“I had a book of jokes and there was one I kept on bringing around to my mother. I read it to her about five times a day. And the punchline was, I'm sick and tired of all this bickering about oatmeal. Now today, if I say that sentence to myself and my mind, I still laugh, but I know the joke was never funny, or just”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Silliness is an underrated part of humor. Most people in the end would rather be cool than silly and snide and condescending and just be out there and being genuinely silly. Robert Benchley was silly. He would take extreme left turns in the middle of an essay about one thing and suddenly be an essay about something completely different. He didn't care. As long as he thought it was funny, he went for it. And that was the thing that when I was a kid just drew me to him that he didn't, and I was used to being presented with Mark Twain as a humorist. Now, Mark Twain is a funny guy, and he wrote some funny stuff, but you don't laugh out loud. Well, you maybe do once every in a great while reading Mark Twain. You smile and chuckle. Robert eventually made me laugh out loud when I was a kid. And I thought, that was, that's what I wanted to do. How about jokes in books? So say when I was a kid, I think I was.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the same topic. What is it about Benchley that makes a fair amount of it pretty enduring and influenced you so much? Well, he was radiantly intelligent. This was a very well-educated, cultured man who made a very good living as a critic and would have been able to have a quite successful career as a theater critic or a literary critic. He was a smart guy. And he was in the movies like you. He's career in some ways. He sort of, he was sorry that he did that in a way. He took the money and he regretted, I think, at least he might have regretted more if he didn't do it. Maybe so. Maybe so. And he did make some pretty funny shorts. But the other thing, the reason that I loved him and still love him was that he was that rare comic writer who was willing to be really silly.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something around it. But that takes certain skill on the part of the comedian. You know, it's kind of hard to say in general. How about Addie Murphy? How funny is he? Well, it used to be really funny. I mean, his stand-up in his day was as good as it got. And what was it, Beverly Hills Cop and a couple movies like that? Coming to America is one of my favorites? He was really, I don't know what happened. I guess he just got too successful to need to be funny anymore or maybe he just got tired of it. which I think happens and God bless him. If you get tired of it, you don't have to keep doing it. Then that's fine. You don't have to. You don't have to live up to my expectation, Eddie Murphy, but he was really funny. Now, one of your favorites, if you could tell us what you find to value in him, and that's Robert Benchley. A lot of what he wrote was in the 20s. I was just rereading his essay on New Yorkers versus Midwesterners and who are the true Americans. And I thought it was better than things I might have read last year.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, yeah, I will just speak for my own personal experience as a dad of a daughter. If I saw a guy get up and doing underage rape jokes, it just wouldn't, even if it were really brilliantly funny, the only guy who even came close was Louis Siquet did a really edgy joke not too long ago, basically about Peterest that, you know, that came really close to, you know. And even then, everybody kind of winced when he did it, but it was daring and funny. But I myself would draw a line there. I want to say the Holocaust, but I've seen people make incredibly funny Holocaust jokes. And again, it all depends on the context and it all depends on your understanding of their sensibility and, you know, what you're really laughing at. You're not really laughing at the Holocaust. You're laughing at the anxiety or the, you know.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it would work anywhere except on a college campus where, of course, you can't say anything at all. But I think we have to distinguish between college campuses and comedy clubs. Comedy clubs, you can still say, you can be racial comedians still are very racial. And, you know, everybody says, yeah, it's fine. He's kidding. He's not really a racist. He's just, you know. He's going on the stereotypes that everybody is aware of. Whereas he can't. But I see non-white comedians being much more deploying racial humor than white comedians. Generally because they can. Because they can. But even, I don't know, even white comedians will do it as long as the understanding is, hey, I'm kidding, you know I'm kidding, which of course you can't do on a college campus anymore because nobody's allowed a kid. Do you think there's anything people don't find funny anymore, even in a comedy club? Campuses as a side.