Recently, I listened to an audio book version of Dave Barry’s Dave Berry is Not Taking This Standing Up. It reminded me why I stopped reading his column: his humor is entirely based on fantasy and misrepresenting reality.
If you’re not familiar with Dave Barry, he writes about real things but makes up so many of the details that he must insert “And I’m not making this up” whenever he presents a fact. What’s more, the details that he makes up are not subtle.
To a younger or superficial reader, this is funny stuff. I am now neither and I find his columns formulaic and reliant on “humor crutches.” I can read one occasionally and even occasionally laugh, but I will never sit through six compact discs worth of his dreck. The speaker, though, did an amazing job of reading—one of the few positives about the many-weeks-of-commute-time experience.