I grew up reading Dave Barry in the Miami Herald, which is probably the only reason I read a newspaper. I started reading his books and was hooked. I love the humor he brings to everything. Getting to read this biography was like sitting down with an old friend.

I'm going to keep my review Short And Sweet. I recommend this Book to all who enjoy a Good Laugh and a Good Story.

Thank you to NetGalley and The Publishers for a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

You may think you know Dave Barry, but this book tells all. Dave takes readers from the beginning to the not-so-end. You'll laugh (a lot) and even shed a few tears, but what a ride he has had & I for one am thankful that he was able to pull if off.

As a fellow Floridian, "Best. State. Ever.: A Florida Man Defends His Homeland", is my all-time favorite book, but this is a must read for anyone that wants to laugh or learn more about the glamour life of a newspaper columnist.

I received this advance review copy from NetGalley & the publisher for my honest review.

There aren't many authors that I can name whose books are guaranteed to make me laugh out loud. Dave Barry is one, and we have been fans for decades. His appeal probably isn't universal, although I think most people find him hilarious. Yes, as he admits, some of it is sophomoric, but it also provides a common denominator of the things that we all find funny.

This biography is not, strictly speaking, a humor book. Naturally, there are some excruciatingly funny parts - his colonoscopy column evidently is in wide circulation, even among doctors and the medical community. But the book begins with his childhood and young adulthood, which include his father's alcoholism and his mother's suicide. He deals with his parents with empathy, some regret, and a nice balance of the happy and the sad.

Although I have read him a lot, I didn't actually know much about him. It was interesting to find out his background, which includes bookkeeping, teaching clear writing techniques to business people, and conventional journalistic news reporting. But once he became a humor columnist, he knew he was in the right place. There is a midwestern modesty about Dave Barry, a desire to never take himself too seriously. This doesn't stop him from being wildly irreverent about most everything.

This was an enjoyable read, humor balanced with some down to earth attitude. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

I have been a follower of Dave Barry's writings for many, many years. I even had a "quote-a-day" calendar by him. This book is a heartfelt autobiography of Dave's crazy life as a humor journalist. All the illustrations are excerpts from old columns, and they provide many a chuckle.

Although this is not a "laugh out loud" book nor is it supposed to be, I appreciated his honest evaluation of his life and career. Recommended to his fans!

I cannot strongly enough recommend his four book series co-written with Ridley Pearson, "Peter and the Starcatchers" telling the story of Peter Pan before he met Wendy.

Dave Barry books are always a great to read. I love his hilarious anecdotes! This is a fantastic memoir and I recommend it to everyone looking for a humorous and interesting book.

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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WHAT'S CLASS CLOWN ABOUT?
It's really all there in the subtitle: it's Dave Barry's memoirs about his career as a professional wiseass—primarily through his humor column, but he's found other outlets for it, too.

Here's some of the jacket copy to help beef that up:

America’s most beloved wiseass finally tells his life story with all the humor you’d expect from a man who made a career out of making fun of pretty much everything.

How does the son of a Presbyterian minister wind up winning a Pulitzer Prize for writing a wildly inaccurate newspaper column read by millions of people?

In Class Clown, Dave Barry takes us on a hilarious ride, starting with a childhood largely spent throwing rocks for entertainment—there was no internet—and preparing for nuclear war by hiding under a classroom desk. After literally getting elected class clown in high school, he went to college, where, as an English major, he read snippets of great literature when he was not busy playing in a rock band (it was the sixties).

He began his journalism career at a small-town Pennsylvania newspaper where he learned the most important rule of local journalism: never confuse a goose with a duck. His journey then took a detour into the business world, where as a writing consultant he spent years trying, with limited success, to get corporate folks to, for God’s sake, get the point. Somehow from there he wound up as a humor columnist for The Miami Herald, where his boss was a wild man who encouraged him to write about anything that struck him as amusing and to never worry about alienating anyone...

Class Clown isn’t just a memoir; it’s a vibrant celebration of a life rich with humor, absurdity, joy, and sadness. Dave says the most important wisdom imparted by his Midwestern parents was never to take anything too seriously. This laughter-filled book is proof that he learned that lesson well.



HIS ORIGIN STORY
The first four chapters are the most autobiographical part of the book—a little less than 50% of it. Here we cover his parents, his childhood, schooling, and early career—from his first newspaper job, his detour through business education, and then finding his way back to journalism and becoming a humor columnist.

This is all the nitty-gritty stuff—what were his parents like? (nothing like you'd guess) What did his childhood entail? (bad jokes and throwing things) What did he write before making money with booger jokes? And so on.

