Dave Barry Quotes

Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.

You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.

You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it.

Satire works best when it hews close to the line between the outlandish and the possible - and as that line continues to grow thinner, the satirist's task becomes ever more difficult.

In a satire, you need foolishness.

It's a challenge to do satire when the thing you're satirizing is almost beyond satire, but I think that's a challenge for everybody.

And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head.

I've been around long enough now that people who don't get into the outrageousness, the over-the-top stuff, they know not to buy my books anymore.

If you're satirizing something, you're hitting at something that's real and true, and putting it on its head, and we did that with 'Tropic Thunder.'

This whole thing has become a pantomime.

You can't satirise darts, because it's hyper-real as it is; there's already enough over-the-top madness to it.

The people of the State of Texas consist principally of men, women, and children, with a sprinkling of cowboys. The weather is very good, thermometer rarely rising above 2,500 degrees in the shade and hardly ever below 212.

Satire, whether it be satire or not, everything has to have boundaries.

I exaggerate all our selves, our beings. I make fun of everything: of our life and what we are. But I don't tell jokes, really. I just exaggerate life, and it comes out funny.

I think satire is most effective when you love the thing you're satirizing rather than... have a vendetta against it.

In 'John Henry Days,' I was taking my idea of junketeering and sort of blowing it up to absurd extremes.

Effective satire has to be almost identical to the subject that it is skewering.

Mike Judge is my Jonathan Swift, and I say that because I don't know any other satirists. But the problem with satire is that it's so easily misinterpreted.

'W1A' is heightened naturalism, whereas 'The Windsors' is like the fever dream of a 'National Enquirer' reader.

That's what people forget about, is that when things are very, very powerful in a sad way, they have that possibility of also being over-the-top, hysterically funny.

I have tremendous affection for New York and my life, but I'm a satirist at heart. And it's easy to satirize New York.

People say the comedy is so shocking, but if you read newspapers or look around generally - I mean, obviously I'm not writing about all the lovely things that there are, which I do see as well - but there is a lot of outrageousness around, slightly covered up. And obviously, it's fun to take that a little bit further.

I love when people overexaggerate. It's so funny to me.

Whatever Brett Favre does, it's a sign of the apocalypse.

If you have a mother-in-law with only one eye and she has it in the center of her forehead, don't keep her in the living room.