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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Dave Barry’s Money Secrets

Reading the newspaper was an institution of my childhood.  My parents always subscribed to the Deseret News, one of Utah’s two major papers.  I remember seeing my mom and my dad read the paper.  When I was really young, my interaction with the newspaper was limited to asking my parents to “read me the ‘Circle,’” which is what I called the Family Circus, since it was the only comic published in a circle instead of squares or rectangles.  Later on, I started to read the newspaper for myself.  I found it fascinating and read articles and columns from all the sections, but admit that the comics and the sports were the priorities.  Sunday’s massive paper with extra sections and tons of advertising inserts also featured Dave Barry’s nationally syndicated column, and I usually thought they were amazing.

Dave Barry’s Money Secrets: Like: Why Is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar? (ISBN: 1-4000-4758-7) is a parody of financial advice books or self-help books and contains a lot of Barry’s goofball humor as well as the kinds of juxtapositions of what people are always saying and what actually happens in real life that have kept comedians in business since the dawn of time.  He talks about the need for money, the lack of money, the history of money, investment opportunities, financial gurus, famous rich people (the bit on Donald Trump was surprisingly germane), tipping, and the stock market, among other things.  None of it is sound financial advice, but it the vast majority of it hits home, like all good humor, because there’s some truth to it.

With the demise of newspapers, I haven’t read Dave Barry in close to twenty years, so the book was a fun read.  I had never read a book by Barry, so this was also a new experience.  As always, I enjoyed the most of the humor.  I made the mistake of reading it on an airplane and I unsuccessfully stifled a few laughs out loud.  I think the book format was just maybe a little too much for me.  The column once a week was probably more the portion size I prefer.  I also thought there was more gutter humor in the book than I remember in the columns (unsurprising, given that I was reading the columns over twenty years ago, when standards were a little different, especially in the newspaper industry as opposed to the book industry).

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXIV John Pruess.