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone who just passed away. I was watching him on YouTube recently, Don Rickles. Don Rickles was a funny man. And I always felt that he was one of the things I liked about him. I saw he was a little out of control. And I know that was contrived, but I think at least early in his career, it was pretty real. You see some of the older performances. He says things sometimes on the old tonight shows that everybody's just dying. And then you realize none of them really knows exactly why that was so funny. They just, you know, it was just that he said something that nobody would have thought to say. But he says some things that we, or at least I wince at. I mean, could there be a Don Rickles today? He's a kind of equal opportunity insulter. But a lot of it would at least seem to be in bad taste. But since it applied so liberally to everybody?”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a kid, I didn't find them funny, but I actually started to find them funny in retrospect after having washed a bit of Seinfeld and Larry David. What's your take on Abbott and Costello? Yeah, I can see the connection there. It more relies on you letting the humor slowly develop and the characters themselves being the humor without coming right out and saying what's funny about it, the one who never understands what's going on, the one who's always losing his patience with the other one. And the first maybe three or four times, it's just mildly amusing, but after a while you see it coming, that becomes very funny to you. It's very rare to find that kind of patience and humor anymore the way I don't think the audience is as generous as it used to be, allowing humor to build the way it did in an Abbott and Castello statute. And is Abbott or Costello funnier to you? Abbott being the straight man? Yeah, I think Abbott is funnier. I think he's much funnier.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intuitively, you would think slapstick being only physical would have a much longer half-life. What I find funny is very culturally specific references. Am I strange? Well, not about slapstick. I never thought that when I was a little guy, I maybe thought the three stooges were kind of funny, but I stopped a long time ago. Some physical humor is still funny to me. Abbott and Costello were pretty physical, but they were funny without being slapstick. Just punch, you know, hitting each other in the nose and going, yong never struck me as funny at all. I missed the second part of your, I've forgotten the second part of your question. You mentioned Abbot and Castello. If you're willing, I'll talk about a few comedians or mention a few, and you can tell me what you found funny with them, didn't find funny. Let's start with Abbot and Costello, favorite of my father. I've watched almost all the movies.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know English speaking comedies from England do pretty well over here. Canadians on average seem funnier to me. That would be a selection mechanism. Canada is the funniest country in the world. It just hides it much better than... That's correct. But so much British humor, I literally feel I don't understand it. There's something about it that's very flat to me in the sense that the British audience are in New Zealand, they're guffawing. And that word guffaw, I would never use the word guffaw to apply to myself. I might giggle or smirk. A lot of times they just acknowledge the humor of it. That's right. British way. But yeah, I mean, yeah, you have to accept with British humor that no British person has ever in history ever said what he actually thought about anything. Everything every British person ever says is meant sarcastically. So it's because they're less direct that they are. They are way less direct. They refuse to ever say anything directly. And that's kind of the wonder of them. I'm the kind of person I hardly ever find slapstick funny. Me too. And when I look at old slapstick, it doesn't seem funny at all.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some things cross-border is fairly easily. A lot of different kinds of foods, though not all kinds of foods, some but not all kinds of music. It's striking to me that humorous movies cross borders, less it seems, from box office data than, say, action movies or even what would appear to be quite culturally specific dramas. What do you think it is about the border that limits the appeal of humor? Probably in part, you know, the English language. I mean, if I just speak from personal experience, what little I know of, you know, anything I've seen of mine that was translated and what little I understand of the other language, it's extremely difficult to translate humor and have it come off the same way. It's easy to translate somebody beating a crap out of somebody else. So action movies are going to lend themselves, I think, far better. Now, if it's English to English, I think probably American comedies do okay in English-speaking countries. I don't know for sure.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Trump pinata. I personally have just kind of gotten to the point where I don't pay that much attention to Trump jokes anymore because they all seem to be the same joke to me. Hey, look at what he said. He doesn't know what he's doing. He's a moron.