Dave Barry
I hate rap music, which to me sounds like a bunch of angry men shouting, possibly because the person who was supposed to provide them with a melody never showed up.Collection: Funny
A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.Collection: Inspirational
If you look at photos of the Gettysburg Address there's a guy off to the right who I think is Keith Richards.Collection: Thinking
Scientists tell us that the fastest animal in the world, with a speed of 120 mph, is a cow dropped out of a helicopter.Collection: Science
But from the perspective of the aging parent, there is no major difference between four and fifteen, except that when your child is four, his motoring privileges are restricted to little toy Fisher-Price vehicles which are unlikely (although I would not totally rule it out in America) to sue you.Collection: Children
The primary function of the government is - and here I am quoting directly from the U.S. Constitution - 'to spew out paper.'Collection: Government
I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that, like most books, it had too many words.Collection: Funny
If you answered, ''Spin the Bottle,'' then I frankly do not want to know any more about your childhood.Collection: Childhood
No man had ever knocked little Richard down. But of course Ammm was not a man.Collection: Men
If Mozart had power tools, there's no telling how great his music might have been.Collection: Tools
Think, for a moment, of the countless happy childhood hours you spent with this amazing device: Drawing perfect horizontals, drawing perfect verticals, drawing really spastic diagonals, trying to scrape away the silver powder from the window so you could look inside.Collection: Thinking
The nicest Father's Day surprise of all for Dad would be if you handed him a box, and he unwrapped it, and there, inside, sitting on a bed of folded tissue, was the pair of his undershorts that somebody threw away six months ago (without asking Dad) because they had reached the stage where they were 3 percent undershorts and 97 percent holes. Dad misses those undershorts. They were his Faithful Undershorts Companion.Collection: Fathers Day
Smee! Raise the Ladies!Collection: Raises
I think Superman should go on the Larry King show and announce that he would come back to life if people in all 50 states wanted him to.Collection: Kings
Black Stache had no love for the Queen, no love for women of any sort, except for his ma. He had a real soft spot for his ma, and was truly sorry for the time he’d marooned her.Collection: Queens
It's very slow for me to create humor. It takes me a long time to write a humor piece. It takes days.Collection: Writing
The term SAT is a set of initials, or autonym, standing for Scholastic Attitude Treaty Organization.Collection: Attitude
The question is, why are politicians so eager to be president? What is it about the job that makes it worth revealing, on national television, that you have the ethical standards of a slime-coated piece of industrial waste?Collection: Jobs
More and more products are coming out in fiercely protective packaging designed to prevent consumers from consuming them. These days you have to open almost every consumer item by gnawing on the packaging.Collection: Packaging
Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art.Collection: Art
Land!” shouted Thomas. “Is there food?” asked Tubby Ted.Collection: Land
A secret society within a secret society.Collection: Secret
Epcot Center also features pavilions built by various foreign nations, where you can experience an extremely realistic simulation of what life in these nations would be like if they consisted almost entirely of restaurants and souvenir stores.Collection: Funny
Spiders so large they appear to be wearing the pelts of small mammals.Collection: Mammals
Nobody is excused from the excellence trend. Babies are not excused. Starting right after they get out of the womb, modern babies are exposed to instructional flashcards designed to make them the best babies they can possibly be, so they can get into today's competitive preschools. Your eighties baby sees so many flashcards that he never gets an unobstructed view of his parents' faces. As an adult, he'll carry around a little wallet card that says "7x9=63," because it will remind him of mother.Collection: Funny
There was nowhere to sit except the bunk, which was covered with rotting food, and a wooden stool, upon which sat a large fur-covered lump—an old cheese, perhaps, or a dead cat.Collection: Cat
I was very pleased to get a Supreme Court justice suggesting a column, so I went and did a column about Beano. I went with my wife and another guy to a Mexican restaurant, which we thought would be the ultimate test for an antiflatulance product. There's a reason most of Mexico is located out of doors. And it worked. Several newspapers refused to run that column. But they did run advertisements for Beano.Collection: Running
Entire new continent can emerge from the ocean in the time it takes for a Web page to show up on your screen. Contrary to what you may have heard, the Internet does not operate at the speed of light; it operates at the speed of the DMV.Collection: Ocean
