Dave Barry

(Excerpt from Dave Barry interview)

Did you actually never miss a deadline in more than thirty years?

That is true. I think one of the advantages I had was that I wrote a weekly column, instead of writing one every other day or three times a week. I had time to do other things, such as write books, which made working on the column never quite as oppressive as it could have been. Sometimes I’d get myself into these situations, like writing about the Super Bowl, where I was committed to produce a column every single day. You’re totally in the grip of coming up with another idea, and then another idea, and then another, and I cannot imagine living that way.

I took vacations and trips, but I could still write my column—it wasn’t that difficult. But that’s not saying I was like Mike Royko. I still don’t know how some columnists did it, Royko being Exhibit A.

How many columns did Royko write in a week, first for the Chicago Daily News and then later for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Tribune?

He wrote every day and, you know, if he didn’t publish a column, the newspaper sales would drop by $100,000. At least this is the legend. He just felt this immense pressure to be in the paper every day. I don’t know what that must be like. I never felt that type of pressure.

Was there ever any frustration that you couldn’t spend more time honing and re-writing an article?

No, I had a lot of time. And again, I had the advantage of writing only one column a week. I was always sure when I sent in the column that it was the best I could have done. Now, there were times when having done all that work I would think that that wasn’t the greatest topic for me. There were also times when I would look at a column after it was published and think, Man, I could have done that better. But I never had the feeling that I was just getting it in because there was no additional time to work on it. With that said, every now and then, when I would be at a political convention or at a sporting event working on deadline, I might have felt that more time would have been nice.

You started off as a reporter. Does your ability to write quickly come from that background—when you would consistently have to crank out articles before deadline?

I definitely think starting out as a journalist is good training for a columnist. You begin to understand the cycle of the paper and the deadlines, and you don’t think in terms of writing for the ages and literature and future generations—you just think in terms of getting it in the paper.

And yet, for a humorist, a week isn’t a long time. Many humorists are famous for re-writing a piece endlessly.

Basically, I had a two-or-three-day cycle where all I was doing was dealing with my column, and that’s a real luxury to me. After that it would be diminishing returns, or no returns. When you write humor, it’s not funny to you. It’s not even really that funny when you first think of the idea. There may be a glimmer of humor because it still seems vaguely original, but after a couple of days it’s not funny at all. You’re just trusting that it was, at some point, funny, and that your honing and tweaking is really improving it. I would eventually reach a point where I would just think, This feels old, even though nobody’s seen it but me.

You once said you were happy that readers didn’t know how your humor column was written. That a reader would have been disappointed by learning how the trick is pulled off—you compared it to being a magician.

I’ve often said that about humor, both spoken and written. It’s a lot like a magic trick, in that there’s a very mechanical way in which it’s done. There are a lot of obvious and basic structural things you do with a sentence and with a joke and how you set it up on the page. And the trick is to do it in such a way that it doesn’t look like there was any effort involved—that it’s somehow magic.

When a good stand-up comic is performing, he gives you the illusion that he’s thinking of these things as he’s speaking—every now and then this may be true, but generally it’s not. Generally, he has practiced every single joke, every single pause, every inflection, every facial expression, and found the ones that work the best. And when he does this quickly, it’s hilarious. To him, it’s executing something. And I think that’s what writing humor is sort of like. There’s a certain amount of inspiration, but there’s also a fair amount of work and repetition and practice and mechanics that are involved in making it look like it’s just happening magically, right then and there…