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Book Review: ‘Class Clown,’ by Dave Barry
nytimes.com
“Who is Dave Barry?” young readers may ask, alas. Let me take you back to the early 1980s, the twilight of the era of the great syndicated columnists, those ink-stained champions whose work was published in hundreds of newspapers. Art Buchwald, Erma Bombeck and Russell Baker were among them, and they were by and large terrific, but they were generally wry rather than laugh-out-loud funny.
Barry brought the laugh-out-loud funny. Here, for example, is his advice in a piece on wilderness survival, written before he was syndicated:
If you or your companions gets bit by a snake, don’t panic. Take a razor blade and make a cut shaped like an “X,” then suck out all the blood. Snakes just hate this, and after you’ve done it to them one or two times they stop biting people altogether.
Dave Barry was hugely influential on me comedically. I had a bunch of his books and always read his column — I’ve even saved some years-in-review to this day. Wacky and eye-opening to a little country kid like me.