When I was growing up, there was one section in the paper I looked forward to before the comics (when young) and the sports section (when not as young): Dave Barry’s weekly column. If you haven’t heard of Dave Barry, I highly recommend you check out his work. I’m sure you can find it with a search online, and he writes books too, so look for them at your library. His definitive Guide to Guys is by far funnier and more insightful than anything I’ll ever write about my gender.
Not only did I enjoy reading Dave Barry, I wanted to write like him. And the thing with DB is, he’s trying to be funny. You can tell. There’s a formula to it. But he wrote the formula, and he executes it so well that it’s worth reading every time. I laugh at the vast majority of his jokes.
A friend forwarded me an article written by Dave Barry about his experience with a colonoscopy. About half the article is about MoviPrep, this stuff that you have to drink before a colonoscopy to clear out your system (he writes, “You have to drink the whole jug. This takes about an hour, because MoviPrep tastes–and here I am being kind–like a mixture of goat spit and urinal
cleanser, with just a hint of lemon.”).
He later describes the results of drinking MoviPrep: “You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another liter of MoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.”
Crude, yes; cras, yes; but in the end, Dave Barry doesn’t offend or insult anyone with his humor (as I apparently did yesterday in bringing up my version of Peter Pan Syndrome. Maybe I should have called it the Peter Pan Effect. That’s more accurate anyway). My hope is that people can get just as much enjoyment from this blog as I did from reading Dave Barry as a kid.
Endnote: If you prefer to watch humorous things instead of read humorous things, watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I laughed out loud for the majority of tonight’s episode, which focused on the gang’s attempt to give a poor family an unsolicited extreme home makeover. There’s a scene with two guys discussing the length of their jean shorts–which they were wearing because that’s what they seen construction workers wearing on TV–that had me rolling on the couch with laughter.
Did you know that the Always Sunny that you are referring to was directed by Fred Savage…yes, THE Fred Savage???
(turns out that, per imdb, a lot of the episodes are, but I think this is the first time I’ve noticed.)