A family show

Being driven around Miami by Dave Barry, the city's and arguably America's best-loved humorist, is an educational experience. Taking a right turn at an intersection where this seems to be illegal, for example, he explains proudly: "In Miami, you're allowed to drive according to the laws of your country of origin."

Which would account for a lot. But it doesn't explain why more residents don't resort to the safety of public transport, especially the elevated Metrorail, a massively expensive white elephant which soars above the downtown traffic. "Not only does nobody use it," laments Dave; "nobody knows how to get up there."

The name Dave Barry would be largely unknown this side of the Atlantic were it not for the manager of Cork City's soccer team, who (despite claims to the contrary by the one in Miami) is a different person. But the Florida Dave is seriously famous in the US, where his Miami Herald column is syndicated to more than 500 newspapers, and has spawned 20 best-selling collections over the past two decades. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1988 and, for a time in the 1990s, was even the subject of a CBS sitcom, Dave's Life; with which he had absolutely no involvement, apart from being paid.

"The show has been cancelled," Barry's press biography notes, "but for the moment his life continues". And his life has had a couple of dramatic developments of late. After so many humour collections, he has finally written a novel (a comic one, of course). And after 19 years of being father to an only child, Robert, he now also has an eight-week-old daughter, Sophie, whose birth was described graphically in more than 500 newspapers last month.

Few subjects have escaped Barry's columns over the years, not even Ireland, although he has a limited and grotesquely distorted experience of this country, having spent two weeks here in the summer of 1995. Which, in case you don't remember, was a scorcher.

Sitting in a restaurant in Coconut Grove, one of Miami's particularly exotic suburbs, he's still laughing at the memory. "We had raincoats. We had umbrellas. We had, you know, spare shoes. Then we got over there and it was . . . ninety. None of the hotels had air-conditioning, so we tried to buy a fan, and all the stores had sold out of fans. We never saw any rain. We had a wonderful trip and everything was beautiful, but we did have trouble sleeping there, it was so hot at night."

In keeping with this altered-states view of Ireland, he and his sportswriter wife Michelle also attended a hurling match in Roscommon. "I called the hurling association and the only match on while we were there was Roscommon versus Galway. We were determined we were going to see this and we thought we'd better get there early because it was a big match, and I thought well OK, if worst comes to worst we can scalp some tickets."

This proved unnecessary, of course, and they got as close to the action as they cared to. Only one player wore a helmet, recalls Barry, who may or may not have been told (as he claims) that the player was only wearing a helmet because he'd lost an eye in a previous match: "It was a wonderful event.

We had never seen a sport like this. In the United States this would not be called a sport."

Although his surname comes from an ancestor who was adopted, Barry is "pretty sure" he's part-Irish, a point he needed to stress after he wrote about the trip, and got "really angry mail from Irish-Americans who objected to the suggestion I had made that there were pubs in Ireland".

Although long synonymous with Miami, Barry was born in Armonk, New York, in 1947. He worked for a time on a local newspaper, covering "a series of incredibly dull municipal meetings, some of which are still going on"; then spent eight years teaching effective business writing - "trying to get various business people to for God's sake stop writing things like: enclosed please find the enclosed enclosure" - before getting a job, and his big break, with the Herald.

A decade and a Pulitzer later, his place in American life reached new heights, or possibly depths, with the sitcom, written and produced more than 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles. "It was very weird. I never really figured out why they did it. All they really bought was a premise: he's a humour columnist, he lives in Miami, he has a kid, he has dogs. It really wasn't based on me. They figured out pretty early on that my life as represented in my columns didn't have a plot or any real meaning to it, and they had to have plots, so they wrote them."

The series ran for four years and taught him two things. "One is it's good to have your own sitcom because they send you money for doing nothing. And the other is you should tell them to use someone else's name."

His real family has made regular appearances in the column over the years and the situation is unlikely to change with the new arrival. But he has two strict rules on the subject. "First, my son and I have a deal we've had since he was a little boy: if I write about him, he can read it. He's never said no, but to this day I e-mail him anything I write.

