My Collection Of My Favorite's Favorites

The next assignment in my quest to become a more competent, compelling, and kooky humor writer as mentioned in I Can Learn To Be Funny? is to decide who’s my most favoritest humorist and then snag 25 quotes. After much deliberation between Phyllis Diller and Dave Barry, I chose the latter. Not because Ms. Diller is any less funny, but because she’s all about the perfect one-sentence joke. My style is more about telling a story. Let me rephrase that: writing a story. I can’t even talk to myself in the mirror, let alone to a crowd of humans. So I’m going with Writer Dave’s work.

“But what about Mark Twain,” you ask. “His quotations have comprised most of your lists up to this point. Wasn’t he the consummate humor writer?”

Beloved reader, you have been reading my posts! Now I know for sure that I have two readers, including myself. To answer your insightful question: Yes, but our beloved Twain is dead. The fact that Mr. Barry and I live at the same time (and in the same country) makes his living, breathing, laughing work more interesting to me.

25 Favorite Dave Barry Quotes
To help prevent skullduggery and favoritism they’re in alphabetical order mostly. Other super important Dave links: Dave's blog, DaveBarry.com, and Wikipedia.

A gene can be either dominant or recessive, depending on which type of gene it is.

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages.

Congress is thinking about eliminating a federal program under which scientists broadcast signals to alien beings. This would be a large mistake. Alien beings have nuclear blaster death cannons. You cannot cut off their federal programs as if they were merely poor people.

Dogs need to sniff the ground; it's how they keep abreast of current events. The ground is a giant dog newspaper, containing all kinds of late-breaking dog news items, which, if they are especially urgent, are often continued in the next yard.

Dogsled-riding is a sport that is relaxing as well as fragrant.

Hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby. (This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print.)

Human skin is actually made up of billions of tiny units of protoplasm, called "cells"! And what is even more interesting, the ones on the outside are all dying! This is a fact. Your skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the older veteran cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and obtained offices with nice views, are constantly being shoved out the window head first, without so much as a pension plan, by younger hotshot cells moving up from below.

I am darned proud of this script. I have been working on it, without sleeping or eating, except for two grilled cheese sandwiches, for the better part of the last 35 minutes.

I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the "bare bones" of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring.

I myself did not wind up at the New York Times. I wound up at a competing newspaper, the Daily Local News of West Chester, Pa. As its name suggests, the Daily Local News covered local news and came out daily, unless you counted Sunday as a day.

I realize that I'm generalizing here, but as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care.

If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

I'm not the only taxpayer who has no idea what he's sending to the IRS. This year, only 28% of all Americans will prepare their own tax returns, according to a voice in my head that invents accurate-sounding statistics.

In terms of appearance, hair is one of the most the most important features of a woman's entire body. In a recent poll, the Gallup organization asked 1,500 men what part of a woman they look at first, and they denied that they look at women at all, because their wives were standing right next to them. But they were lying. They definitely look at women, and one of the things they notice is hair. "Yes, that woman probably had hair," they'll say, if questioned.

It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.

It is inhumane, in my opinion, to force people who have a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently view it as some kind of recreational activity. I bet this kind of thing does not happen to heroin addicts. I bet that when serious heroin addicts go to purchase their heroin, they do not tolerate waiting in line while some dilettante in front of them orders a hazelnut smack-a-cino with cinnamon sprinkles.

Never under any circumstances take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

No matter how much you love your spouse, eventually the smooth unblemished surface of your relationship will be marred by a small pimple of anger, which, if ignored, can grow into a major festering zit of rage that will explode and spew forth a really disgusting metaphor that I don't wish to pursue any further here.

Our dogs' most important duty, of course, is barking. They use the energy-conserving Two-Dog Alternating Bark Procedure: a deep BARK from Earnest, followed immediately by a high, irritating yip! from Zippy, followed immediately by another BARK, and so on BARK yip! BARK yip! for several days, if necessary. They implement this procedure whenever their keen senses detect that one of the following Danger Red Alert situations has occurred:

    1. Somebody is at the door.
    2. Nobody is at the door.
    3. Another dog—any dog, anywhere in the
        universe—is barking.
    4. None of the above.

Scientists tell us that the fastest animal on earth, with a top speed of 120 feet per second, is a cow that has been dropped out of a helicopter.

Summer vacation season is almost here, and if you have kids, you know what that means! It's time to put them up for adoption.

The easiest way to make a fruitcake is to buy a darkish cake, then pound some old, hard fruit into it with a mallet. Be sure to wear safety glasses.

The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free information hot lines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly. If you ask them a real tax question, such as how you can cheat, they're useless.

The simple truth is that balding African-American men look cool when they shave their heads, whereas balding white men look like giant thumbs.

We'll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail.

(My favoritest favorite's favorite is the one with four steps explaining why his two dogs bark.) (Not that you asked.)

For the backstory on why I'm doing this, read my previous post, I Can Learn To Be Funny?