The New York Times has pronounced DAVE BARRY “the funniest man in America.” But of course that could have been on a slow news day when there wasn’t much else fit to print.
True, his bestselling collections of columns are legendary, but it is his wholly original books, like this one, that reveal him as an American icon. Dave Barry Slept Here was his version of American history. Dave Barry Does Japan was a contribution to international peace and understanding from which Japan has not yet fully recovered. Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys is among the best-read volumes in rehab centers and prisons. And now, with his take on American politics, and, especially, Washington, D.C., he takes his place with de Tocqueville and Larry King as a truly infamous explicator on and commentator of the process by which we find, fund, and … (fill in your own four-letter word here) our pols and public servants.
Raised in a suburb of New York, educated in a suburb of Philadelphia, he lives now in a suburb of Miami. (Won’t they let him into the cities? Read him on, for example, Miami, which played such a pivotal role in the last presidential election, and you’ll understand why.)
He is not, as he often puts it so poetically, making this up.