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What he does. And I don't see it that often. Malcolm Gladwell in one of his podcasts, he criticized the TNF skits of Sarah Palin. Gladwell, of course, doesn't like Sarah Palin. And he thought that Tina Fay, even by mocking Sarah Palin, since Tina Fay was a likable person, a likable character. It humanized Sarah Palin for the audience and that the satire was counterproductive. What do you think of that argument? It's just like overthinking it so badly. You know, that's not how any normal person reacted to Tina Fay's Sarah Palin, which was brilliant. So, no, I'm sorry. I don't know Malcolm Gladwell, and I know he's a brilliant man, but that's way overthinking it. And Alec Baldwin doing Donald Trump. How funny do you think that is? It's pretty funny, but again, it's like, this is a pretty easy target to be taken a swing. I mean, there's a big pinata up there and everybody's got a stick and everybody likes to swing it.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is there something intrinsic about humor that it's left-wing slant humor? No, no, definitely not. I mean, humor should be subversive. And it's a lot more subversive to be right-wing than a left-wing these days. A pro-Trump humorist, I don't know if any exist, would be a lot more subversive than any of the nine billion. Trump himself is the pro-Trump humorist. In a sense, he's too funny to make fun of. Yeah. Or just too out there to, you know, he's such a caricature by himself that it's hard to caricature. But, you know, like, okay, there's a guy, are you familiar with the blog Ace of Spades? Yes. Guy's funny. The guy is a funny, funny writer. I don't always agree with him, but he's funny. He's really good. And he's viciously anti-left. Yes. And that's rare. But when you see it, it's like, wow, that's different. You know, I admire the skill that takes to do what he did.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long time ago. So I think there was kind of a steep decline in the quality of American political humor from which we haven't really recovered combined with the fact that a lot of what passes for humor now on both sides is just vicious attacks. And some of them are very clever and some of them are very funny, but it isn't really that it isn't that funny. It isn't that creative. It's just sort of, I'm going to smear how many times you have to be told Donald Trump has weird hair. At some point, you would think this would be exhausted as a source of humor, but it's not. Do you think there's room for a new right-wing kind of humor? Maybe not a right kind of right-wing that you like, but say now there's alt-right. It's at least perceived as new. It's outrageous to many people. Is this the new direction of funny?”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just didn't nobody made fun of them. So they continued pounding on, you know, I'll never forget, and here I will be unable to summon up the details, but it was one of the many White House Press Association dinners while Barack Obama was president. And he's there and Donald Trump's there. And I can't remember who the comedian was, but he spent the whole time ripping Donald Trump, who was at the time some schmo in the audience. He wasn't, the president sitting right next to him. And it to me, it kind of epitomized the way it is. We're allowed to, you know, in the humor biz beat up all we want on Republicans because they're stupid idiot Republicans and their followers are all red neckneck.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we think of the political content of humor, so I think back, say, to the 1960s, there's Lenny Bruce, there's Richard Pryor. What's funny at that time, it seems mostly to be anti-establishment in some way or left-wing John Stewart today, again called Colbert. There's some conservative or libertarian comedians, there's PJ O'Rourke, there's yourself, there's Drew Carey. But do you think that the medium of humor today has a slant politically one way or the other? And what is that slant? Definitely. I mean, it is a leftist slant. But why? Well, because that's what the cool kids think all the other cool kids are doing. It's kind of funny because it's not very subversive anymore. What could be less subversive than the humor industry during the eight years of Barack Obama, where like, we never made fun of Barack Obama. Correct. And there were some funny. You got a Nobel Prize for doing absolutely nothing. But, you know.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Represent the Humor Bureau. I have no earthly idea. I do think that in the particular field that I'm in, which is writing with like the archaic form of actually writing words down, it's certainly changed. The day of the newspaper humor columnist, which is what I was, is pretty much over. Because the newspaper is over. Newspapers are over. There's no more audience for it, that people have no more time for it. So longer form humor does seem to be disappearing. On the other hand, there's a million good TV shows, I think more than there ever used to be funny TV shows. They keep popping up there in all the, you know, they're on Amazon, they're in Netflix. Some of them are really pretty funny. I can't keep up with them all. But I'm always surprised at the quality. So there seems to be more outlets maybe than used to be if for not the kind of humor that I did. But still, it's written humor. It's scripted humor.