Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-Winning syndicated columnist and humorist based in the Miami Herald. This particular collection of 72 of his columns, published in 2000, was recommended in the Humor Section of The Ultimate Reading List. That's why I tried this--I'm not really a fan of joke or humor books in general, and this didn't do much to change that. Barry is funny. I did often grin madly and quietly snicker, and it takes a lot to get even that much of rise out of me from a book, and it happened in column after column. I guess the reason I don't rate this higher is that I can't see this as a keeper I'd want to read again and again. As he says himself, his columns are limited to 800 words, and being newspaper columns are very topical--so topical they don't always age well. These were published in the 1990s and there's lots of mentions of trivia of the day from The Blair Witch Project to--I am not making this up--those damn non-flushing toilets (TM). Several on that subject in fact from "The Toilet Police," "Smuggler's Blues," "Head to Head" and "And Don't Forget Tassels for All the Generals." I did from those get a novel insult for my Canadian friends, "maple breath" and Barry was often dead on about the gender wars. From "Rubber-Band Man" about a man flying a plane propelled by a giant rubber band and the contrasting reactions:
Male Reaction: "Cool!"
Female Reaction: "Why?"
I think Barry speaks for my entire female gender there. And the illustrations can be as witty as the essays. See the one to "Eye of the Beholder" on public avant garde art. So, likable, fun collection, even if it never quite got me to let loose with loud guffaws such as, say Bill Bryson's From a Sunburned Country or Pratchett and Gaiman's Good Omens.
