“… the pinnacle of hyenic humor, was the hyena, the classic hyena, that hit too far back while running, would circle madly, snapping and tearing at himself, until he pulled his own intestines out, and then stood there, jerking them out and eating them with relish. “‘Fisi,’ M’Cola would say and shake his head in delighted sorrow at there being such an awful beast” (Ernest Hemingway: Green Hills of Africa).
Despite being born in the relatively sane enclave of Armonk, New York, despite being raised there by a Presbyterian minister and his loving wife, despite graduating from Haverford College, Quaker alma mater of such respectable literary figures as Christopher Morley and Frank Conroy, Dave Barry has chosen to spend most of his adult life in Florida, writing mainly about that eminently disreputable state and its denizens. Like Carl Hiaasen, he spent much of his newspaper career with the Miami Herald.
Barry has written (in Best.State.Ever, 2016) that among other reasons he’s chosen to remain in his adopted state, it is “one of the least boring places on the planet.” For someone who makes a living writing humor columns, Florida’s plethora of bizarre, ludicrous and/or outrageous events would naturally be alluring. But Barry’s outlook on life probably wouldn’t have differed much had he stayed up in Armonk.
I probably risk Dave Barry’s ire when I suggest that he’s a comic writer who deserves serious admiration, but in the unlikely event that he ever runs across my suggestion and bothers to respond to it, his ire would probably be pretty funny, so what the hell. Here goes.
At various times, Barry has suggested that the essence of his humor depends on jokes about boogers or on his liberal use of the word “weasel.” Even if he’d only written his newspaper columns, this would be inaccurate. Those columns, many of them collected into book form over the course of Barry’s career, remain consistently funny and remarkably germane today. But toward the end of his long indenture to the 800-word column, he began to feel the need for larger canvases.
Big Trouble (1999) was his first longer effort, followed by Tricky Business (2002) and Insane City (2013). While all three are built on a classic comic formula – a cast of wildly disparate, initially unrelated characters is thrown together by some MacGuffin or other, complications proliferate, disaster is improbably averted by the actions of the protagonist. The protagonist in Barry’s novels is some iteration of the Lovable Loser, a decent, not terribly ambitious, barely middle-class fellow who rises to heroic action in defense of one or more characters, human or animal, even more powerless than he is.
His first three novels, in their plots and pacing, recall Frank Capra, Jacques Tati, George Cukor and Howard Hawks. A couple of scenes inTricky Business rival some of Tati’s finest car pile-ups, though it’s essentially a modern-day Miami version of Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre. (If Barry has ever written about any of those directors or their films, I haven’t found what he wrote, but he’d be far from the only writer influenced by film techniques. Ed McBain, Andrew Vachss and K.C. Constantine spring to mind as three other clear examples.) Lunatics, though, seems to owe the shape of its mad plot to an earlier inspiration, Voltaire’s Candide, and that book’s view of world politics, human nature, and the utter unlikelihood of successful revolution in the former or significant improvement in the latter led Voltaire to a conclusion similar to Barry’s.
None of that sounds particularly hilarious, but what plot analysis would? The hilarity in Barry’s novels arises from the apparently bottomless cornucopia of his imaginative ability to embroider those plots, and from his gift for dialog, a gift which would have been the envy of the Marx Brothers’ writers or of P.G. Wodehouse or Thorne Smith or just about any other comic writer I can think of. Barry has a pitch-perfect ear for a wide variety of American speech patterns, from PC cant to local TV news-anchor babble to urban black and hispanic speech to stoned flights of fancy, to name a few.
One example (from Insane City): The following exchange takes place in a hotel room occupied by the prospective best man at an impending wedding (Marty) and a guest at that same wedding (Wendell Corliss). The bride’s father has invited Corliss because he hopes to curry favor with him because he is one of the richest men in the world, so rich that he is referred to (even by himself) as “Wendell Fucking Corliss.” Marty has introduced Corliss to pot-infused brownies, and they have just finished a profligate room-service breakfast:
“Wendell nodded. ‘Is it just me,’ he said to Marty, ‘or does it seem like everybody’s cutting down on gluten?’
“‘It’s not just you,’ said Marty. ‘Five years ago, I never even heard of gluten. Then all of a sudden it’s the worst thing in the world. It’s the Nazi Party of food ingredients. People are scared to death of gluten. You could rob a bank with it. The bank people would be like, “Do whatever he says! He’s got gluten!”‘ Marty burped. ‘What the fuck is gluten, anyway?’
“‘It used to be trans fats,’ said Wendell.
“‘Gluten did?’ said Marty.
“‘What I mean,’ said Wendell, ‘is that it used to be you weren’t supposed to eat anything with trans fats. Or maybe you were supposed to eat things with trans fats. I don’t remember which. You never hear anybody talk about them anymore. They’re over.’