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything, as I say, I cannot keep up. Personally, I don't even try to keep up. I see something that everybody tells me is funny. I look at it. But to try to stay on top of all the stuff that's coming out, you can't do it. But does it mean we end up in a world where, in a sense, humor is rarely intentional and it's the moments that weren't expected to be captured. That's what we laugh at. And humor is a kind of science that will dwindle? No, I mean, but that is still going to be, yes, that's part of it. But there's still, as I say, there's still a lot of people who are very creative and are going to continue to be funny. They're just going to use whatever is going on around them. And it may be a lot more internet oriented than it used to be. But in the end, I don't think people's sense of humor has changed that much. It's sort of more the way it gets fed to us now. And say 20 years from now, do you think there will be more professional comedians in this country or fewer? I don't know.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably tougher to be really original, to sound really original than it used to be. But I think there's, you know, there's an awful lot of consumers as well, and there just seems to be this huge appetite for more funny. So I don't know that it's worse for, and in some ways it may be easier. Like if you are a kid who wants to get known as a comedian, you don't really have to anymore go the incredibly difficult route that most of the stand-up comedians I know went, which is starting out at Catch a Rising Star or someplace much worse than that. And doing all those stand-ups in front of three drunks and slowly getting noticed and finally getting hired by somebody, you can just go on the internet, make a funny video, and sometimes that will produce fantastic results for you. It's the half-life of a joke much shorter now. Yeah, for sure.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And David Chappell are still creating their own humor and it's still really funny. And it's them. It's not anybody else. It doesn't look like anybody else. So yeah, there's way, way more of it out there. And it's probably”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if there are billions of people out there and say each one is, you know, really funny once in their lifetime, and some of that gets captured on YouTube, and you have aggregators or filters as a professional comedian, you're competing against the funniest moment of each amateur, often unintentional. So do you think it's the case that professionals now, they become more like brands. So if I watch Stephen Colbert report, To me, it's funny. He's not as funny as that moment by Kelly. So he almost to me is a kind of watchman or he reassures me. And that's made the comedian somewhat, in a sense, deliberately not that funny. They play a different role. How do you see that? I don't know. I think that the real comedians, like Colbert, he's basically delivering jokes written by a staff of writers and curating whatever they got from the internet or presenting whatever they curated from the internet. But, you know, guys like Louis CK.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything happens so fast and everything builds on everything else so quickly and things become old almost instantaneously or become mutated so much instantaneously. It's really hard to keep up, which is why I don't really try that hard, to be honest. If I think of the humor I consume, I've realized today compared to when I was a kid how much of it is from amateurs. So there's some one-star reviews on Amazon that are actually hilarious. Twitter can be funny. It's very context dependent. Maybe you know this South Korean video of Robert Kelly, the man doing an interview. He's trying very hard not to be funny, and his two children barge into the room and they're removed by his wife. Truly, if you were to hire professional writers to write a scene and professional actors to act, you could not possibly have outdone that particular 30-second sequence. I mean, it was just so wonderful because it was real.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Radically changed the humor industry, especially for younger audiences which are much more oriented towards meme things that they see other people look at shorter things, shorter bits, things that require a lot of insight and knowledge, which everybody seems to have now thanks to the internet. And I mean, if I can extend it to not just YouTube, but Twitter and Instagram and Facebook.”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit Conversations with Tyler.com. Hello, I'm here today with Dave Barry, and we're going to talk about humor, Dave's life, and Dave's career. My first question about humor has to do with YouTube. So a lot of the funny things you have written rather than doing stand-up. And now there's YouTube as a kind of competitor to written humor. How has that changed what readers are looking for and what new constraints does that put on you? Well, the second part is easy. None for me. I'm too old to change, basically do what I always done. I do think YouTube and the internet in general have”
2017-08-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source