I've loved Dave Barry and thought of him as one of the funny Florida writers for a long time. Of course he's not from Florida, and this book covers his life from his beginning, through his childhood, and then to his different jobs.
He has a way with words and there were a lot of chuckles, but I was surprised how serious the book was. There were parts that broke my heart, especially about his mother.
Talk about a full life-- Barry worked closely with people I consider legends, and at the end he talks about losing them as time went on. He's definitely a guy who led a fulfilling life and made a big impact on a lot of people.

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass was everything I wanted it to be and more. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, yes, but it’s also unexpectedly heartfelt and reflective in the best possible way. Dave Barry has always had a talent for making even the most ordinary things absurdly hilarious, and that voice carries through every page of this memoir. But here, he pairs the comedy with genuine warmth and insight.

He takes us through his childhood, career, marriage, parenting, aging, and even the loss of loved ones — and he does it all with a voice that’s completely self-aware and never takes itself too seriously. You can tell he’s lived a full, ridiculous, joyful life, and he doesn’t mind poking fun at himself along the way. There’s a real honesty to this book that caught me off guard. Behind the jokes, there’s wisdom and experience, and I found myself underlining moments that felt surprisingly profound.

I loved the way he structured the book. It reads like a series of stories you’d hear over a long dinner with someone who’s lived a wild, meaningful life and still knows how to make you snort-laugh your drink through your nose. The pacing never drags, and even when the subject matter shifts into more serious territory, it never loses that signature Dave Barry tone.

This book is a celebration of not growing up, of staying curious and silly and deeply human, even as the years fly by. If you’ve ever laughed at one of his columns, or if you just enjoy memoirs that balance humor with heart, I can’t recommend this enough.

I was a huge Dave Barry fan growing up. Not only did I buy all of his books (yes, even the early ones on DIY, marriage, and becoming a CEO), I would read them repeatedly, with “Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits” being one of my all-time favorites. I would get the Sunday Chicago Tribune just to read his columns, and really looked forward to his end-of-the-year annual summaries. That makes me part of the target audience for “Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass”, a memoir that peels back the curtain (a bit) on Dave’s life and inspirations.

Dave takes us through his younger years, growing up and starting his career. Not everything was rosy, alcoholism and suicide helped shape Dave’s world view from a young age. Journalism was his first foray into writing, for a small newspaper in Pennsylvania, where his humor columns soon became his main focus. The Miami Herald came calling (among others), and that’s where Mr. Barry got comfortable, given the freedom to write about anything and everything that caught his interest, and would eventually lead to a Pulitzer Prize. Syndication, TV shows, books (both fiction and non-fiction), The Tonight Show, Oprah, rock and roll, fame and fortune soon followed.

Which brings us back to this book. A lot of what Dave writes about, stories he tells, are more detailed versions of things his fans have seen before, from his mother’s death to his colonoscopy to the anger of Neil Diamond fans. That doesn’t mean that they’re not funny, but it’s revisiting old stories instead of hearing new ones, which makes this wistful for longtime fans. Dave glosses over some topics (mostly around his divorce) and spends a lot of time on others, but I guess he’s earned that right. Some of his comments will anger some readers, but speaking personally those readers deserve to be angered, more people need to speak the truth.

A great stroll down memory lane with an American institution. It will make you want to reread all of his past works and laugh once again.

I requested and received a free advanced electronic copy from Simon & Schuster via NetGalley. Thank you!

If you are a Dave Barry fan, ,you will love this scamper down memory lane. He combines his usual irrepressible humor with sweet memories and leaves his readers feeling well entertained and perhaps understanding a little better what makes this writer tick.
All in all, a nice respite from the usual vitriol published in the daily news.

If you’ve enjoyed any of Dave Barry’s other books, or his columns, you’ll probably enjoy this. It’s actually somewhat informative, as well as laugh out loud funny. Barry has a gentle sense of humor that I really appreciate. He can poke fun at anyone and everyone without being mean or resorting to foul language. He talks a bit about his family of origin, but doesn’t reveal too much about his adult life outside of his work. Some of the stories will be familiar to his fans, but that gives this the feel of sitting around talking with an old friend over a beer. Remember when? Oh yeah, good times.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster for providing me with an ARC through NetGalley. I volunteered to provide this honest review.

