Dave Barry - Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up

Mr. Barry is the funniest man in America and we should encourage him.

The New York Times Book Review

Truth may or may not be stranger than fiction, but in Dave Barrys hands, it sure is funnier.

Roanoke Times & World-News

Barry goes directly to the funny bone and tickles readers something hilarious with outrageous, near-senseless tales about exploding Pop-Tarts and the worlds fastest lawn mower.

The Gazette (Montreal)

Barrys light-hearted, Everyman humor and what-me-worry grin have evoked comparisons with Mark Twain and Will Rogers, and earned him the Washington Post designation of Americas Humorist.

San Francisco Examiner

Barry is in top form.

Publishers Weekly

People often say to me: Dave, you are a leading journalism professional and not as short as I expected. What is your secret of success?

The answer is that, throughout my career, I have always kept one vital journalistic principle foremost in my mind: Try not to leave the house. A journalist who leaves his or her house can run into all kinds of obstacles, including:

• Editors.

• Members of the public.

• News events involving actual facts.

All of these obstacles can seriously interfere with the basic work of journalism, which is sitting around and thinking stuff up. This is what I mainly do, which is why I have been able to achieve a level of high-quality journalistic productivity, as measured in booger jokes, that a guy like David Broder can only dream about.

Nevertheless, every now and then a situation will come up wherein a story of major importance is breaking somewhere other than in my office, and I have no choice but to go and cover it. For example, in this book you will find a column concerning an incident in 1992 when I left my house and traveled, without regard for my personal convenience or safety, all the way to my yard, to see the Worlds Fastest Lawn Mower. Thats the kind of dedicated professional I am.

The result is that this book contains a number of columns based on real events. There are also some longer articles, most of which originally appeared in the Miami Heralds Sunday magazine, Tropic; these also contain an unusually high (for me) level of factual content. Thats why this book is called Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up.

I want to stress, however, that this title does not mean that this is a serious book. This book also contains a lot of tongue-in-cheek social commentary and satire, by which I mean lies. I hope you dont find this mixture of fact and fiction to be confusing. If, in reading the following pages, you are uncertain as to whether a specific statement is meant seriously or not, simply apply this rule of thumb: If the statement makes you consider filing a lawsuit, I was kidding. Ha ha!

In an effort to boost up sales, we were going to call it Rush Limbaugh Is Not Making This Up, but there was some kind of legal problem.

READER ALERT

The following section, which is mostly about family stuff, contains the article that pretty much launched my writing career: the story of my sons natural birth. When I wrote it back in 1981, Beth and I were living in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, and I had a job teaching effective business-writing seminars. I wrote the article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and it got reprinted in many other newspapers, including the Miami Herald, which ended up hiring me. So in a way you could say that I owe my job to my son. Although if you consider the amount of money I wound up spending just on He-Man action figures, I have more than paid him back.

This could be why we got so far behind Japan.

Its getting late on a school night, but Im not letting my son go to bed yet, because theres serious work to be done.

Robert! Im saying, in a firm voice. Come to the kitchen right now and blow-dry the ant!

We have a large ant, about the size of a mature raccoon, standing on our kitchen counter. In fact, it looks kind of like a raccoon, or possibly even a mutant lobster. We made the ant out of papier-mch, a substance you create by mixing flour and water and newspapers together into a slimy goop that drips down and gets licked up by your dogs, who operate on the wise survival principle that you should immediately eat everything that falls onto the kitchen floor, because if it turns out not to be food, you can always throw it up later.

The ant, needless to say, is part of a Science Fair project. We need a big ant to illustrate an important scientific concept, the same concept that is illustrated by all Science Fair projects, namely: Look! I did a Science Fair project!

(I know how we can solve our national crisis in educational funding: Whenever the schools needed money, they could send a letter to all the parents saying: Give us a contribution right now, or were going to hold a Science Fair. Theyd raise billions.)

Our Science Fair project is due tomorrow, but the ant is still wet, so were using a hair dryer on it. Science Fair judges hate a wet ant. Another problem is that our ant is starting to sag, both in the front (or, in entomological terms, the prognosis) and in the rear (or butt). It doesnt look like one of those alert, businesslike, can-do ants that you see striding briskly around. It looks depressed, like an ant that has just been informed that all 86,932 members of its immediate family were crushed while attempting to lift a Tootsie Roll.

While Robert is drying the ant, I get a flashlight and go outside to examine the experiment portion of our project, which is entitled Ants and Junk Food. On our back fence we put up a banner that says, in eight-inch-high letters, WELCOME ANTS . Under this is a piece of cardboard with the following snack substances scientifically arranged on it: potato chips, a spicy beef stick, a doughnut, a Snickers candy bar, chocolate-filled cookies, Cheez Doodles, Cocoa Krispies, and Screaming Yellow Zonkers. If you were to eat this entire experiment, you would turn into a giant pimple and explode.