"We need to take one last look back at the hideous reality of 2015."

December 24, 2015 8:02 AM

Dave Barry, enjoyed and reviled by MeFites, considers the year that was.
posted by doctornemo (46 comments total)

1. We didn’t hear that much about Honey Boo Boo.
2.

Worst list ever.
posted by Fizz at 8:18 AM on December 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well, I suppose an advantage to climate change is that there will soon be no Miami Herald to employ Dave Barry, because there soon will be no Miami.
posted by Automocar at 8:20 AM on December 24, 2015 [18 favorites]

Some of these stories seemed fishy.
posted by bongo_x at 8:26 AM on December 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ah, thank you for posting this. He still makes me laugh pretty damned hard.
posted by Wolfdog at 8:27 AM on December 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

What can I say about Dave Barry? Well, he's no Scott Adams.
posted by Splunge at 8:28 AM on December 24, 2015 [17 favorites]

Some part of me apparently cares about Dave Berry, because seeing a post of the form "Dave Berry, words words words, words words words." made me briefly think "oh no Dave Berry died?!"
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 8:30 AM on December 24, 2015 [4 favorites]

If you've followed Dave Barry a long time, as I have, I think it is safe to say that he's still quite funny, in his less-than-over-the-top way. That's what makes him Dave Barry.
posted by Seekerofsplendor at 8:33 AM on December 24, 2015 [9 favorites]

Abroad, tensions mount on the Korean peninsula when North Korea, in an unprecedented cyberattack, posts an estimated 23 million negative Yelp reviews of South Korea, including several million containing the phrase “we ordered the dog, which arrived so undercooked that the tail was still wagging."

Well. I guess that gave me a trial run at smiling politely at my racist uncle tomorrow.
posted by Aravis76 at 8:57 AM on December 24, 2015 [49 favorites]

In hindsight, a David Barry screed seems like a perfectly fitting way to send out this trainwreck of a year. He's the pundit that 2015 deserves.
posted by schmod at 9:11 AM on December 24, 2015 [4 favorites]

Metafilter: Some of these stories seemed fishy.
posted by mule98J at 9:17 AM on December 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Dave Berry is (for me) to humor columnists what "Nancy" is to newspaper comics... never more than semi-humorous but FAR superior to "Garfield". His semi-retirement is appropriate and allows him to give us his semi-humorousness in a more concentrated dose.
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:24 AM on December 24, 2015

But November is not just a time for fear: It is also a time, as Thanksgiving ushers in the holiday season, for all Americans, regardless of ethnicity, religion or political views, to be deeply offended. Nobody is more offended than college students, who stage a series of protests over the racism, sexism, fascism, heteronormism and — trigger warning — insensitive Halloween costumes that constitute the festering hellhole of hurtful things that is the modern American college campus and THERE IS NOTHING FUNNY ABOUT IT.

Welp, fuck Dave Barry I guess.
posted by shakespeherian at 9:28 AM on December 24, 2015 [17 favorites]

Welp, shakespherian, you just proved Dave Barry's point, I guess.
posted by tommyD at 9:32 AM on December 24, 2015 [24 favorites]

Elsewhere on the tech front, Microsoft releases Windows 10, which, in a widely hailed breakthrough, turns Windows 8 back into Windows 7.

Having spent an entire evening and one full day in Windows 10 hell, all I can say is I WISH.
posted by pjsky at 9:36 AM on December 24, 2015 [4 favorites]

Welp, shakespherian, you just proved Dave Barry's point, I guess.

I don't understand this comment.
posted by shakespeherian at 9:41 AM on December 24, 2015 [4 favorites]

It's a good name for a rock band.
posted by dr_dank at 9:43 AM on December 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Good ole Dave Barry, he's a national treasure. Who else would give us an irreverent take on the year from the perspective of an old, white male?
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 9:59 AM on December 24, 2015 [12 favorites]

NOVEMBER
… the world reels in shock after horrific terrorist attacks in Paris and Mali. With rumors of new threats coming daily, the U.S. State Department....issue(s) a Worldwide Travel Alert, warning American citizens to avoid potentially dangerous areas, “especially the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.” The department assures Americans that “there is no need to panic,” stressing that they should “remain in bed paralyzed by butt-puckering fear.”

