A 41-year-old Miami Herald writer and author of the soon-to-be-notorious book Dave Barry Slept Here assaults the truth regularly through his weekly column, which appears in more than 150 helpless newspapers.
Q. The subtitle of your book is A Sort of History of the United States, but some people will find it sort of upsetting. You say that the First Amendment guarantees the right of religious groups, "no matter how small or unpopular, to hassle you in airports." You explain that radio works "by means of long invisible pieces of electricity (called 'static') shooting through the air until they strike your speaker and break into individual units of sound ('notes') small enough to fit inside your ear." Why are you trashing history and science?
A. I guess because high school textbooks stink. Also, we are constantly told + that American students are even stupider than we thought. So I'm just dumping on the whole idea that we need to make our kids smarter, by putting out a book that will clearly not do that.
Q. Would it be ungracious to suggest that your humor is a trifle sophomoric?
A. Yes. Anyway, I like sophomoric humor. Sophomoric is often used as a pejorative term, but I myself remember laughing pretty hard as a sophomore.
Q. Your writing shows an extraordinary gift for metaphor.
A. Really? No one's ever accused me of that.
Q. Well, your imagery is rather startling.
A. You're easily amused. I can see that.
Q. I quote: "The United States tried, by depressing the clutch of diplomacy and downshifting the gearshift lever of rhetoric, to remain neutral." Also: In 1929 the nation's economy "was revealed to be merely a paper tiger with feet of clay living in a straw house of cards that had cried 'wolf' once too often."
A. Yeah. Well, I see a lot of manuscripts written by people who are hilariously inept with literary devices, because they try so hard to be ept.
Q. The dust jacket of your new book says that the Pulitzer committee "must have been drunk out of their minds" when they gave you the prize. What ever do you think possessed the Pulitzer jury to give you a prize?
A. Let's be honest. Nothing I've ever written fits the definition "distinguished commentary." But I can explain. The Pulitzer is judged by people who are undergoing two extremely stressful things at the same time. One, they're in New York City; and two, they're reading Pulitzer Prize entries, which are often written for the purpose of winning Pulitzer Prizes. Whole forests could be saved if we didn't actually put these in the newspaper and just sent them straight to the Pulitzer jurists instead. So these people have to read hundreds of heavy, huge entries, every one of them earthshakingly important. And that makes them really hostile toward journalism in general. Then they have to go out into the streets of New York and get into the subway at rush hour both ways. One of my entries was a vicious and unfair attack on New York City, and the other was a vicious and unfair attack on the Pulitzer Prizes. So they gave me the prize for distinguished commentary. People often confuse it with the Nobel Prize. Not that I'm giving it back.
Q. More's the pity. I see that you write many unkind things about well-known personalities -- Nixon, Carter, Reagan, especially Geraldo Rivera. Why do you keep picking on Geraldo?