Dave Barry’s History of the Millennium (So Far)

Year-end synopses and other annual summaries were something that seemed to be pretty popular in the news during my teenage years and into my early adulthood.  Newspapers would publish year-in-review stories and devote a page of one of their lesser-read sections to what the editorial staff considered to be the year’s top ten or so stories.  Admittedly, I am somewhat sentimental in nature, affected a little by nostalgia, so these kinds of things in the papers appealed to me.  Humorist Dave Barry was not one to be left behind by that trend, and one of the Sundays around New Year’s Day always featured his year-in-review columns, which were always laugh-out-loud funny and something I looked forward to.

Dave Barry’s History of the Millennium (So Far) by Dave Barry (ISBN: 978-0-399-15437-9) is a compilation of those year-end columns for the first few years of the 2000s.  Since those were always multi-page columns, the book is a decent length even though it doesn’t even deal with a full decade.  The style of Barry’s columns relies on a couple main devices.  One is to make fun of real events, and given the state of American politics, that is easy to do.  Often, it seemed like he didn’t have to do a lot of writing; the material was writing itself.  Another is to start by reporting a real event and then, suddenly and usually rather abruptly, turn it into something surreal or absurd.  The subject of the jokes is wide ranging and includes politics, religion, sports, crime, popular culture (singers, movie stars, and generic celebrities who are famous for now real reason), and some bizarre things that make hometown papers only.  As the cover to the book suggests, the Republican Party and President Bush are the subject of many jokes, but politicians at all levels find themselves in Barry’s crosshairs.  Another continuing theme throughout the book is that things really are getting worse.  Each year’s summary starts out with a comment about how we all hoped the year would be a good one and would improve on the past, but that, as usual, we were all disappointed with just how the latest year turned out.  Given the ineptitude around us, why should we keep being so optimistic?  It’s never dark humor, but there is a level of sarcasm or cynicism that often gives the jokes an edge.

I actually laughed quite a bit as I read through this book, which I thought was considerably better than the other compilation of Dave Barry columns that I read a while ago, Dave Barry’s Money Secrets.  Maybe politics, which are, in some ways, constantly changing, provide more fresh material than financial affairs, the nature of which really don’t change too much.  In any case, I thought the book was funny.  My guess, though, is that there is a shelf life to a book like this.  I lived through the era Barry is writing about in these columns and know about the people he makes fun of and remember most of the events he picks apart from the headlines of news articles that I read.  For people who either weren’t old enough to remember the early years of the third millennium or simply don’t remember it — maybe even on purpose — the content of the book is going to have a lot less relevancy.  So, while I enjoyed the book and found it quite funny (and fairly balanced as far as which political party was being skewered, maybe 60-40 with Republicans taking the larger share of the abuse), I think the chances are that this book is going to appeal more to those born earlier than 1990.

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