Talking with Dave Barry about “Lunatics”

Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, columnist and humorist who has written over thirty books.  His nationally syndicated column ran in the Miami Herald for over twenty years.  He won his Pulitzer “for his consistently effective use of humor as a device for presenting fresh insights into serious concerns.”  His latest book, Lunatics, is a collaborative effort with writer Alan Zweibel.  Dave was recently a guest on Unmasked, hosted by Ron Bennington.  Below are excerpts from that interview.

Dave Barry on Writing Humor vs Creating Standup:

Ron Bennington:I think you come at humor in a different way than a stand up comic because you don’t get to test your jokes out at all.

Dave Barry: Yeah, that’s one of the scarier things about writing humor and it’s also one of the good things about writing humor is that you don’t know if you’ve bombed until way later. But you do actually, I find, I write in a little room with my wife on the other side of the room. She’s a sports writer. So we were both all day on that computer. And I will sometimes go over and say read this and tell me it sucks because I know it sucks. Just tell me that and I’ll quit and I’ll sell insurance.  Because it sucks. And no talent left. And she always goes “No, I like it. You know you really like it.” “Yes? No, really.” And I can’t believe her because she’s my wife. But that is the extent of my testing. My market testing. There’s a dog there too, but…she pretty much whatever I say she likes. Because it could mean that we’re about to go for a walk.

Ron Bennington: You know what’s great though is that your career is at the point where you’re saying I’ve no talent left. But the thing to with a stand up comedian, he can hone that joke over 14, 15 nights till he’ll finally go “Okay, now I got it where I want it.” You never get that opportunity even if you’re bouncing it off one person.

Dave Barry: Right. And I don’t know if this is the equivalent of that, but when I write, I don’t write ever one joke real quick. To watch me build a sentence is painful. I get to where “Should it be a squirrel or a weasel?”  And it’s the third word. And it might take me an hour to make the squirrel – weasel decision. And then we get to later on “Should it be rutabaga or some other vegetable?” So it’s a very slow painful thing and by the end of it, I don’t know if at all if it’s funny. I know I really worked hard on it though. Spent as much honing as I can possibly do. So that if I give it to any editor and he doesn’t like it, I tell him he’s wrong. Because I spent way more time on that sentence than you did, writing it then you did reading it.

Dave Barry on His Working Style:

Ron Bennington: See most of us think that you write a half hour a day. You’re done. And you have a great life.

Dave Barry: This is the illusion.  And I do have a great life. Everyday I look out the window at people driving by in cars going to work. And I think “Thank God, I’m not one of those people.”  I have nowhere to go. And if I got there, I wouldn’t know what to do. I do spend hours and hours and hours cranking out very little material. It’s agonizingly slow. When I was writing weekly humor columns, I wanted it to look like it took a half an hour and I was drunk. But truth is, if I was drunk, it would be 45, 50 minutes sometimes. No, it would take me, sometimes a couple of days to write a column because I’m just a slow writer.

Ron Bennington: But it does always kind of feel like a conversation.

Dave Barry: It’s suppose to. Well there’s an old saying in writing, it’s “Write hard. Read easy. Write easy. Read hard.” If you don’t but the effort into writing it, it will show in the reading of it. And I find it to be really true with humor writing. It has to be really tight. You can’t misplace the punch line. The timing matters in writing maybe the same way as in stand up, but it really matters. Timing a sentence, I’ve over the years gotten tons and tons, way more than I ever want, of writing from people who want to be humor writers. And most of it’s terrible. And the reason is because they didn’t spend a lot of time writing it. They just thought of a funny idea. Kind of threw it down. And it might be potentially funny somewhere in there, but it won’t read that funny because they didn’t really figure out how to time it.

Ron Bennington: The other interesting thing is a lot of comics have…

Dave Barry: I’m glad you stopped me in that.because I didn’t know where I was going with that sentence. Thank you.

Ron Bennington: I am not going to let you drown this early. I’m going to stay with you.

Dave Barry on his New Book Lunatics:

Ron Bennington: Well the interesting thing, your book “Lunatics” that you have out now, you’re not writing in your Dave Barry voice at all, so as a reader you’ve got to find the character voice for yourself.

Dave Barry: Yeah. And it’s gonna confuse some people, I think. This is a fictional character. What happened is Alan Zweibel, who I believe you’ve had on this show…

Ron Bennington: Yes, I did.

Dave Barry: ….and I wrote this book and each of us writes a character. His character is sort of like him and is like a really nice loveable kind of a good-natured goofy guy. My character is a complete asshole. Beginning to end, is just a horrible human being. I don’t think that that’s really me. I was looking for a contrast to Alan’s character. He sent me the first chapter of this wonderful guy and I thought this book’s gotta have some edge to it. I’m gonna be this just complete jerk. So, I write in that voice of this jerk. Like well, when he tells a joke, this guy, my character, it isn’t a joke I would ever tell. But it’s what I think a guy like that would think is funny. So, that’s the difference.

