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After Dinner Speaker | Author | Entertainment | Humor | Political Humor Dave Barry was born in Armonk, New York, in 1947, and has been steadily growing older ever since without ever actually reaching maturity. He attended public schools, where he distinguished himself by not getting in nearly as much trouble as he would have if the authorities had been aware of everything. He is proud to have been elected Class Clown by the Pleasantville High School class of 1965. Dave Barry went to Haverford College, where he was an English major and wrote lengthy scholarly papers filled with sentences that even he did not understand. He graduated in 1969 and eventually got a job with a newspaper named - this is a real name - the Daily Local News, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where he covered a series of incredibly dull municipal meetings, some of which are still going on. In 1975, Dave Barry joined Burger Associates, a consulting firm that teaches effective writing to businesspersons. He spent nearly eight years trying to get various businesspersons to stop writing things like, "Enclosed please find the enclosed enclosure," but he eventually realized that it was hopeless. So, in 1983 he took a job at The Miami Herald, and he has been there ever since, although he never answers the phone. His column appears in several hundred newspapers, yet another indication of the worsening drug crisis. In 1988 he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, pending a recount. (Many people are still trying to figure out how this happened.) Dave Barry has written over twenty short but harmful books, including, Babies and Other Hazards of Sex and Dave Barry Slept Here: A Short History of the United States. The critics have hailed his books, including Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down, The Greatest Invention in the History of Mankind Is Beer, and Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway as "containing virtually no useful information." In September of 1999, G.P. Putnam's Sons published his first comedic novel, Big Trouble, which was made into the movie Big Trouble in October 2002. Dave Barry's second comedic mystery novel, Tricky Business was published in September 2002 and a collection of his columns, entitled Boogers Are My Beat was published in September 2004. The CBS television series Dave's World was based on two of his books; the show has been canceled, but for the time being Dave Barry's life continues. Also, he set fire to a pair of underpants with a Barbie doll on Late Night with David Letterman and owns a guitar that was once played by Bruce Springsteen. Dave Barry plays lead guitar in a literary rock band called the Rock Bottom Remainders, whose other members include Stephen King, Amy Tan, Ridley Pearson, and Mitch Albom. They are not musically skilled, but they are extremely loud.
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