"I didn't have to do that when he couldn't read, obviously. One of the things that really pissed me off about the educational system is they taught him to read. I'd sent him to public schools in the hope that that wouldn't happen, but it did anyway. Fortunately, Sophie can't read, so I get free shots at her for a few years."

The other rule is that it should be interesting to readers, not just to him. "The master of doing this was a woman named Erma Bombeck, a terrific columnist who wrote only about household things. She was a very smart lady, very funny lady and the one thing she knew was always to relate it to the readers." Bombeck's column was syndicated in the Evening Press for years.

"So I always try to say, OK, why am I writing about my family here? It better be because it's incredibly funny on its own - and every now and then something like that happens - or because it's something readers will recognise as part of their lives, too."

It was on the latter basis that he wrote about the deaths of both his parents: a gently humorous piece about his last conversation with his father; and a serious and even more gentle piece about his mother, whose life went sharply downhill after her husband's death and who committed suicide in 1987. He incorporated the tribute - strangely but movingly - in the book Dave Barry Turns 40 - along with a rare piece of serious advice to readers.

"People ask me where I got my sense of humour. Well, I got it from my mom, who had a very edgy, dark humour, sometimes verging on the bizarre. A terrific sense of the absurd. She also had a lot of emotional problems, obviously. But she had this wonderful sense of humour, and so I thought it would be nice to include that piece in a book somewhere. So there'd be some mention of my mom."

He worried about it being self-indulgent, but the huge response reassured him, much of it from people dealing with similar questions. In a slapstick book which otherwise poked fun at his and baby-boomer America's mid-life crisis, he felt the need to caution others that they couldn't necessarily understand what their parents were going through when they hadn't been through it themselves.

"There's a tendency we have to start talking to our parents as though they're children. That was the worst guilt I ever felt when my mom killed herself and I thought about all the things I'd said to her the previous year and not one of them was really treating her as an equal. It was all. . treating her as a problem, you know, somebody who needed to get her act together."

A lot of time has passed since - his last collection was Dave Barry Turns 50 and yet another, on politics, is on the way - and his material these days is as funny and fiercely unsentimental as it has been for most of the past 20 years.

A self-confessed "slow" writer, he still spends two days a week on his column, now his only obligation to the Herald. In his spare time, as his biography notes, he is a candidate for the US presidency, advocating the death penalty "for whoever is responsible for making Americans install low-flow toilets".

IN a campaign not burdened by consistency, he has also called for war with Canada to stop the importation of three-gallon toilets by Americans embarrassed at the inadequacy of their own. And whatever about his presidential chances, his concern with such issues has endeared him to millions.

The novel - Big Trouble - has been described by horror writer Stephen King as "the funniest damn thing I've read in almost 40 years" and by crime writer Elmore Leonard as "the funniest book I've read in 50 years". Against which, it should probably be noted that King is a member of the same all-author rock band, the Rock Bottom Remainders, as Barry; and Leonard advised him how to write a plot.

The book is also, as at least one otherwise admiring review pointed out, "not Huckleberry Finn"; but Barry laughs at the comparison. "I don't even begin to think of myself as a novelist," he admits, dismissing Big Trouble as "like the columns - a quick read, sheer entertainment . . . froth". That said, the book after the next will be another novel, setting a pattern he hopes to continue. And next time, he'll be a bit more ambitious.

"I have a humour columnist's mentality, in that I always assume readers would rather be doing something else. I'm always afraid of boring them. I'm happy that I achieved what I set out to do with Big Trouble, but the next novel I hope would have a little more depth to it. A little more patience on my part. More willingness to assume the reader will stick with me a little longer."

Big Trouble is published by Piatkus Books, London, price £9.99 in the UK.

The Miami Herald website is at www.herald.com. Frank McNally can be contacted at fmcnally@irish-times.ie