Friday funny

I simply can't help myself from sharing this plug about my fellow funny libertarian, Dave Barry. In this article, a Slate.com writer makes the case for Dave replacing William Safire.

Now of course, I think the funniest newspaper writer around is Neil Steinberg (that's the second plug he's received on this blog, so please go read his stuff), and I'm catching on to James Lileks. But Dave does make me laugh, and he has an honored place in my history, dating back to when I was a little twerp of a humor columnist myself.

Back at Emma Willard, as a high-school senior, I got to write the funny stuff for our newspaper, The Clock. A picture of me wearing a propeller beanie appeared next to my descriptions of other people's salads and what it was like to be something of a Southern girl in the frozen North.

Several of my friends were Dave Barry fans, having succeeded on the AP U.S. History exam by reading his book Dave Barry Slept Here. As Dave would say, I am not making this up. Sure, it's a silly satire, but it really helped us remember such oddities as the XYZ affair and the several occasions "widely believed to be the end of Nixon's career."

Perhaps seeking to make his own mark on history, Dave runs for president. So in the fall of 1992, as part of the Clock's hard-hitting election coverage, one of my friends wrote a story about Dave for the paper. She called the Miami Herald and asked for a "Dave Barry for President" bumper sticker. She got to interview him, begging because our friend the newspaper editor was getting edgy about her getting the story done, and he sent a note telling the editor to "chill out."

Dave Barry helped me learn how to be funny at the time I was just figuring out that I could be funny. And it turns out he was one of the first libertarians I became familiar with, well before I knew I could call myself a libertarian, that being a rare thing within the walls of a girls' school. You can make fun of his sometimes predictable style, but anyone that can get so many millions of people to read something libertarian has a special talent.

Who knows if Dave will end up on the op-ed page of the New York Times. But Slate is right -- he's more important than people think.