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Dave Barry On ‘You Can Date Boys When You Are Forty,’ Justin Bieber [VIDEO EXCLUSIVE]
Dave Barry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and long-time humor columnist at The Miami Herald, recently released his latest book, You Can Date Boys When You’re Forty. “We need to find a cure for puberty in girls, because it is a radical transformation,” Barry told Uinterview exclusively. “All of a sudden, not only does she care about boys, but boys care about her and they’re all over the place.”
Barry also sounds off today’s celebrities — including Justin Bieber, whose concert he attended with his daughter. “He took off his shirt, which was pretty silly I thought,” Barry told Uinterview. “He’s got the same body as the Geico Gecko!”
Well with my son, who's older, puberty was not that big a deal. He became a larger, hairier, smellier boy. And that's essentially what puberty is in boys. Because let's be honest, men are nothing but large, hairy, smelly boys â not a big change. With girls, it's radical-puberty is very, very different in girls. We need to find a cure for puberty in girls, because it is a radical transformation. She was, you know, in my daughter's case when she was a little girl, princess, loved her dad, wanted me to tell her stories, that kind of thing suddenly Bam! She's this woman, like this grown woman walking around. And, first of all she doesn't have any time anymore for her dad or her mom. There's no time for parents in general, because girls are very social, but only with other girls. So like she is, she's now 14, and she is closer, personal friends, best friends with every other 14-year-old girl, as far as I can tell, in North America. And they're all connected on this social network, you know, various platforms. And each one of them emits every ten to 15 seconds a text or something, updating her status. So my daughter has to keep track, of course, of her 19 million 14-year-old friends, which means she has to look at her phone, all day long, all the time like this and she can't look at me for five seconds 'cause she would miss like 80 or 90 important updates from her friends: 'lol, lol, lol, lol' so that's one thing. Then there's boys; you know when she's a little girl she's not, you don't really care about boys. Then all of a sudden, not only does she care about boys, but boys care about her and their all over the place. They're out on our lawn, they're on our roof, they're in the trees, they're like squirrels, they're everywhere. And I know what they're thinking, 'cause I use to be a boy. I'm a male. I know what males are thinking. We're scum; we're all scum, okay? We don't want this gender around our daughter. My solution to that problem would be traps, like a humane, steel trap on the lawn so when a boy came it would have some kind of bait that would attract 14-year-old boys like fireworks or a video game, something like that. And there would be a, 'Clang!' You know? And I'd go out there and there'd be a boy out there trapped on the lawn. And, um, you know I'm not talking about anything violent. I live down in Miami; I would drive him out into the Everglades and release him in a humane manner. But my wife who is a woman, she's been a woman her whole life, doesn't know what men are thinking, what boys are thinking, so she lets them into the house and it's uh, it's pretty scary.
I went. When my daughter was 13, loved Justin Bieber. She's 14 now so she doesn't love him anymore she loves something else called One Direction. But then she was 13, and she wanted to go to a Justin Bieber concert. I took her, and it was the loudest thing Iâd ever experienced in my life. I've been to, I been in a hurricane. Okay, I was in Hurricane Andrew; it went right over my house. Hurricane Andrew, the whole thing was not as loud as the girls sitting to my right at the Justin Bieber concert. You know like every time Justin Bieber would run by they would go, 'Ahhh,' screaming - 'I love you Justin.' 'Cause girls, the way they show they're happy is they cry, like that. They sound like they're having surgery without anesthesia; that's when they're really happy. Anyway, Justin Bieber went running by and running by, so like his concert is more like a track meet. You know he just keeps running around and running around. At one point he took off, he took off his shirt, which was pretty silly I thought, because he doesn't have - he's not Channing Tatum. You know he, he's got the same body as the Geico Gecko. But he took his shirt off and, 'Aah Justin I love you.' And there's that, so that's anyway that's another one. There's actually a bunch of essays in this book that are unrelated to parenting.
Well, I think we use to be more manly. Guys use to be able to fix things to do things. Now, generally we've gotten soft. You know we don't even flush our own urinals. Guys don't. You know you use the urinal there's a little red thing there, and it's connected with somebody, and I don't know who and then they flush it for you. They go, 'Okay he's ready now, oh oh hold it, okay now.' So I, we think it's like we're being manly if we successfully install an app on our phone. You know, we've lost the pioneer spirit. So I have a chapter of unmanliness talking about how to do certain things; talking about how to jumpstart a car, how to cook a steak, that kind of thing. And also, tips on what to wear. Here's a tip: do not where capris pants!
I can't stand the Viagra ads. I mean because first of all for the subject. You really, do we have to, you know in the middle of a football game with your kids around, do we really have to talk about erectile dysfunction. Does that really have to be the topic? But also, the ads are so ridiculous. The one I make fun of in the book is the one where there's like a cowboy guy driving a pickup truck in the west, and he's got a trailer with two horses in the trailer and he breaks down. The announcer goes, 'You've reached the age where you don't back down from a challenge.' This is such a lie. I am 66 years old. The reason I am 66 years old is I'm perfectly willing now to back down from a challenge. That's the key to being an older guy. You learn. You're happy to back down from a challenge. And if you have any doubt about that, go to YouTube and search for the phrase 'shoot bottle rocket out of butt.' And you'll find a whole lot of guys doing this. Not one of these is an older guy. Why? Because those are guys that are going, 'Bet you won't shoot a bottle rocket out of your butt,' and the young idiot guys go, 'Oh yeah, well I will.' They don't back down from a challenge. And they end up going to the emergency room with like third degree burns on their butts. No, you don't see any older guys doing that, because we back down from challenges. That should be our motto.
Very little [laughs]! I read Fifty Shades of Grey because 100 million women bought that book. It's an incredibly successful book. And I thought like, 'Alright! I will find out what women want. The plot of the book, I don't want to give too much away here, is this woman falls in love with a hot billionaire. A twenty-seven-year-old hot, billionaire. Um, which is understandable, okay, he's a hot billionaire, and she tells you every three sentences how hot he is and how billionaire-y he is. And, but here's the thing. He wants to tie her up and hit her. That's what he likes to do. That's his thing. So the whole plot-it's 300 pages of 'boy he's a hot billionaire, I want to tie you up and hit you, I don't want you to tie me up and hit me, but you're a hot billionaire, da da da da,' goes on and on. Finally, she lets him tie her up and hit her and guess what? It hurts. So she doesn't like it, and she breaks up with him and that's the book, that's the end. It's like at the end of this book I read all that, and I said to my wife, 'Do you secretly want me to tie you up and hit you? And she said, 'No!' So I learned nothing from that book at all, except that maybe it's good to be a hot billionaire, but I knew that before I started.
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