Book: Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up

Overview
Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up gathers a run of Barry’s Miami Herald columns from the late 1980s and early 1990s into a compact tour of real-life absurdity. The title is both a promise and a punch line: these essays spring from genuine news items, everyday catastrophes, and reader tips so improbable that the writer repeatedly pauses to swear they actually happened. What results is a snapshot of American life in an era of camcorders, newfangled gadgets, and rising safety warnings, filtered through a voice that finds the ridiculous seam in everything from government memos to backyard projects.

Structure and Scope
The collection is arranged as short, self-contained essays, typically a few pages each, grouped by loose themes such as domestic life, travel, technology, holidays, and public institutions. Barry moves briskly from household misadventures to national headlines, from the chaos of parenting to the strange theater of civic bureaucracy. He often anchors an essay with an authentic news clipping or reader letter and then explodes it into a comic set piece, circling back to the source to remind you he isn’t kidding about the facts. The pieces are designed to be dipped into, but together they map a consistent worldview of cheerful skepticism.

Voice and Techniques
Barry’s signature tone is mock-authoritative and breezily meticulous. He piles on exact details, escalates scenarios until they teeter, and then snaps them back to the original, verifiable oddity. He favors deadpan disclaimers, vivid analogies, and bursts of capital-letter emphasis at the moments when common sense should have prevailed and didn’t. Running gags, his salute to “Alert Readers,” the strategic “Note: I am not making this up,” the harassed everyman narrator, create continuity across varied subjects. The humor is accessible and conversational, often playing the expert fool who explains complicated things so plainly that their silliness can’t hide.

Subjects and Situations
Domestic life is an inexhaustible engine for disaster: home improvement projects that metastasize, toys that require a mechanical engineering degree, pets and pests that do not behave like the brochure promised. Travel yields its own inventory of indignities, from airline announcements that soothe no one to road trips where children and snack foods achieve destructive synergy. Holidays become competitive rituals, lighting displays, elaborate costumes, office parties, where planning and pride collide. Barry also trawls the public record for peculiar triumphs of bureaucracy, official communications that say nothing, and safety practices that go so far they loop around to unsafe.

Real-World Absurdity
A recurring pleasure is Barry’s affection for the way truth outpaces satire. Oddball scientific “breakthroughs,” arcane state laws, inexplicable product labels, and small-town epics arrive like found comedy, and he treats them with equal parts glee and incredulity. Technology, especially early-’90s consumer tech, appears as an arena where devices promise to simplify life and reliably make it weirder. Even when he lampoons institutions, committees, commissions, corporate policies, he avoids cynicism, preferring to portray a nation enthusiastically overcomplicating simple tasks.

Effect and Aftertaste
Read consecutively, the columns sketch a comic ethnography of America: homes crammed with gadgets and good intentions, workplaces diligent about procedures and light on outcomes, families improvising solutions that create new problems. Barry’s real subject is the gap between official rationality and human behavior. The book’s pace and variety keep the laughs frequent, but the pieces also fix a time and texture, the language, fads, fears, and small comforts of the period. By insisting the stories are true, Barry doesn’t merely strengthen the joke; he invites readers to recognize their own households and headlines in the parade of mishaps. The result is a brisk, affectionate catalog of everyday life going entertainingly sideways.