In 'Class Clown,' humorist Dave Barry embraces both the funny and hard parts of life
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. It's almost a cliche at this point that the funniest people are the saddest. That humor can be a shield, a crutch, and a bomb for people really going through the worst that life has to offer.

humorous dave barry is no exception the author and columnist is out with a new memoir titled class clown it's about his life growing up his dad was a presbyterian minister and an alcoholic and his mom well his mom was the funny one and as he tells npr scott simon barry's mom was going through it herself that's ahead

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Now I went 77 years without growing up. Dave Barry wrote a syndicated humor column for 22 years. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. And like his many books, Class Clown is funny. And that makes some of the recollections that are darkest and probably hardest stand out. And we will alert you that there may be mention of suicide. Dave Barry joins us now from Coral Gables, Florida. Dave, thanks so much for being with us. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Class Clown, that's an official title you were bestowed once, wasn't it? I actually won the title, well, the male title. It was male and female back then. Class Clown, Pleasantville High School, Pleasantville, New York, class of 1965. It was a fair election, too. No matter what you hear, no matter what people say. We've got complaints, as you can imagine. We hear from them every week. Some people have never accepted that. How did you learn you could make people laugh?

Well, you want to say that it's natural, that some people are funny, some people are not. But I really had a pretty good mentor in my mom. Both my parents were funny people.

My mom was different. She was very, very dark. She, in fact, had a depressive personality of which she battled all her life. But she was really, really edgy and really, really funny in a way that made her quite different from anybody else I knew, especially any mom I knew back in the 50s when she was raising us four kids. So in our house...

The sort of the rule was that you could make fun of everything. And in fact, you should, you should never take anything too seriously. And above all, you should never take yourself too seriously. Yeah. Could you tell us about the fruitcake? Yes, I will. Every year in our house, a little house in Armach, New York, we would get from a neighbor, a fruitcake as a, as a, as a Christmas gift.

And we hated it. And so my mom and I developed a tradition, which is the fruitcake would come and she'd say, oh, Davey, the fruitcake is here. And I'd go, oh, hurrah. I hope we don't leave it in the doorway again. And mom would open the kitchen door and put the fruitcake down. And then she'd go, I'm feeling a draft. I had best close the door. And

And she would slam the door on the fruitcake. And then we would lament that the fruitcake was no longer edible and we would have to throw it away. And we did that every year. And it was my favorite Christmas tradition. Maybe still is. Your father, Presbyterian minister, he ran a, I guess we'd call it a relief society in New York. You call him the best man you ever knew. People would call him at home for help. Yeah. My dad was just a naturally sympathetic person. Great listener, great,

non-judgmental guy. And he didn't have a congregation. He ran a social work agency called the New York City Mission Society in New York City. He was very active in anti-poverty work and civil rights movement. But people just trusted my dad, loved my dad, and would come to him all hours of the day, night. He would be on the phone all the time and counseling people, helping people. He was just a good person.

Your father developed a problem at some point, didn't he? Yes. My dad, he fell deeply into alcoholism in his late 40s, early 50s, and it got worse and worse. And he was so loved that people kind of propped him up, but it just got bad. And ultimately, it got so bad that he bottomed out, which was fortunate for him. And in his late 50s, he got into Alcoholics Anonymous, which

And because he was the kind of guy he was, he didn't just go through the program and recover and he never drank again. But he became extremely active in AA and helped set up AA programs in New York City, the New York State prison system. He ended up turning, as he so often did, a rough thing into a good thing. And your mother, this sharp, funny, profane and creative woman.

Went into a tailspin, didn't she? She did. After my dad died, she'd always fought with depression. We always knew that. There would be days when she was just really barely there. And there were several rough years there where she basically bounced around the country between me and my two brothers looking for a place to live.

And ultimately, she committed suicide, which came as a shock when it happened, but not really a surprise. I went through this phase. I think a lot of people when they're there, you know, I was in my 40s. I was, you know, I was a father. I had a career. My mom was getting older. And you get through this phase where you think you know more than your parents. I thought I knew what mom needed to do. I would tell her, Mom, you got to snap out of this. You got to pick a place to live. Make friends. You've got friends.

And I was an idiot. I mean, I didn't know what she was going through and still feel guilty about that. That, you know, when she was really struggling, I was telling her what to do instead of maybe listening more to what she was dealing with. Not that I don't know that it would have stopped it, but it might have. Dave, look, I say this as someone, suicide is running our family too. I think your mother didn't want to trouble you.

Yeah, that is so true. She was the depression-era mom who never wanted to be a burden to anybody. And in fact, before she took her life, she sent birthday cards to all of us telling us how much she loved us. And it wasn't our birthdays. Why didn't I see that signal? But you're absolutely right. She didn't want to be a burden. And that was her way of relieving us of that. Let me also ask about... We're making this book sound pretty fun, huh, Scott?

Well, but you know it is, and this is life. Yeah, yeah. And I didn't want to skip over where I came from. People always ask you, where do you get your ideas? And I wanted to go into it. Well, part of where I got them was my childhood, which was actually a wonderful childhood. But it had this element.

How does it feel to have a sewage pumping station named after you? It's a great honor. And I mean, you can't, I know you talk to a lot of writers, a lot of great writers, but how many of them do have a sewage lifting station named after them? I do. I do.

I wrote a column making fun of North Dakota, which is a mistake I will never make again. Now that you're part of it, but yeah, go ahead. Yeah, no, I got invited to Grand Forks, North Dakota in January when it was like 40 below zero and they dedicated a sewage lifting station in my honor. And it's still there. You can go there and see Dave Barry lift station number, I think it's number 16, something like that.

Every now and then, it's quite infrequent, but I will get a picture someone took standing in front of my lift station in Grand Forks, North Dakota. You do have some concerns about what's happening to humor these days. Yeah, I do. And this is maybe just old guy things. I'm 77, and when I got started in the humor biz, the big humorists were people like Russell Baker or Art Buchwald, Johnny Carson on TV.

And there was a certain generosity of spirit about it. People made fun of everything. You know, whoever was the president, you made fun of that person. And Carson made fun of everybody who just laughed and went on with it. And the people he was making fun of laughed with him half the time. And I'm not going to put blame on anybody in particular, okay? But I am going to say we just aren't there anymore. Now you kind of have to pick a side in humor. And if you make fun of one side, the other side will hate you. And you're evil and stupid.

And vice versa. But it's sad to me that we can't laugh together the way we used to laugh together. Maybe that's very naive to say. I guess it sounds that way. But I still find it sad. Dave Barry, this new memoir, Class Clown. Thank you so much for being with us. It was my pleasure. Always is. Thank you for listening today. And for anybody in crisis, you can call or text 988 for the Suicide in Crisis Lifeline.

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