Ron Bennington: Was that more fun for you? To write from that place?

Dave Barry: Absolutely. I think Alan had a harder time because my guy could always be relied on to do something just really stupid and wrong. Alan kind of had to figure out how he could make his guy funny without doing a lot of stupid wrong things because he’s a nice man.

Ron Bennington: The funny thing about it is, it’s such, you write a chapter, you send a chapter to him, he writes a chapter. It seems like the worst idea you could possibly do to finish a book. 

Dave Barry: It could go very very wrong. Very very wrong. Yeah, we called it “improvisational novel writing”. But in this case, he just sent it to me, I’d send something back. And we’re just basically trying to top each other and make the other guy laugh. And at some point, like I don’t know, a third of the way through, half way through, we had sold it to a publisher, so then there’s like actual money involved and I’m saying to Alan “Do you think we should have a plot?” He’s going “Maybe we should have a plot.” So we met in here New York. I was up here for something. And we went to dinner. And I really thought at the dinner, we were going to discuss the plot. We sit down. We order some drinks and there was some basketball game on, so we were looking at the basketball game. Three or four drinks later, dinner’s over and everything and we never really talked about the plot. So like at the end of the evening, we said “We need a plot” and then we went home.

Ron Bennington: The book, it reminds me of Terry Southern’s early stuff because it just keeps getting crazier. Like oh okay, this is the crazy part of the book so now we’ll come back to it.

Dave Barry: Clearly early on, these guys, can I just summarize? The book is like it’s two soccer dads. They’re suburban dads. Their kids are playing soccer. And one of them is a referee. That’s the character that Alan wrote, Philip Horkman and the other one’s the father of one of the girls. That’s my character, Jeffrey Peckerman. And Horkman, the referee, calls offsides on Peckerman’s daughter and Peckerman of course, being an asshole, is outraged. The end of the match, it happened to be the key call of the game, and at the end there’s a little confrontation. And as Alan writes in his first chapter, it’s a beautiful day, this one guy was a little annoyed by a call, but other than that, a wonderful day. And my guy being such a, “I wanna kill him”. So we have these two guys, they don’t like each other, they have this little confrontation after a soccer game, but they don’t expect to ever see each other again. And a series of events occurs, fairly quickly, so that within 2 days, these men have accidentally, without intending to, hijacked a clothing optional cruise ship. And that is really the very beginning of things. That is by no means the worst thing that happens to these men.

Ron Bennington: And every chapter just keeps popping over. And you’re like, well you guys really were in a shootout this whole time of who can take it to the weird place?

Dave Barry: Yeah. Like Alan said, you get the chapter and you go “Ohhhh”. “Okay Mr. Funny Man. Then you deal with this!”  Kind of like revenge was more the motive than plotting really in a way.

Dave Barry on Alan Zweibel:

Dave Barry: Like today, we did one of these TV satellite tours. Where you sit in a room like this and you’re each sitting there and have thing in your ear and a microphone plugged in and a camera in front of you. And they go “Now we’re going to Indianapolis, you’ll be talking to Toby and Tammy”. You do 3 minutes with them. “And now we’re going to San Antonio and you’ll be talking to Bobby and Billy”. And you just go around the country like that. And you do it like for 3 hours, you’re sitting in this room. And they had behind us, the cover of our book, it’s the biggest thing. We’re looking at ourselves on this monitor the whole time. After like about the tenth show, Zweibel goes “I have an enormous head”. He goes, “Look at my head compared to your head”. I gotta say, on the screen, it looked like his head was twice as big. I said “Well, do you think maybe my head is just small?” He goes “No, no, your head is normal.” And it happens that the book, this is radio, but I’ll show the audience here, it has the title of the book “Lunatics” vertically printed. And he’s going “Like look, my head starts at the ‘U’ and goes all the way up to like the ‘C’ and your head is just like the ‘N-A-T’ “.  And that’s who he is. But he’s kind of like that about writing too. He’s insecure. I am so used to, like when I finish something I think okay, it may not be the greatest thing I ever wrote, but it’s funny, it’s good. Nobody’s gonna mess with this. This is good. And he is like, when we were writing this book, every like other sentence, he would send it to Billy Crystal.  He would say “Billy, what do you think of this?” “Billy likes that sentence”.  And I’m not in that world, I don’t send anything to anybody ever until it’s done. And we’re like, we’ve written 3 chapters and he goes “Steve Carell’s people love it”   I’m like “Wait. What do you mean they love it?” They love it? We don’t even know what it is yet.

