bargainsleuth 's review for:

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass—How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up by Dave Barry, Dave Barry

4.5

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Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the digital copy of this book; I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Back in the old days (1980s and 1990s), I used to read the newspaper. And one of my favorite syndicated columnists was Dave Barry. I was so pleased to see he wrote a sort-of memoir. And his humor is still intact! This is a light-hearted, self-deprecating look back on his life and work, but not an official “memoir” in the strictest sense.

Barry recounts his life as a journalist and columnist for the Miami Herald, starting at a relatively young age. Some of his writing will make you laugh out loud, he’s that good, and it shows how he maintained the role of columnist for 30 years. He was syndicated in 500 newspapers at his peak.

The author’s personal life is not all sunshine and full of laughs, though. His clergy father was an alcoholic, and later on, his mother committed suicide. As a child of an alcoholic, I, too, always chose laughter because things were not so great at home. The originality and rawness of his feelings in the first chapter alone is worth the price of admission.

For the rest of the book, Barry recounts some of his favorite columns and expands on them, telling us why they were some of his favorites and quoting from them. It brings me back in time when newspapers were so important to communities, when columnists like Dave Barry and Erma Bombeck were part of the fabric of newspapers across the country, providing respite from the doom and gloom from the front page.

The coolest thing about Dave Barry is that he is in a band with other authors, the most famous of them being Stephen King. A bunch of Boomer authors unwind by playing music together. How cool is that?

This book gets an extra star from me for the pure nostalgia.