4.5 stars, rounded upwards.

The first time I read a Dave Barry column, it was 1984, and a friend sent it to me. We had only snail mail back then, but it was so funny that she snipped it out of the airline magazine she’d read on a business trip and mailed it to me. I don’t remember which column it was, but it left me gasping for air, I laughed so hard. This was a difficult time for me, a young mother with two small children, a third on the way, and almost no money, and I floated along on the laughter that article brought me for a solid month. I hung it on the fridge where I could reread it whenever the urge struck me. That is how I became a Dave Barry fan.

Since then, his work has either hit or missed for me; almost all of the time, it has hit and although times are easier for me now, laughter is always a balm. When he misses—which is rare—he misses bigtime. But this time he’s golden, the Dave I remember reading that first time.

My thanks go to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now.

It strikes me again how frequently the funniest humorists, be they journalists, novelists, standup comedians, or comic actors, have tragic backgrounds. Barry has experienced more than his fair share, with a schizophrenic sister who’s been institutionalized, a father that died too young, and a mother that couldn’t recover from his loss, and took her own life. Barry wrote about her when it happened, and he reprints some of it here.
He reprints some other things, too, and I expected that. I don’t think that it cheats the reader when he documents parts of his professional journey by reprinting some of the things he wrote; he’s been writing prolifically for thirty years, and it seems to me that it was probably a lot of work just choosing what to include and what to leave out. It feels strangely like a school reunion, rereading the excerpts from drop dead funny columns that I enjoyed for the first time when they were originally published. Oh, my heart, “Ask Mr. Language Person!” I’m an English teacher, and I’m in stitches all over again.

The thing about an autobiography is that the author is also the subject, and so when he decides what parts of his own life to write about and what to keep private, we readers need to accept that. At the same time, it does seem disingenuous to completely pass over his marriages and divorces. A paragraph for each, maybe? Just give us the benchmarks.

I hadn’t known that he was responsible for Talk Like a Pirate Day, and both I and my middle school students owe him for that one! But the thing that is most striking to me, and that I appreciate most, is his reflection about the political discourse in the U.S., and the way we have become polarized and too often, uncivil. In the past---and he cites the Kennedy/Nixon campaign—arguments between family and friends were “heated, emotional, sometimes angry, but never nasty. At the end of the night everybody hugged everybody, because they were friends, and they understood that they could disagree about politics without believing the other side was evil. Mistaken, maybe. Evil, no.” All I can say about that is thank you, Dave, and amen.

Because I was running late, I checked out the audio version from Seattle Bibliocommons. Barry does his own reading, and it's even better that way.

There are a lot of hilarious experiences he recounts, but the thing about Barry that binds all of the experiences, the columns, and the books he’s written is his refusal to take himself too seriously, and it is his complete and delightful intolerance toward pretentiousness that keeps me coming back. I cannot imagine Dave Barry snubbing anybody, ever. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone was like that?

Highly recommended.

Great read - Kept me amused and also informed- hope he comes out of retirement and writes another book.
Glad to see a good person rewarded for his contributions to journalism.

Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC of this book. I read Swamp Story from Dave Barry, and I loved it. It’s amusing, and at times made me laugh out loud, anxious to share what I’d read, but for some reason, I found it slow reading. I began to realize that maybe I just really like reading fiction, with a plot that follows characters from beginning to end, with challenges along the way. This was more of a retelling of Barry’s life, which was interesting, but just didn’t grab me the way his fictional work does. That said, there were some very funny bits, many of which I can’t even begin to include.