Not at all ashamed to admit that this made me laugh out loud. Possibly because I travel for a living and 2016 may very well find me in bed paralyzed by butt-puckering fear.
posted by pjsky at 9:59 AM on December 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

Sadly, he is still funnier than Andy Borowitz.
posted by holborne at 10:10 AM on December 24, 2015 [7 favorites]

Aw! Dave Barry! He was hilarious to teenage me. As an adult (and as he's gotten older) the formula is a little more obvious and the problematic elements stand out more sharply (that Korean joke in particular was both lazy and bad) but there's still lots of fun in here. ("Jeb Can Fix It!")
posted by JDHarper at 10:47 AM on December 24, 2015 [11 favorites]

Good ole Dave Barry, he's a national treasure. Who else would give us an irreverent take on the year from the perspective of an old, white male?

Andy Rooney's been in the ground for less than half a decade, too soon!
posted by Apocryphon at 10:55 AM on December 24, 2015 [4 favorites]

Who else would give us an irreverent take on the year from the perspective of an old, white male?

Virtually every dying old-line newspaper in the US from coast to coast?
posted by blucevalo at 10:57 AM on December 24, 2015

Virtually every dying old-line newspaper in the US from coast to coast?

Ummmmm...
posted by howfar at 10:58 AM on December 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

If you've followed Dave Barry a long time, as I have, I think it is safe to say that he's still quite funny, in his less-than-over-the-top way. That's what makes him Dave Barry.


I sorta have followed Dave Barry for a long time and no, he actually used to be a lot funnier. (it's been a while, unfortunately)
posted by atoxyl at 11:00 AM on December 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

I also used to think he was funny once upon a time, and I don't want to go back and check. Or rather, I feel safe in my assumption that he was funny, and would hate to find out that no, he was never funny, and I was just easily amused.

There's a core of humor here. I can see where most of the jokes were supposed to be, and a couple times he almost connects.
posted by kanewai at 11:13 AM on December 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

To be fair, even when I was a teenager and really enjoying the Dave Barry collections at the library, the Annual Year In Review columns were always the most tedious and formulaic entries.
posted by shakespeherian at 11:39 AM on December 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

He really needs to stop with the sexism and racism BUT he is also still damn funny at times, e.g.:

Also deeply offended in November are people who have taken time out of their busy lives to notice that the 2015 Starbucks holiday cup is just plain red and — trigger warning — does not have snowflakes or reindeer on it. This is yet another salvo in the War On Christmas, which has completely eliminated Christmas from our lives except for Christmas carols playing on loudspeakers everywhere and huge Christmas displays in every store and Christmas movies on TV constantly and numerous Christmas-related news stories and an endless stream of Christmas-themed commercials running 24/7 since approximately Labor Day.

Bonus: his video gift giving guide, embedded in the linked column, is pretty much all fabulous. Topped, in my opinion, by the dog dryer.
posted by bearwife at 12:33 PM on December 24, 2015

Having spent an entire evening and one full day in Windows 10 hell, all I can say is I WISH.

BTW, if you installed Windows 10 by (accidentally or deliberately) clicking on the "free upgrade" dialog, you can back out to the previous version within 30 days. The feature is in the control panel.

</derail>

I also really liked Dave Barry back in the '90s and so have something of a soft spot for him. I'm not sure whether he just stopped being as funny or that I got too familiar with his schtick, but I've mostly given up on him now.

Either way, I chuckled a couple of times here but got bored before the end. Also, a few places felt somewhat down-punchy. That's probably more cluelessness than malevolence on his part but it made me cringe a bit.
posted by suetanvil at 12:46 PM on December 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

Dave Barry promises very little, and delivers on that promise. Even the inevitable problematic clueless old white guy stuff is sort of adorably amusing when you know it's coming and condescend accordingly. "A racist Korea joke? Oh you!" There's just no way I can take it seriously enough to be outraged. YMMV, of course.
posted by jklaiho at 1:27 PM on December 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

I remember being amused by Dave Barry in the early 1990s.
posted by humanfont at 5:04 PM on December 24, 2015

In the early 1980's, when I was just starting Junior High, my group of friends loved Dave Barry's columns, Gary Larson's Far Side comics, and of course Late Night with David Letterman. In the intervening years, Barry's humor and reputation has probably suffered the most. Although Letterman, those last few years... Still love the Far Side.
posted by Auden at 5:23 PM on December 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

All the windows users I know have bought Apples. And are now worse than the old-school Apple fans ever were.
posted by bukvich at 5:41 PM on December 24, 2015

In other political news, a person calling himself “Lincoln Chafee” manages to get onto the stage of the Democratic presidential candidates’ debate on CNN and make several policy statements before he is noticed by security and escorted out. This might have been embarrassing for the Democrats, but fortunately nobody is watching CNN, including moderator Anderson Cooper, who is openly playing Candy Crush.

