Reportedly Funny Man Turns Out To Actually Be Funny!

I'll Mature When I'm Dead: Dave Barry's Amazing Tales of Adulthood by Dave Barry
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dave Barry! Dave Barry! Dave Barry! The lame IT guy at my old job kept going on and on about Dave Barry, so of course I wanted nothing to do with him (Either of them, but mostly Barry). How funny could he be, especially since he was being recommended by a mundane white dude who sat simpering and gurgling behind his computer in a closet of an office all day?

Well, the answer is, Dave Barry is quite funny. I laughed, even aloud, a good many times. Sure, he sometimes sets up his jokes viewable from a mile away, but he's been a humor columnist for a good long while and he's developed a knack for it. He knows how to mine a topic for whatever nuggets of gold it may yield.

In I'll Mature When I'm Dead those topics include celebrities, parenthood, crack, Scarlet Johansson, marriage, writing screenplays, Miami, NY versus Miami, Scarlet Johansson and crack. As you can see, he does tend to go back to the well on occasion. One too many times a joke was punctuated by crack and his babe du jour was...any guesses? You got it: Scarlet Johansson.

Now, nick-picky complaints aside, I really did enjoy this book. The guy can be funny, especially when he's shooting the shit about everyday life, and he can satirize with the best of them. He sticks the Twilight books with a sharp barb in an extended spoof. His take on tv hit "24" is not quite as successful. You can tell he likes the show too much to do it any real harm.

However, the problem with topical humor books is that they don't tend to age well. Making fun of the Kardashians is already bland/easy humor, and so like the celebrities-of-the-moment that he bashes, Barry's book will too be soon irrelevant. But that really doesn't matter, because the prolific Barry will just churn out another. Just as more vacuous celebrities will be churned out... *shudder*