You can't have a bad time at Disney World. It's not allowed. They have hidden electronic surveillance cameras everywhere, and if they catch you failing to laugh with childlike wonder, they lock you inside a costume representing a beloved Disney character such as Goofy and make you walk about in the Florida heat getting grabbed and leaped on by violently excited children until you have learned your lesson.Collection: Funny
Washington is nicknamed "The Evergreen State" because it sounds better than "The Incessant Nagging Drizzle State."Collection: Nagging
A critical function that we journalists perform at political conventions is to try to get into parties that we have not been invited to. There are dozens of these parties, sponsored by large corporations with a sincere public-spirited desire to become larger.Collection: Funny
You're not allowed to park a truck in your driveway. You're not allowed to work on your house on Sunday. The people who enforce these laws are nuts. After I wrote a column on this, I got I don't know how many letters from Coral Gables homeowners, story after story after story, wonderfully horrible stories. And the venom they felt for their own government!Collection: Sunday
Be advised that there is no parking in Europe.Collection: Funny
Are we ever going to have a federal tax system that regular people can understand?Collection: People
The Japanese tend to communicate via nuance and euphemism, often leaving important things unsaid; whereas Americans tend to think they're being subtle when they refrain from grabbing the listener by the shirt.Collection: Funny
The Hawaiian Islands were discovered by hardy Polynesian sailors, who crossed thousands of miles of open ocean in primitive canoes, braving violent storm-tossed seas for months at a time. My family and I arrived by modern commercial aviation, which was infinitely worse.Collection: Funny
U.S. News Organizations observe the anniversary of September 11 with investigations about the nation's continuing vulnerability to terrorism. First, the New York Daily News reports that two of its reporters carried box cutters, razor kinves, and pepper spray on fourteen commerical flights without getting caught. Then ABC News reports that it smuggled fifteen pounds of uranium into New York City. Then Fox News reports that it flew Osama bin Laden to Washington, D.C., and videotaped him touring the White House.Collection: New York
Democracy: In which you say what you like and do what you're told.Collection: Freedom
When I say 'serve you better,' I mean 'increase our profits.' We newspapers are very big on profits these days.Collection: Mean
I feel that nasal spray is a wondrous medical achievement, because it is supposed to relieve nasal congestion, and by gadfrey, it relieves nasal congestion. What I'm saying is that it actually works, which is something you can say about very few other aspects of the medical establishment.Collection: Funny
We're trying to make our current house look domestic so that somebody will want to buy it. We're making a lot of simple, obvious improvements that never would have occurred to us to make while we actually lived here, because, tragically, we both happen to be domestically impaired. If we were birds, our nest would consist of a single twig with the eggs attached via Scotch tape.Collection: Simple
I grew up in the Southwest Bronx. Father an accountant, mother a schoolteacher. Brother was six years older, which explains why I gobbled crystal meth at 12, smoked hashish at 13, and was shooting smack at 17, which explains how I got Hepatitis C, which was the basis of my first book, which was a humor book about dying.Collection: Mother
During bomb drills, we students were told to crouch under our desks. Apparently the desks used in classrooms in the fifties were made of an exceptionally missile-resistant variety of wood. During the Cold War years I often wondered why it never occurred to our defense planners to protect the entire nation from nuclear attack by simply covering it, from sea to shining sea, with a huge Strategic Classroom Desk.Collection: War
Trails need to be reconstructed. Please avoid building trails that go uphill.Collection: God
You can use the Internet to find out, from anywhere on the planet: exactly how much coffee is in a certain coffee machine at Cambridge University in England; exactly how many sodas are available in certain vending machines at certain major universities; and much, much more.Collection: Coffee
We should call editorials what they are: columns written by committees.Collection: Columns
You cannot paint the exterior of your house. You have to take the paint chip down to show the paint-chip Nazis.Collection: House
I've never been struck by lightning as far as I know, so the Higher Power is treating me as well as even those people who love him very much.Collection: People
I hate to speak for the whole society, but I will. I'm a journalist, it's my job. There's been something of a reaction against political correctness. Needless to say, the government hasn't caught up yet.Collection: Jobs