Dave Barry: evaluation

Transcript context

…Which makes you funny. And the constant worry that you no longer can do it, and that you’re not funny any more. As soon as you start to be pretty confident that anything you write is great, then you’re going to suck in any creative field, I think. But then also, a certain impatience or fear of getting into too much of a rut, so wanting to try new things that you feel are in your wheelhouse. If I had said that I wanted to become a playwright, I think I would’ve been stretching too far. I don’t know anything about being a playwright. I wasn’t trained, I haven’t studied, whatever. But I did feel that I could go from writing funny essays to maybe trying to write a funny novel — if I looked at the funny novel as a series of funny scenes with some kind of plot, which is a crude way of looking at it. But at least it was connected in a way that I thought, maybe, could make it work. It’s a combination of insecurity, needing to keep producing, and fear of boredom, wanting to do something new that you still felt you could do competently, or at least not embarrass yourself. What was it like playing music with Roger McGuinn? [laughter]…

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