This was the more educational—in a good way, I stress—part. He wrote about is parents, in particular, with warmth and humanity. He was open about some of their struggles, but with sensitivity. I really appreciated the way he talked about his marriages—past and present—very briefly, yet definitively. There is some humor, but it's largely self-directed, or at the culture he and his parents were in.

This is really the kind of thing you come to a memoir for, and Barry did it well. He quotes some of his more serious (and some of his less-serious) columns here to show what he's said about these things in the past.

TOPICAL MEMORIES
A little over half the book is devoted to what I'm describing as "Topical Memories"—he has a chapter on things like "My Readers," "Politics," and "Books, Music, and Movies." In these, he relates a collection of stories and anecdotes from all over his career along these lines.

So we get stories about the great things his readers have sent him—and some of the less positive things they've said. Scandals he created—inadvertently or not. How he was involved in Obama's first inaugural parade, or had Bruce Springsteen sing backup for him, how he accidentally offended an audience of Russians by screening one of his films. I particularly enjoyed him talking about his feud with his Neil Diamond-loving readers (I'm a pretty big Diamond fan, but thought Barry's jokes were good and deserved, for what it's worth)

There are several extended quotations from his columns here—and we get a lot of the stories behind the columns, too. Not the nuts-and-bolts of how he wrote them, but what led to them.

If the Origin Story chapters were educational—this was recess. Just a lot of fun and goofing off, telling wild stories and recounting past glories (and blunders). It was exactly the kind of thing that Barry readers pick up his books for.

THE APPENDIX
I don't frequently talk about appendices; they're supplemental material, and I prefer to focus on the main portion of the book, but every now and then, one comes along that demands attention.

For example (as you might have guessed), this appendix. It was a hoot—its title is "A Good Name for a Rock Band." Barry (like many of us) will frequently pick up on a phrase from something he quoted and say it would be a good name for a rock band (also known by the super-easy and memorable acronym WBAGNFARB). After discussing this practice a bit, Barry gives a non-exhaustive, but extensive list of some of those bands.

I think reading them in context is best—but you definitely can appreciate them in a different way with no context whatsoever. They are definitely more ridiculous that way.

It's worth picking the book up from the shelf at your local bookstore/library just to read those few pages. (Of course, you'd be better served by reading the whole thing). Even people who don't have a background with Barry will find some laughs there.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT CLASS CLOWN?
I'm fairly certain at this point in my life that I'm hardwired to enjoy Davy Barry's writing, and that I don't have the neuroplasticity to change that. No matter what apps for seniors I try. So maybe take this with a softball-sized grain of salt.

I really enjoyed this book. A lot—and on several levels.

Part of me would've liked a little more depth, a little more digging into details of his life, maybe his approach to writing. But it'd just feel strange knowing that much about Barry—and we all know what happens to a joke when you dissect it, knowing too much about how his sausage is made might not be that entertaining. Really, for Dave Barry—this is about as deep as we want. Every time I started to say "I wish he'd given us more about X," I stopped myself and realized that no, this was just the right amount.

So no, it's not as self-revealing as say, Patrick Stewart's or Matthew Perry's books—and that's good.

This is a great way to get to know Barry a little better—given the nature of his work, a lot of us have had a para-social relationship with him before that was a phrase people used. It's nice for us to deepen that relationship to a degree—before we get back to jokes about exploding cows, questionable song lyrics, or whatever.

I heartily encourage readers of Dave Barry to pick this up—even casual readers will have fun with this, you don't have to be a die-hard like me. He's one of a kind, and it's great to bask in that for a little while.

Disclaimer: I received this eARC from Simon & Schuster via NetGalley in exchange for this post which contains my honest opinion—thanks to both for this.

Class Clown, by Dave Barry, is a combination of memoir from childhood, career progression, clips from columns, and reflections of the current state of the world from the vantage point of an aging Boomer. Perhaps because I am also an aging Boomer, I found his memoirs of childhood and career boring. On the other hand, his clips from his columns and his reflections on life and the world are truly hilarious. I laughed our loud so many times my family banned me from reading in the common rooms and I was forced to seek privacy! 4.5 stars rounded up to 5. Highly recommend to other Baby Boomers! Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Shuster for the opportunity to thoroughly enjoy myself!

Dave Barry has long been known as one of our country’s favorite humorists. His weekly columns ran for decades in hundreds of papers, back when that was a thing. He has written novels, been made into a television show, written for the Oscars, written about politics, co-wrote YA books that were turned into a Broadway musical, written books that became major motion pictures, and won a Pulitzer Prize. And now he’s written a memoir about it all.

Told with the same tongue-in-cheek snark that made him so popular as a columnist, Class Clown starts with the beginning and goes right on through to the now. Barry talks about growing up the son of a Presbyterian minister and a mother with a wicked sense of humor. He and his brothers and sisters didn’t have a perfect childhood, but it was happy. He talks about being in a band in college and then writing for a small newspaper, where he got a chance to write an occasional column.

