Canter Bridge

I’ve got to stop apologizing for liking Dave Barry’s Junior-High humor. Maybe there’s a transitioning middle schooler in each of us.

Dave Barry Turns Fifty is not the Miami humor writer’s best shot at bedtime reading guffaws. But it’s good. I’ve come to think that Barry is at his best—like most of us—when he sticks to his main thing. His effort to characterize the years and decades of his growing towards fifty is sometimes grumpy without being funny.

But when he’s good, well, he’s very, very good.

Fifty used to seem so old. In Dave Barry’s hands, it’s barely thirteen.