Ron Bennington: He’s constantly checking in to see if he’s okay.

Dave Barry: Part of his charm is that he’s just terminally insecure.  And unhappy. He’s just extremely Jewish. He’s beyond Jewish. Whatever like that would be.

Ron Bennington: How did you two hook up together? How’d you become friends?

Dave Barry: Well it was through Steve Martin. In 2005, he got the Mark Twain Award, it was this big award in DC. And he asked me to be one of the presenters. And one of the others was Larry David. And Larry David asked Alan to write his speech. And so, the deal was that Larry David would go if Alan could go too. So I met him hanging around the green room and the hotel bar and stuff like that. And we liked each other. We hit it off. We saw each other at a couple more book events. And he kept saying, and this again the very collaborative, “We should do something together. We should do something together.” And I would think, “Do what? Do what together?”  You could come and like help me type? What? But he meant, he didn’t know what, he just thought we should, he liked the idea. And then he came up with this idea for the book because we had a conversation once about soccer. Because my daughter plays in soccer leagues. And I was talking about what assholes the parents were. And that’s where he came up with this first chapter that he sent me.

Dave Barry on working with Hollywood and Selling Lunatics:

Ron Bennington: You’ve already sold this [Lunatics] to Hollywood, right?

Dave Barry: Yeah. Again Alan Zweibel. It’s really funny. He’s so plugged in. He knows everybody. You know, like everybody he knows. And he got Steve Carell’s production company, he’s doing something else with them, whatever, but before we had finished the book, he had them wanting to buy it. And so we ended up with some sort of movie deal before the book actually got published, we started having these conversations. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been in these conversations with people in Los Angeles about movies? But the first thing they want to do is change everything.  Like this is going to end up being about horse in World War I.  Before we’re done with it. And they want you have character arcs and all this. And fortunately, Alan can do that. Talk to those people. So we have these conference calls where I say almost nothing. I go “Hey, good.” And then that’s “Fine. Good to hear you”. And then Alan talks to them. And when it’s over, I call him up and say “What do we have to do?” He goes “Nothing. Don’t worry about it”.

Ron Bennington: He’s good in the room. He knows how to really say this is all going great. “I love what you’re saying. I’m going to hand you back the same exact work”.

Dave Barry: He’s made it clear that we have to be complete whores about this. We have to change whatever they want. Because they bought it. I get that. I’m with that.

Ron Bennington: So, is the hope that Carell’s gonna do one of the parts?

Dave Barry: He is, as we say, I know learned, “attached”.

Ron Bennington: Alright, he’s attached. Is anyone else?

Dave Barry: Alan and I are attached to write the screenplay. But he’s gonna write it because I don’t know how to do that. I don’t even have the computer program that does that.

Ron Bennington: To write the script right?

Dave Barry: Yeah, you have to indent a certain way. Or they throw you out. No. Indent. You laugh. You try the wrong indenting in your script writing, they’ll know. Rookie.

Dave Barry on Celebrities Who Drink on TV:

Dave Barry: People don’t get on TV drunk enough the way they used to.

Ron Bennington: No, no, it used to be great.

Dave Barry: Pat Sajack. Nobody remembers this, but Pat Sajak, in I believe the 90s had a show, briefly had, it was part of his deal I think, so successful with “Wheel of Fortune”. He had a talk show.

Ron Bennington: Pre-Letterman. It was right before Letterman.

Dave Barry: And he’s actually a pretty funny guy, Pat Sajak. And I think I’m the only person who was ever on that show twice. Because he was only on the air for like 2 nights, really. And it was kind of like a show that was just getting its footing so they couldn’t get like a lot of A-list people. I mean they had people like me. So I’m out there and the main guest when I was there was David Carradine. And so I’m there and back in the green room. And David Carradine shows up hammered. Really, just staggering hammered coming into the green room. And proceeds to start drinking more. And I’m standing there with the producer of my segment and she’s going over what I’m going..and she’s looking more and more concerned. Anyway, the show starts and she says “Do you mind? I’m just gonna follow David Carradine and make sure he gets out there okay”. And Sajak’s doing his monologue and everything. And I kind of follow her. And Carradine’s kind of standing there weaving back and forth. And then the producer and me. And he says “Here he is! David Carradine!” Applause, applause. And then he takes like 3 steps and falls down. On stage, he fell right down. And I can see Sajak’s face like…and the audience of course roars, they figure this is all part of the schtick.

Ron Bennington: Yeah. The slapstick of David Carradine.