For example, when Barry was a kid, the polio vaccine was released and his school was part of a test group. He takes umbrage with the way the local newspapers portrayed the students as excited about participating in this test. He hated it, particularly since he hated getting shots. But what made it even worse is that after going through all of the shots, he found out he’d been given the placebo, so he was forced to go through it all over again—effectively getting two shots for every one that his sister got. He ends by saying, “I think this at least partly explains why I ended up being an atheist.”

One of the humor articles for which he received wide acclaim had to do with getting a colonoscopy. I loved his description of the prep: “You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another liter of PoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.”

One of the things he got to do was travel to Moscow to take part in a writer’s exchange workshop. This statement took me by surprise, and made me laugh. “On our second night in Moscow, I stupidly did the one thing you should never, ever do in Russia: I ate at a Mexican restaurant." He proceeds to describe the intestinal agony he experienced over the next few days.

And then he introduced a running gag, describing his writing friend thusly, "He also had a very large head, a head that would not look out of place on Easter Island, but he's sensitive about it, so I plan to delete the sentence much later.” Obviously, he did not.

But he doesn’t stop there. “Alan, a very funny guy who's easy to work with once you get used to the size of his head, about which I will say no more.” This is followed by a footnote that says: “Seriously, it's enormous.” Then he talks about working together with two of his friends, while he and the other guy spend a lot of time “making fun of Alan's head.” Fortunately, for Alan, this is the last mention of his gigantic cabeza.

The appendix had something I enjoyed, a list of WBAGNFARB, phrases that Barry had identified Would Be A Good Name For A Rock Band. The list goes on for several pages. Not every one is gold, but there are enough good ones in there to make it worth considering buying this book if you’re planning to form a rock band.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed the book. It just didn’t feel like the compelling kind of reading I’m accustomed to, where I’m dying to know what happens next. It’s not making it to my list of absolute favorites. That said, I still recommend it.

The Lessons from Lucy book was exceptional, This one not so much. The stories behind the stories were interesting and early life events correspond to most of us Boomers. While on the end years of Boomers, I too remember hiding under a desk in case of nuclear attack, However I also remember saying the pledge of allegiance and a prayer at the beginning of a day. I probably should have stopped reading when he blatantly declared being an atheist. On this subject, I would direct him to the books written by Lee Strobel. Being an avid reader and the book mostly interesting I trudged on until I read the statement about his opinions of the current President of the United States and the half of the population of the US that voted for him. Many of us are professionals - not total idiots and many hold college degrees.) To us so called idiots you are correct, we will never trust the press again. You lost that when CNN reported the location of US troops to the Viet Cong.This president has been attacked by the press and other politicians as never before. What we all like about him is that he isn't A politician. He says things that the rest of redneck USA think. If you atheists had left prayer and patriotism in school we wouldn't have so much deviant,violent behaviors in the generations that have followed. Mr. Barry has become one of them, a liberal socialist and elitist who has lost touch with the common citizen,Too busy living the rich life to understand what real working people experience. As he said frequently, he couldn't believe he got paid to to some of the things he did. Thus this book became a name dropping arrogant personal opinions, not totally what one thinks of as a memoir -usually a life story, life experiences and lessons learned . I was provided and advanced reader copy at my request. The opinions expressed are my own. Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book.

Dave Barry is a well known, award winning humorist who has been writing steadily for over fifty years and has written innumerable newspaper columns syndicated across the country and dozens of books, none of which I’ve read. I did just read, however, an advanced reader’s copy of his autobiography, “Class Clown,” provided to me by NetGalley. My review of this book is voluntary.

It is often hysterically funny, causing me to laugh out loud repeatedly. When not hysterically funny, it’s just plain amusing, entertaining, and enlightening. Mr. Barry’s career has been long and incredibly diverse, allowing him to cross paths with a vast array of interesting and noteworthy people, many of whom are celebrities or famous in their fields. I enjoyed reading about his work and career, as well as his philosophical leanings, and his brief discussion of his novel and the movie based on it, “Big Trouble,” made me want to read the book and then watch the movie.

