Story: Dave Barry collects some of his newspaper columns to form a “100% Fact Free Book.”
Review: In a way, “Dave Barry’s Bad Habits” is the reason my own website exists. When I read it in 1989, my career ambition began to shift toward journalism, and while like many other plans that one has since been relegated to the scrap heap, the skills and interests I developed while pursuing it have been funneled into Not News. So clearly I think this is a fine book. While it probably won’t cause you to go home and rethink your life, you should get a lot of chuckles and a few belly laughs out of the book.
This is the earliest collection of Barry’s work, with essays written in the early-to-mid 1980s. As such, the topical humor is a bit dated, including some references to the Carter Administration and the eighteen cent stamp. The references aren’t off-putting, however, and in some cases it seems like America has come full-circle, so that the issues Barry satirized are just as germane today. (“Deep in their souls, [stock traders] realize they are participating in an enormous hoax that could collapse at any moment, so any event, no matter how trivial, caused them to panic.”) There’s also a much broader selection of topics than one finds in later Barry collections; while Barry has always drawn much of his material from personal experience, including several columns in this book about his newborn son Robert, there are a great many columns satirizing contemporary news and culture, including the educational system, the media, the arts, and politics. It’s a nice mix.
The writing and satire are also very sharp here. Barry’s keen eye for the absurd is on full display, and he’s one of the best at using exaggeration to full comic effect. He can get a run-on sentence going full steam, gathering momentum, and keep it well enough under control that it all hangs together as a coherent – and very funny – thought. Not that grammarians are Barry’s target audience. (“I can not overemphasize the importance of good grammar. What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say ‘Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America.'”) In this book, he hasn’t yet adopted his Hapless Aging Baby Boomer Befuddled by World persona; he’s much more of a know-it-all smart aleck, which ultimately I find funnier. And the broader range of topics lets Barry’s intellect shine through – this is a pretty smart guy, and the absurdities he highlights are the kind of thing where the ideal response is to laugh and then scratch your head and say, “Yeah, why do we do it that way?” And ultimately, that’s the point of satire, and why Bad Habits is such a fine book.
Year: 1993
Author: dave Barry
Publisher: Henry Holt
Pages: 292