★★★★★ Tactical Assault Clown

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

Dave Barry

There is one living human who can write prose that makes me laugh so hard I can't breathe. That person is Tactical Assault Clown Dave Barry. Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass—How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up had that effect on me at least twice -- an automatic five-star rating. ("Tactical Assault Clown" is right up there with "Combat Epistemologist" (The Jennifer Morgue) on my list of creative military specializations. And if you're one of those people who get their knickers all in a twist when someone uses parens inside of parens, you know what you can do about it.) (Yes, I know I'm not funny.)

It's not all ROFL funny. In fact, he tells about his father's alcoholism (that story has a happy ending) and his mother's suicide (that one obviously does not). Later in the book he tries to convince us that his real life is nothing like the wacky sitcom life of the main character of Dave's World.

My real life was nothing like that. My real life, at that time, consisted of sitting in a room with two dogs and zero other humans, hour after hour, day after day, staring at a computer screen and thinking: This is not funny.*

Although I believe him, this book does a poor job of conveying that message. The message is undermined by the Tactical Assault Clown parts of his story.

For many years Barry worked as a columnist at the Miami Herald. The Herald not infrequently sent him out into the field to do Real Honest-to-God News Reporting. And he had experiences that were quite unlike staring at a computer screen and thinking: This is not funny. For instance, he played in a rock band called the Rock-Bottom Remainders whose musicians (using the word loosely) are authors, and in that role he once sang lead to Bruce Springsteen's backing vocals. While some of his columns are pure invention, some are not. In fact, "I am not making this up," became a tag phrase of his (Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up), and as far as I can tell he was always honest when he wrote it.

Of course, he is 77 years old, and that is plenty of time both to rack up a score as history's most effective Tactical Assault Clown, and to spend many hours staring bleakly at computer screens.

Class Clown is a short book, and much of it is excerpts from Barry's columns. The best and funniest parts, though, are the new material. If you're one of those folks who gives one-star ratings to short books and complains of being cheated, you're not going to be happy. Personally, I think it is worth every penny I paid for it. (Well, OK -- I got a free Advance Reader Copy from Edelweiss and Simon and Schuster. (Thank you!) But I have pre-ordered the book and will pay full price for it on release.)

*This quote is from an Advance Reader Copy and may change before publication. If so, it will be corrected on the publication date.

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