Welcome Back, Dave Barry!

For those of us who have taken 50 or more spins around the sun, there are many sources of entertainment that once gave us great pleasure, but which have long since been consigned to our memories. We accept that they were from a different era and are permanently lost. In my case there were certain sports broadcasts, radio shows, and newspaper columnists with whom I felt a personal connection, even if it was only just listening to their show or reading their column.

Among these was Dave Barry and his weekly humor column. It went away in 2005, but after a 20-year absence, it’s back! Rather than being syndicated from the Miami Herald as it was in the old days. Mr. Barry’s revived humor column is now on Substack.

My hometown newspaper carried Dave Barry’s column in my younger days, and my father and I would read it every Sunday, laughing together at Mr. Barry’s humor. A few years after college, in the early 1990s, my employer relocated me to Los Angeles. It was a rough transition for me, as I went from living large in Texas to feeling very alone in California. My father tried to pick me up by connecting with me in one of the ways he knew how – he’d mail me Dave Barry’s humor column each week, then call me a few days later so we could laugh about it.

Some 20 years later my father was in a nursing home, with a cruel, paralyzing disease that left him unable to speak, even though he could still hear and comprehend. I was back in Texas and living in the same city as my father, so I’d visit him a couple times per week. In addition to updating him about what was going on in my life, I’d read him a story from Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits on each visit. Although though my father couldn’t speak, he could still laugh, and he laughed heartily as I read to him.

The great news, as a I mentioned, is that Dave Barry’s humor column is back. Here are a few snippets from some of his recent columns:

“Marriage and Dementia” (4/21/2025)

So in two crucial areas of our married life — plumbing and remote controls — my brain handles the thinking for both of us. I also am in charge of some other areas, including:

- Turning off every single light in the house at least six times a day.
- Opening any mail we receive from financial institutions and, after frowning thoughtfully at the contents for 8 to 10 seconds, putting them in a "file."
- Spiders.

But there are other areas that my brain does not concern itself with, because I have come to rely on Michelle to think about them. One example is pillows. I never have to think about pillows, because Michelle apparently thinks about them 24/7, the result being that we have acquired enough pillows to blockade the Canadian border. Michelle is also extremely good at detecting odors, so I don't have to. Here's a conversation we have often:

MICHELLE: Do you smell that?

ME: Smell what?

MICHELLE: You can't smell that?

But Michelle's biggest mental responsibility is thinking for both of us about other people. I used to be involved with other people, but over time I outsourced pretty much all social interactions to Michelle, to the point where my only regular human contact, aside from Michelle, is the plumber. As a result, the social part of my brain now has the same level of neural activity as a rutabaga. This means that whenever we encounter another person, I depend on Michelle to supply me with critical information such as:

- Who is this person?
- Do I know this person?
- Am I related to this person?
- Do I have to talk to this person?
- If so, what should I say?

In another of his recent columns, I’m pretty sure that Dave Barry is the first person to have analogized a prostate exam with accessing Tallahassee from a backroad in Alabama.

There are times when it's not easy to be a male. I experienced one of these times a few days ago when, within a span of 20 minutes, three different people, two of whom I had not previously met and one of whom was a member of a completely different biological sex, asked me to lower my pants so they could handle parts of my body that I will refer to here, out of respect for their privacy, as my festicles (not their real name).

This happened at the office of my urologist. Like many older men, I see a urologist regularly, and I believe I speak for all of these men when I make the following urgent plea to the urology community: For the love of God, please find a way to get to the prostate gland other than the way you're getting to it now.

When you visit your urologist, he or she always examines your prostate, which is a tricky procedure because of where it's located. If we envision the male reproductive system as a map of Florida, the prostate would be Tallahassee. The problem is, there is no easy way to get to Tallahassee. So the current procedure is for the urologist to approach it via the back road from Alabama.

This means that the prostate examination is quite unpleasant for everyone involved.

Q. How unpleasant is it?
A. When it's about to happen, both you and the urologist are quietly hoping for a direct meteor strike.

With that thought in my mind, I’d like to thank Dave Barry again for reviving his humor column, and also thank him for his special role in how my father and I used Mr. Barry’s humor to lift each other up at difficult times in our lives.

Dave Barry can also be followed on Twitter at @rayadverb.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 07:30 PM

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