Dave Barry

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Humor Columnist, Best-Selling Author, and Satirist
Dave Barry
  • Won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary and the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism
  • New York Times Bestselling Author
  • Engages audiences with hilarious comedic and satirical performances

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Dave Barry has been a professional humorist ever since he discovered that professional humor was a lot easier than working. Barry was born in Armonk, New York, in 1947 and has been steadily growing older ever since without ever actually reaching maturity. He attended public schools, where he distinguished himself by not getting in nearly as much trouble as he would have if the authorities had been aware of everything. He is proud to have been elected Class Clown by the Pleasantville High School class of 1965.

Barry went to Haverford College, where he was an English major and wrote lengthy scholarly papers filled with sentences that even he did not understand. He graduated in 1969 and eventually got a job with a newspaper named -- this is a real name ---The Daily Local News, in West Chester, Pa., where he covered a series of incredibly dull municipal meetings, some of which are still going on.

In 1975 Barry joined Burger Associates, a consulting firm that teaches effective writing to businesspersons. He spent nearly eight years trying to get various businesspersons to for God's sake stop writing things like "Enclosed please find the enclosed enclosure," but he eventually realized that it was hopeless. For many years he wrote a newspaper column that appeared in more than 500 newspapers and generated thousands of letters from readers who thought he should be fired. Despite this, Barry won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, although he misplaced it for several years, which is why his wife now keeps it in a secure location that he does not know about. One of Barry's columns was largely responsible for the movement to observe International Talk Like a Pirate Day every year on September 19. This is probably his most enduring achievement.

Barry has written more than 30 books, including the novels Big Trouble, Lunatics, Tricky Business and, most recently, Insane City. He has also written a number of books with titles like I'll Mature When I'm Dead, which are technically classified as nonfiction, although they contain numerous lies. Two of Barry's books were the basis for the CBS sitcom Dave's World, which can probably still be seen on cable TV in certain underdeveloped nations.

Barry lives in Miami with his family and a dog that is determined to urinate on every square inch of North America.

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