From there Barry went on to work for the AP, and then taught writing to executives, where he had to become comfortable in front of groups of people. But he kept writing those columns, finding his voice and starting to find an audience. Eventually, he got a job writing a weekly humor column for the Miami Herald, which became his home paper. He wrote columns about news items and about boogers, about exploding toilets and the music of Neil Diamond. He wrote about the birth of his son and the death of his mother. And he wrote a lot about beer.

And that’s just the start of the long list of things Barry has done. Class Clown is his story, told in his words, sometimes with clips from old columns that he wrote. He talks about growing up and his first newspaper job, about his family and his writer friends. He name drops Stephen King and Steve Martin and Oprah, because if you can, why wouldn’t you? But really, he’s pretty humble about all of his accomplishments and hard work. Through this book, Barry strikes the perfect balance of celebrating his past and understanding what’s really important in life. Entertainment matters, laughter is important, but those are not the things that matter the most.

I have been a big fan of Dave Barry for many, many years. There are some of his old columns that I still think about and laugh. I love Mr. Language Person, and I could watch Big Trouble a hundred more times. So it’s not going to be a big surprise that I loved this book. I thought it had a lot of heart, but it’s also smart and funny, with visits to some classic columns as well as stories about his life experiences. He speaks fondly of his friends and his family, with warm humor, and even thanks those who were not fans but wrote to him throughout his career. I think longtime fans of Barry will nod along with these stories, and those who are new to his writing will find an entertaining story about a life well lived.

Egalleys for Class Clown were provided by Simon & Schuster through NetGalley with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.

This memoir is full of laughs, references from "International Talk Like a Pirate Day" to Keith Richards to the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile, and of course, Florida. Dave Barry finds himself in the center of many cultural zeitgeist moments. Every page is a treasure, with so many laugh out loud moments. I loved it. He's a gifted writer, first to admit he just ended up in the right place at the right time, with a lot of wiseass-ness and humanity.

Because if you can't laugh at life, the alternative kind of stinks. Thank you Dave Barry for the hysterical and heart-warming walk down memory lane.

My thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the Advance Reader Copy. (pub date 5/13/2025)

Dave Barry is a national treasure. I’ve been reading his work, both fiction and nonfiction, for longer than I care to admit and the man never fails to make me laugh. Heck, I be willing to bet he could rewrite the phonebook and it would be amusing. (Dang, I mentioned the phonebook, I guess that hints at my age, lol) Now finally after all this time he has delivered an autobiography of sorts. And it has definitely been worth the wait. Sharing stories (in his own particular style) Dave takes us through his childhood to his start in the newspaper business, and into this great success. And while it’s true the book is packed with plenty of amusing tales, he’s also shares some touching and brutally honest looks at his life, especially in terms of regrets around his mother. I for one am glad Dave never grew up…and hope he never does!. I’d like to thank Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review an eARC of Class Clown.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R18JFZDXBMXGQ3/ref=pe_123899240_1043597390_SRTC0204BT_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. It came along at a time when I needed it- delightful, funny (in the very particular way Dave Barry is funny), charming, insightful and also warm and endearing.
While I’m at the younger age of his generation, so much resonated and he’s just so wise and funny.
And it was so welcome to laugh out loud while reading.
Any Dave Barry fan will thoroughly enjoy! (And according to him, there are at least a few of us left!)

I received an advance reading copy (arc) of this book from NetGalley.com and the publisher in return for a fair review. Dave Barry is, without a doubt, one of the funniest people on the planet. This memoir addresses many of his adventures--some hilarious and some sobering. He writes openly about his parents--his dad's bout with alcoholism and his mom's suicide, which I found very touching and honest. His escapades as a writer, however, were often laced with his unique sense of humor. He considers himself terribly lucky, but there is also a lot of talent involved. His stories about covering politics and visiting small towns across the U.S. are too funny. I found myself laughing out loud on more than one occasion. If you are looking for a light read that will tickle your funny bone, this may just be it. I hope Dave Barry continues to write for the next 77 years!

I really like memoirs/autobiographies because you see the journey someone took to find the success that they have. It's never an easy journey and it's good to be reminded that every "successful" person has usually gone through their share of unknowns and trials. What a journey he has had, the pain he has suffered with what happened to his parents, his personal journey through jobs and relationships, but to come through it with grace and humor. It was also fascinating to hear the different jobs he had that took him to where he ended up - who knows what the things we say yes (or no) to will lead. Thank you for this reminder that we should all be open to different opportunities and doors that open when we least expect it!