Dave Barry: Who was famous for it. And then he gets up. And he kind of staggers over to the set and the producer grabs and goes “Your segment’s gonna go really long tonight”. So Carradine does, they just kind of do like this really random raving interview and it goes like 4 minutes in and Sajak says “Well it’s been great having you”. And Carradine goes “What? This is it? I flew all the way here from Montana!” Or something like that. “Thank you! Thank you ladies and gentlemen! David Carradine!” And they get him off. And I did do like a half an hour. Sajak’s asking me state capitals. We ran out of everything. But there used to be more of that.

Ron Bennington: Yeah. There was.

Dave Barry: There used to be shows where people were drinking and smoking on the air. Real alcohol and real cigarettes.

Ron Bennington: The Dick Cavett Show. Norman Mailer would come out and be ready to fist fight. But you know, Carradine, and who thought there’d be two David Carradine stories on the same show? But there was an amazing Tonight Show that he did when George Carlin was hosting. And Carradine, for some reason, had just written everything on his arm that he wanted to plug.

Dave Barry: Don’t make me…Wait till I’ve swallowed my soda before you…

Ron Bennington: He’s like sitting in the lotus position and he’s reading things off. And then finally, Carlin just grabs his arm and just starts “Here, I’ll do it”.   Starts to read his arm back to him. It’s stunning. (Dave Barry laughs) But yeah, you just won’t see people…

Dave Barry Talks About the Famous Cover of the Herald:

Dave Barry: Well, I thought it was a mistake at the time. But Gene was the one who made me do it. What happened was, this is when the Miami Heat had first formed and they had been in existence for about a year, and then Orlando was starting a basketball team called the Orlando Magic. And we thought it would be fun if I went up to write, since neither team was ever going to be able to beat another real team in the NBA, this is when they were horrible. We thought we would start a rivalry in the state of Florida between Orlando and Miami. There’s a natural rivalry anyway between those two cities. So I went up and wrote this vicious attack on Orlando. And the cover that Gene talked me into doing, I’m spinning a basketball on a finger. Guess which finger? And that somehow, Gene talked the editor, I was sure when they did the photo shoot that it would never see print. I’m giving the finger in a family newspaper, but somehow he talked the editor Jan Chusmir and no, it was not Gene, it was Janet who said that was the biggest mistake she ever made. Gene will never regret something like that. That’s Gene’s proudest moment.

Ron Bennington: It’s kind of interesting too that you even think vicious attack on Orlando. What have they ever done?

Dave Barry: I believe I said something along the lines of it’s nothing personal against the low forehead nose picking yahoos.

Ron Bennington: You know Florida is in the news more and more.

Dave Barry: More? It’s always in the news. It’s never out of the news. It’s the strangest place on the planet.

Ron Bennington: What brings that there? What happens?

Dave Barry: You can sort of explain some of it. There’s like people from all over the country come there. And there’s a lot of tourists there. But it’s hard to explain how just weird Florida gets. In Miami, I could pick many. I’ll gonna give you one. I just can’t imagine this happening in a real city. These two guys are fishing in Biscayne Bay right in the middle of Miami, downtown. They catch a 6 foot nurse shark. These are two homeless guys. They catch this big shark and they decide they’re gonna sell it. They need some money, they’re gonna sell it to a fish wholesaler over by the Miami River which is across Miami. They don’t have a vehicle. So they decide to take public transportation.  We have a thing in Miami, it’s called the People Mover. It’s like this unmanned cars that move around the downtown. You go up in an escalator and get on. And they got on the People Mover with a shark and it’s not dead. It’s still alive. This shark is still alive. And I found out about this, a reader sent me an email at the Herald, it said “I’m on the People Mover and there’s guys on here with a shark and it’s not dead. It’s breathing”. And she sent me this picture. And we had a situation where people, commuters could have been bitten by a shark.  Now tragically, nobody was bitten because that would have been the best story in the history of the world. And then they took the shark and nobody would buy it because the Herald did a story the next day. So they left it on a street in downtown Miami. There’s a shark there. And they quoted some shop owner who was coming to work and he goes “I saw it there and at first I was really concerned because I thought it was a body. So I was really relieved to see it was a shark”  There’s this shark downtown. And that’s Miami. That’s the city I live in.

Ron Bennington: And then people wonder where he gets his material from.

Dave Barry: Exactly.

Ron Bennington: The name of the book, aptly titled Lunatics. Dave Barry everybody. Thanks so much.

Dave Barry: Thank you. Thank you man. You’re fantastic.

=================================================

This interview can be heard in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.  Not a subscriber yet?  Click here for a free trial subscription.

Get more information on Dave Barry at his website,  or his twitter account @rayadverb.

Order Lunatics from Amazon by clicking on the link below.

***