Life & Wisdom Quote by Dave Barry

Tribalism is funnier when it wears a helmet and insists it isnt tribalism. Dave Barry takes a petty slope-side feud and frames it like a Cold War cartoon: one side sees a "menace" (a word that belongs to crime reports and neighborhood watch emails), the other reduces its enemy to Elmer Fudd, the bumbling hunter forever outmatched by the rabbit he thinks he deserves to catch. The joke lands because both perspectives are embarrassingly self-serious. Skiers cast themselves as the responsible citizens defending order on the mountain; snowboarders reply with pure cultural contempt, treating skiers as a dated, rule-bound character from a pre-extreme-sports world.

Barry is pinpointing how quickly a shared activity becomes a status system. Skiing, especially in its old-money resort mythology, codes as tradition: lessons, rules, parallel turns, the right gear. Snowboarding arrived with a different aesthetic and soundtrack, and for years it was literally policed (bans at resorts, "no snowboarders" signage). That history hums underneath the one-liner. "Menace" isnt just about collisions; its about disruption. "Elmer Fudd" isnt just about clumsiness; its about being square, paternal, and out of step with the present.

The brilliance is that Barry refuses to arbitrate. He lets each camp indict itself: fear on one side, snobbery on the other. Its a compact satire of how identity hardens around minor differences, especially in leisure spaces where everyone is supposedly there to relax.