Maybe I was expecting it to be really funny because it was Dave Barry, sorry for the assumption (!), but I didn't feel as drawn in as I had hoped, even though I still found it interesting! There are no half stars, and might change as I reflect more but I want to rank it 3.5 stars right now, though it's hard for me to do that for someone's story/memoir!!

“Atomic war was part of the school curriculum in the fifties… aside from polio and nuclear war, elementary school was a pretty good experience,” Dave Barry writes in his memoir Class Clown.

Of course, he finds the humor in everything. Puberty. Politics. Great Literature (which he read thirty percent of as an English major). Hawking your books. The dangers of fire-starting Barbie Dolls. Did I mention politics?

Barry’s memoir shares his childhood, which was a pretty good one. His high-minded clergy dad ran an inner city nonprofit while building their house in a small town. Barry credits his mom’s sharp, dark, humor for his own sense of humor. But his parents had their dark sides; his dad’s drinking turned into alcoholism and his mom’s depression, in the end, won out.

In high school he found his niche, and was elected Class Clown.

What surprised me was his early newspaper career as a serious journalist at small papers and the AP, and as a business writing consultant,teaching writing to businessmen.Through these jobs he honed his skills in writing and public speaking. Teaching writing “made me a better humor writer,” Barry admits. During this time, he was also sending out columns to a small paper, which eventually led to the Philadelphia Inquirer hiring him full time, and then his move to Miami Herald.

Barry inserts excerpts from his columns as he shares his career highlights. We read him back in his Philadelphia Inquirer days, and when our son was growing up his syndicated column kept our whole family in stitches.

His career included a TV show inspired by his life, movies, playing in a band, co-writing a spoof novel, and authoring books for adults and kids.

To conclude, he shares his advice for all of us aging boomers.

It’s a laugh out loud book with genuine heart.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley.

There are a couple of things I need to confess before starting this review: First - I loathe memoirs; second - I adore Dave Barry’s books. So I approached this book with trepidation. I was truly worried it would be the first Dave Barry work that I’d read and hate. Fortunately, that was not the case.
Turns out this book lacks the thing I dislike most about memoirs - pretentious navel gazing. Barry has never taken himself too seriously in any previous books and he didn’t take himself too seriously in this one. And it was loaded with the things I’ve always enjoyed in a Barry book - it’s mostly very funny and occasionally, out of the blue, poignant and wise.
Warning for people who DO like memoirs. Dave Barry is and has always been fairly private about his private life, so this memoir is more about his working life than his personal life. Which was fine with me. But if you’re looking for weepy shirt-rending, you won’t find it here.

Simon and Schuster provided an early galley for review.

In the 90's, I was drawn into Dave Barry's world by the aptly titled Dave's World sitcom which starred Harry Anderson. I recall reading a few of his humor books (often collections of his columns) around that period as well. I found both entertaining, and that's what inspired me to pick his upcoming memoir for a read. That along with the fact that as a life-long inspiring writer, I am fascinated by the things professional writers have to say and how they got where they came to be.

Though we grew up two decades apart, I could very much relate to Barry's youth years. I found it interesting to hear about his parents and family, along with his collegiate pursuits. This is told very much in a standard autobiography manner.

Where the style changes up is when he starts working as a journalist and then columnist. From this point, several moments are told with an event or person touchstone followed by excerpts from published writing of his related to those points. It is like a "greatest hits" retrospective. Fans of his writing will certainly enjoy it; I did find it a bit disjointed and dulling my interest in spots. I did appreciate those sections, though, where the true Dave Barry shone through.

I remember reading Dave Barry’s columns when I was in high school so when I heard about his memoir, I knew I would love reading it. Dave did not disappoint. I enjoyed his stories about his parents and figuring out what he wanted to do in life. I was shaking with laughter at points re-reading the excerpts from his columns. This was such a great memoir with some wonderful stories and great insights.

As a fan of Dave Barry, this was an enjoyable read in many respects. while not the most scintillating memoir. Fans of his comedy writing and/or the memoirs of humorous Boomers will be pleased.

A long time fan of Dave Barry's weekly humor column, and having read most of his books, I found his memoir to be kind of a book length version of one of his humor columns. Which is not at all a bad thing. His columns were always hilarious and so is this memoir. Starting with an overview of his childhood and a good bit about his parents, the remainder of the book focuses entirely on his professional life. Other than a brief mention that he has been married three times, and a couple of references to his son, there is nothing here about his personal adult life. The book is organized by topic and includes numerous excerpts from his columns, which comes across almost as a greatest hits of his humor. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and highly recommend it, especially to Dave Barry fans.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for an advanced reader copy.

I really enjoyed the way Dave Barry wrote this memoir, it had that element that I was hoping for and enjoyed in this type of book. I was engaged with the stories being told and had that humor that I was looking for.