Damn You, Dave Barry
To see why I really, really, hate Dave Barry, look no further than the start of his year-end review:
A huge airliner simply vanished, and to this day nobody has any idea what happened to it, despite literally thousands of hours of intensive speculation on CNN.
It may not show (in fact, I very much hope it doesn’t), but a one-liner, tossed off in a comment, might have been polished or wholly rewritten five or six or a dozen times, until it’s clear, concise, puts the snap at the end, and looks like there’s no way to improve it. And still, I almost never achieve the pure perfection of that sentence above. Worse, it’s not just the one joke: Barry has gems throughout the four thousand words of that piece. For me to do that would take time approaching the 17 years it took James Joyce to rework Finnegans Wake into absolute gibberish.
Honestly, it’s almost enough to make me give up and put that energy into stuff I get paid for.
They asked Joe Quesada “how does somebody become a comic book artist?”
His answer: “Draw everyday. Draw everyday. Draw everyday.”Report
Also Bradbury’s “Write 1,000 words a day, every day.” According to this site, and assuming single-spaced 11-point Times New Roman, that’s 2.1 pages per day. Note that Bradbury only said it would make you a writer; nothing about whether you’d be any good at it.
When I’m trying to write, I find the enormous blank expanse of an on-screen representation of an 8.5×11-inch piece of paper intimidating. So I cheat, and tell the word processor to use a 5.5×8.5 page. With half-inch margins all around and 11-point TNR, that holds about the same content as a trade paperback page — call it 400 words. For whatever reason, for me, that’s a much more comfortable sort of space. Two-and-a-half pages that size per day doesn’t seem quite as impossible.Report
Reminds me of one of the Simpsons lines that I get a lot of mileage out of IRL, from Season 8’s “Hurricane Neddy”:
“You gotta help us, Doc. We’ve tried nothin’ and we’re all out of ideas!”Report
They have my vote.Report
Now let’s burn down the observatory so this never happens again!Report
FWIW, I think you’re every bit as funny as Dave Barry.Report
Don’t encourage him! Comedians need crippling self-doubt to work!Report
Are you sure that was encouragement? I don’t see where Doc Saunders said he thought Dave Barry was funny…Report
Well done, Ken.Report
A plus Ken. Well played…Report
Maybe it is something in the Florida water that lets him be this funny. You can always move to Florida…Report
That would explain Carl Hiaasen. And Little Carmine.Report
“How did it get to this? Retaliations. Counterattacks. We’re at a f*ckin’ stagmire.”
Which is a real shame, because as we all know, “a pint of blood cost more than a gallon of gold.”Report
You’re at the precipice, j r, of an enormous crossroad.Report
It would also explain why so many hilarious crimes are committed in that state.Report
What does this have to Steve Garvey? Barry has a bit of a sordid past, but not to Garvey levels.Report
I hated Garvey for being the most bleeds-Dodger-blue person in the world back when as far as we knew he was faithful to his gorgeous blonde wife. (OK, for that too.)Report
To New Yorkers, Cyndy Garvey is probably more well known for being the original host of The Morning Show on WABC7, which has since evolved into the syndicated Live! with Kelly and Michael.Report
I hated him for singlehandedly keeping the Cubbies (bless their souls!) from gettin to the world series. What a loser!Report
@stillwater
You are letting Bull Durham off the hook.Report
“A woman did the most amazing thing with her vagina, a yo-yo, and some fruit. footnote: no, I’m not going to tell you what.“Report
put that energy into stuff I get paid for.
Don’t you dare.Report
This is a gem:
“A number of GM cars — the final total could be as high as four — were not recalled.”
I find that tossed-off one liners are often the best ones. Woody Allen’s “Like this watch? My grandfather, on his death bed, sold me this watch.” comes to mind.Report
Fun fact: Woody wrote that one so he’d have an excuse to pull out his watch and check whether his set was running long.Report