“‘ Like My Space,’ said Marty. ‘Or global warming.’
“‘Or Deepak Chopra.’
“‘Who?’
“‘Exactly.’
“‘What about carbs?’ said Marty.
“‘What about carbs?’ said Wendell.
“‘Are they still bad?’
“Wendell frowned. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘But not as bad as gluten. Or lactose! Lactose is evil. Lactose is death. Lactose is Glenn Close, in that movie where she stalks wharshisname.’
“‘Who?’
“‘Whatshisname. You know. She boils his daughter’s rabbit.’
“‘Who does?’
“‘Glenn Close.’
“‘Glenn Close boils a rabbit?’
“‘You never saw this movie?’
“No. Why did she do that?’
“‘She was in love with whatshisname.’
“‘So she boils a fucking rabbit?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘How?’
“‘How does she boil it?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘In a pot.’
“Marty thought about that. ‘Why doesn’t it jump out?’
“‘Of the pot? They don’t explain that.’
“‘That’s a plot flaw. I mean, a rabbit is not a lobster. You put a lobster in a pot, it stays in the pot. But a rabbit would definitely jump out.’
“‘Yes, but if she boiled a lobster, nobody would care. I mean, as a viewer you’d be thinking, Big deal, a lobster.’
“‘No, I understand that. It couldn’t be a lobster. But it could be a small dog.’
“‘Dogs can jump.’
“‘OK, maybe a chicken.’
“‘No, because there you have the lobster problem all over again. A chicken boiling in a pot, the viewer goes, Well, it’s only a chicken.’
“‘So you’re saying it has to have fur.’
“‘No, I’m not ruling out feathers entirely. For example, it could be a parrot, but it has to have some personality. Like earlier in the movie it says some comical words or phrases so the viewer gets to know it, and their reaction is, Oh no! Glenn Close boiled Polly!’
“Marty thought about that. ‘Why wouldn’t the parrot just fly out of the pot?'”
There you have a perfectly rendered snippet of one of those endless dope conversations you might recall but probably can’t: From the new anti-gluten obsession to the plausibility of boiling a parrot rather than whatshisnames’s daughter’s rabbit, with no end in sight.
It was a short step from his first three, dialog-heavy novels to taking on a 1st-person narrative voice, which Barry did in collaboration with television writer Alan Zweibel in Lunatics. Barry’s narrator is Jeffrey Peckerman, a “forensic plumber” and All-American troglodyte who views pretty much everyone else in the world with contempt and disgust. He sounds like this:
“I hate dance. Ballet, tap, that modern shit where they all look like crack addicts – I hate it all. I’m not saying dance is gay. It is gay, but that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is it’s boring. I had to watch a live ballet once, when Donna dragged me because her cousin’s daughter was in it, and it was the most boring thing I ever sat through, except the time I went to a NASCAR race and there was not one fucking crash.”
And this: “To be honest, I was wishing I picked another place to go into, but at that point I couldn’t pussy out. So I went to the phone and of course it wasn’t a real pay phone belonging to the phone company; it was some phone company I never heard of operated by some raghead in Bangladesh who wanted my credit card number and probably charged me eighty dollars to call Jersey.”
Barry handles Peckerman’s perpetually aggrieved, self-excusing, egocentric, bigoted voice effortlessly, and the contrast of that voice with the NPR prissiness of Horkman’s produces much of the book’s humor.
Peckerman and Horkman are carried off on their improbable careers as international terrorists/peace-makers by a series of small, personal conflicts that metastasize, largely due to the desperate credulity of the true believers they encounter, and the fuel for that credulity provided by the national news media and its penchant for painting the most banal accidents of everyday life into overblown, apocalyptic canvases. In this collaboration and his previous solo efforts, Barry has a wonderful time with his parodies of what has become of “journalism” in this century.
But if there’s one common thread running through Barry’s novels – and here I’m sure I can hear him coming for me, his nose for pretension quivering and his needles at the ready – it is the Biblical observation, radix malorum cupiditas est. The antagonists in each of the first three novels are set in motion by greed, which leads them all to varying degrees of disaster, sometimes comic, sometimes quite ghastly, generally both.
But if Barry, like Twain before him, is a secret moralist, he’s also a truly Christian one. Even his most minor characters are given lives of their own, and even the most essentially monstrous characters, like Tark in Risky Business, are not denied their humanity. Barry’s attitude toward human behavior is exactly like M’cola’s toward that suicidally snacking hyena: delighted sorrow. Throughout his career, Barry has manfully clung to the delight, and given it back generously to this gutshot world.
Photo credit: Orlando Weekly