Class Clown is the memoir of Dave Barry - a syndicated humor columnist for many years. This book is full of some of his favorite stories and anecdotes - most of which appeared in a past column. There are lots of laughs, including stories from his childhood and his time as a new reporter. He got to have a job where he could make fun of everything and get paid for it. (All of us that were ever class clowns are jealous) His experiences covering the political conventions were interesting as well as his time marching in Obama's inaugaration parade. One of the funniest things was his list of band names at the back (The Wood Tick Snorkels, Shy Fruiter and the Saplings, Flamimg Squirrels, Earl Piedmont and the Dipthongs)

We could all use a laugh and this is a great place to start.

Dave Barry is well known for his writing, particularly his humor column, He also had a television program based upon two of his books. While his memoir has some very serious moments, (such as his mother’s suicide), much of his life story is expressed in a light-hearted matter. He doesn’t seem to take himself very seriously, and he does seem to know how to have a great time. He had several mock runs for president, and played with a rock band that he freely admits was loud but not very good.
Fans of Dave Barry would enjoy this book, and other readers would find this memoir worth reading as well.

"Class Clown" offers us a look into Dave Barry's life. I enjoyed his regular newspaper columns in the past, and enjoyed his look back at his career and his life. Anyone who has enjoyed Barry's columns will enjoy this walk down memory lane with him.

Special thanks to NetGalley and the Publisher for the Advanced Reader Copy of this book - Class Clown is available now.

I love memoirs that give you a glimpse into other people’s lives through humor and this was perfect for that. Dave Barry’s astute observations on life, politics, Miami, the media, and other events had me laughing out loud and sharing snippets with my husband. His brushes with celebrities, particularly Barbara Bush, were so relatable that I couldn’t help but laugh and feel a little of his embarrassment, too. This was a quick, fun read.

I have enjoyed reading Dave Barry over the years, be it his columns, novels, or nonfiction books, and I enjoyed this memoir as well. It was fun to see how he got started and I appreciated his sprinkling in some excerpts from his columns, which worked well in the text. My only complaint is that it’s a little slim and I feel he could have included more. That being said, it’s well worth the read for his fans.

3.5 stars! I actually had to Google who Dave was before requesting this book - the cover is what drew me in. I really enjoyed getting to know him and learning about his life and career. He's a humor writer and that definitely shines through. Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review - it's out now!

A wonderful view into Dave Barry's life, the people he's met, the places he's been, and all the things he's done in his lifetime. He writes with a charm that is sincere, and shares so many wonderful stories of his life. If you haven't read Dave Barry you're missing out!


Pub Date: May 13 2025

Many thanks for the opportunity to read 'Class Clown'

As Dave himself says, he used to be funnier, but this was part funny, part real life so he can be forgiven for not being funny every minute of the book.

After having read many of his earlier books, I lost interest other than the annual recaps usually found around New Year's Day. Then, it's true, I did say that he had been funnier in the past and stopped reading once I got to February. I almost didn't request this one, but I am glad I did. I now know the story behind some of the stories. Let's face it, we were all better at what we do years ago. Funny seems hard to carry off over and over, but he has done that.

Thank you NetGalley for an advance reader copy. Honest opinions expressed here are my own and are freely given.

I'm a lifelong Dave Barry fan, and think he's about the funniest person on the planet. He's done a wonderful job with his autobiography/memoir, taking us from his childhood, throughout his growing career as a journalist during some of our country's most turbulent events. Anyone who enjoys Dave Barry's writing will love this book, and it is also a great introduction to his work for those who are not as familiar.

Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer. He's well known for his humor that is sometimes a bit crass and tacky, but still timely and touching. This is his memoir. If you're a fan, you'll love it. If you're not, you will be after you read this. There are personal stories from his past, selections from his columns, lots of "name dropping", and some commentary on current affairs and the process of aging. This a very readable memoir that will elicit both tears and laughs. I loved it!!

Note -- while this a book for all ages, there is a bit of profanity and I think it will appeal especially to readers "of a certain age". Since Barry is now in his 70s, many of his stories will resonate for those who are older -- there are many references that younger readers may not understand. Having said that, it's still a good read for everyone.