Described as "equal parts incisive observer and eighth-grade class clown," Dave Barry wrote a nationally syndicated column for The Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005. "Thanks to my solid academic training," he once wrote, "today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information, which is how I got a good job in journalism."

A master of hyperbole, Barry often insists that he is "not making this up." As you read the following excerpts from a column composed in the mid-1980s, decide for yourself whether Barry may still be telling the truth even when he is making things up.

from "Revenge of the Pork Person"*

by Dave Barry

I have never met a woman, no matter how attractive, who wasn't convinced, deep down inside, that she was a real woofer. Men tend to be just the opposite. A man can have a belly you could house commercial aircraft in and a grand total of eight greasy strands of hair, which he grows real long and combs across the top of his head so that he looks, when viewed from above, like an egg in the grasp of a giant spider, plus this man can have B.O. to the point where he interferes with radio transmissions, and he will still be convinced that, in terms of attractiveness, he is borderline Don Johnson.

But not women. Women who look perfectly fine to other people are always seeing horrific physical flaws in themselves. I have this friend, Janice, who looks very nice and is a highly competent professional with a good job and a fine family, yet every now and then she will get very depressed, and do you want to know why? Because she thinks she has puffy ankles.

This worries her much more often than, for example, the arms race. Her image of herself is that when she walks down the street, people whisper: "There she goes! The woman with the puffy ankles!" . . .

What women think they should look like, of course, is the models in fashion advertisements. This is pretty comical, because when we talk about fashion models, we are talking about mutated women, the results of cruel genetic experiments performed by fashion designers so lacking in any sense of human decency that they think nothing of putting their initials on your eyeglass lenses. These experiments have resulted in a breed of fashion models who are 8 and sometimes 10 feet tall, yet who weigh no more than an abridged dictionary due to the fact that they have virtually none of the bodily features we normally associate with females such as hips and (let's come right out and say it) bosoms. The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates. If a normal human woman puts on clothing designed for these unfortunate people, she is quite naturally going to look like Revenge of the Pork Person.
 
Selected Works by Dave Barry

• Stay Fit and Healthy Until You're Dead, 1985
• Dave Barry's Greatest Hits, 1988
• Dave Barry Turns 40, 1990
• Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys, 1996
• Dave Barry Turns 50, 1998
• Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down, 2000
• Dave Barry's History of the Millennium, 2007
• I'll Mature When I'm Dead: Dave Barry's Amazing Tales of Adulthood, 2010
• Insane City, 2013

 

* First published in The Miami Herald, "Revenge of the Pork Person" is included in Dave Barry's Greatest Hits (Ballantine Books, 1988).