It's funny because it's true. Nobody gives a shit about sensible governance. Not even Democrats. Democrats want the spectacle that is the WWE-esque Republican debate car crash to laugh knowing all of this is helping them sink the general while off the deepend Rs want the ever escalating rhetoric against everyone who they blame for ruining America except the actual culprits; the rich who have effectively plundered the country already during the plutocratic Bush years.
posted by Talez at 6:02 PM on December 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

I remember being amused by Dave Barry in the early 1990s.--humanfont

The highlight was his article about starting fires with a rollerblade Barbie, later shown on David Letterman, which made him enemies of fire marshals and parents everywhere because, although this Barbie was discontinued, anyone who had one of course had to try to recreate his experiment.
posted by eye of newt at 7:27 PM on December 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

Anyone who repeatedly uses "trigger warning" as a lazy joke isn't engaged in comedy, they're just patting the backs of people who listen to talk radio and want to guffaw as part of a mutual appreciation society rooted in how oppressed they are because suddenly people are calling them out on their garbage ideas.
posted by maxsparber at 9:02 PM on December 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

I mean that whole section is literally just a bit about humorless feminists and how they can't take a joke. Calling that out isn't proving the dude's point.
posted by shakespeherian at 9:19 PM on December 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

25 years of doing the same schtick tends to wear on you. From the quotes so far, seems like he's gotten old, and added far more edge than anything I've seen from him in a long time. So, good for him. Despite the sexism, punching down, etc.
posted by Windopaene at 10:18 PM on December 24, 2015

He has this great imagination, he's really creative, he can still whirl around inside a sentence or two with laugh out loud funny leaps. The word that is coming to me is zany. Sure, a lot of it is lame. But it's worth it -- to me, YMMV -- for the tears from laughing at the good that's in it.

I haven't read him in years,prior to what I just now read. I used to read him religiously, 1980s through 1990s; when we first got an internet connection at the place I worked -- 1995? -- Thursday afternoons were great, because his column dropped.

I think I tried to read one of his books -- he's written some novels -- I think I tried to read one and couldn't make it go. And I just lost the habit of reading him online, his blog, whatever else.

I watched him on a Google speech a couple of years ago and it was absolutely *not* his element, the Google people not in the slightest amused by lame comment (Comments? It's been a few years.) about how unhinged he was/is in the presence of a real, live breast, something that would have been funny 30 or 35 years ago reading it in his nationally syndicated column but ...

It was sad to watch, he was pretty much relentlessly un-hip, I'm not certain I watched the whole thing or not. It's not surprising to me that there's a lot of people here that don't much care for him. He's not grown with the times.

He's absolutely not a guy like Vonnegut, loved/respected/admired/revered all the way, cool when he was young and cool when he got older.

Still. For 30 years Barry put out a column every week. Could you do that? He won the Pulitzer, and deserved to. He's still writing, and it sure looks like he's still having a lot of fun. I'm glad I just read him
posted by dancestoblue at 12:00 AM on December 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

Barry is a surprisingly thoughtful and poignant writer, when he writes seriously. And his formula's pretty amusing in short doses—dude can layer gags with serious skill. Not especially daring beyond that, and it suffers when he goes longform as he does here, and Punch Up is a trick that even old dogs oughtta learn, but there is theoretically something good here.

The Internet is really eating a particular kind of entertainer alive. Turns out brilliant insights/jokes don't suffer from sloppy forms, or from an individual Tumblrer or Twitterer's only ever finding half a dozen real gems. In aggregate, they make the old pros seem stale and uninspired. (Comparing Jeb!'s "We can fix it" line to Bob the Builder is worth the thought of a chuckle; comparing it, as others did, to the slogan of a famous British celebrity pedophile has a real nasty kick to it. And that joke came months ago, versus at the end of the year for people who don't load new Internet funnies—"normal people", in other words, or "inferiors" in my preferred parlance.)
posted by rorgy at 8:56 AM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Barry is Gene Weingarten's protege, right? He feels like the same mixture of smart writer/cheesy gags, only Weingarten's "serious" writing is leagues better, and his "cheesy" writing is far, far, far, far worse.
posted by rorgy at 8:59 AM on December 25, 2015

Regarding trigger warnings: I've been working on articulating them to people who Don't Get It, and I think that what critics are missing is that they're not about people's right to be "free from things that bother/upset me", as they seem out of [admittedly a tad deep-in-feminist-thought] context. Rather, it's that supposed logic turned on its head: people, whether students or college professors or entertainers, should not be free from the understanding that fairly systemic, fairly horrifying suffering has been inflicted upon entire demographics in this country. What's funny or interesting to a person who doesn't understand the ways in which their media or thoughts or jokes or whatever might be deeply upsetting to somebody else... well, that doesn't deserve to be sacred. It doesn't deserve to be censored, but you should know what things you take for granted as harmless are, in fact, harmful, for not just one person but many, many people, more than will ever impolitely let you know.

Learning triggers isn't catering to an overly sensitive group that needs to be shielded—it's catering to an overly shielded culture that needs ways of providing sensitivity to those who need it, without simply abandoning a cultural/social history that's been advanced on a basis of regularly ignoring/hurting people whose voices haven't been deemed worthy of acknowledging as voices.

The problem here isn't humorless college kids screaming "IT'S NOT FUNNY!" It's ignorant everybody-else screaming "IT'S NOT NECESSARY!" Well, it is, if you want to really live up to that stated belief that people are all equal, and their pasts and experiences are worth a damn.
posted by rorgy at 9:13 AM on December 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

Okay okay Dave, we get that you get the idea of a "trigger warning." Now learn the concept of a "safe word", something we can say to make it stop.
posted by chavenet at 11:19 AM on December 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Ah crap. I don't want to know why. By Graphthar's Swinging Hammer, it's bad enough that I remember some of those godawful jokes I told when I was a tadpoleish teen; please don't tell me why I laughed--it's too dark in there.

Vonnegut's writing is still a treasure, though it can be brutally funny--you know, it hurts when I laugh; or vice versa.

Barry doesn't hurt, he just tickles gently. Sometimes I squirm while chuckling.
posted by mule98J at 11:55 AM on December 25, 2015

Barry in his less-than-humorous mode:

[T]he feeling of vulnerability only got worse, forcing me to accept that I wasn't in control any more. My universe could be trashed in a moment because of uncontrollable developments on this newborn comet. I can remember every detail of the time when, at 10 months, he got a fever, 106 degrees, I carried him into the hospital, thinking I can't take this, please, let me be able to stop this, please, give me this fever, take it out of this little boy and put it in me, please.

But you can't do that. You have to watch it happen and it never gets easier.

Beth and I are in the car, and I'm driving too fast, but I have to; I have to see what I don't want to see. Up ahead some people are gathered on the side of the road, and a woman is kneeling - she has blood on her dress, a lot of blood - and lying in front of her, on his back, his face covered with blood is . . .

''Oh God,'' says Beth. ''Oh God.''

This is where it ends, for some parents. Right here, on the roadside. My heart breaks for these parents. I don't know that I could survive it. Now I'm opening the door, stumbling out of the car toward Rob. He's moving his hand. HE'S WAVING AT ME. He's giving me a weak smile, trying to reassure me.

''It's my fault,'' he's saying. ''I'm sorry.''

''It's OK!'' I'm saying. ''It's OK!''

PLEASE LET IT BE OK.

''I'm sorry,'' the woman is saying. ''I'm so sorry.'' She was driving the car that collided with Rob. He went through the windshield, then was thrown back out onto the road, 40 feet, according to the ambulance guys.

He was OK. A broken leg, some skin scraped, a lot of stitches, but nothing that won't heal. He'll be getting out of his cast in a couple of months, getting on with his ever-busier life; he'll be growing bigger, moving faster, this bright comet-boy who streaked into my universe 12 years ago and is already starting to arc his way back out, farther from me, from my control, from my sight.

But that little hand will never let go of my finger.

In one of his books, which I think was titled Dave Barry Goes To Japan and was mostly yuk-yuk Barry gags, he writes about Hiroshima and Nagasaki with surprising lyricism and thought. It makes his jokes about Koreans eating dogs or protestors making a big deal over nothing more, not less, disappointing; he's capable of being a sharp humorist, but, more than that, he's also capable of thinking. It makes it that much more conspicuous when he abandons that responsibility.
posted by rorgy at 1:46 PM on December 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

(Prowling about in his archives on my train ride back to Philly, I encountered—for the first time—the quietly devastating article he wrote about his mother. Just... wow.)
posted by rorgy at 1:56 PM on December 25, 2015 [10 favorites]

rorgy: "Beth and I are in the car"

That was his second wife. The one he had a son with and left for a woman 18 years younger than him.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:17 PM on December 26, 2015