Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys Read online

  “BARRY IS IN TOP FORM …

  [He] dazzles with wit, with language itself: the expertly paced sentence leading up to the surprising word or phrase … Barry will make you laugh loud enough to jeopardize your lease…. Reading it, I found myself laughing so hard many times that I could not finish the sentence that started me laughing in the first place. I’m not talking chuckles here; I’m talking doubled-over, rip-open-your-gall-bladder-incision guffaws. Virtually any one page contains enough hilarity to justify the cost of the book.”

  —Miami Herald

  “The Robert Bly of the Guy Movement.”

  —Newsday

  “The reason [Dave Barry’s] humor is so widely read and loved is that it cuts so close to the bone. The superficial frivolity of Barry’s journalism disguises a keen understanding of men: men in groups, men alone, men with women…. Quoting Barry is like eating peanuts, or, as he probably would prefer, drinking beer; once you get started it’s awfully hard to stop.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Dave Barry is the most consistently funny, deceptively playful satirist this side of Twain and Thurber.”

  —People

  “DAVE BARRY AT HIS BEST …

  “Read it for yourself. Read it to your significant other. Read and enjoy. As the fellow on the TV commercial says, ‘I guarantee it.’”

  —Tulsa World

  “The point of reading Dave Barry is to savor the anecdotes, the stories clipped from newspapers and sent in by adoring readers, the mention of the author’s pets, and son…. Barry’s talent is to put all the little noodges and itches and adjustments and adaptations of a daily life lived with other human beings in the perspective of the big picture.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Insightful about the plight of being male—and the plight of being female trying to figure out males.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “If you’re looking for guffaws, chuckles, and hee-haws, this first-rate book is indispensable reading.”

  —The Southern Register

  “REALLY FUNNY AND QUITE SILLY …

  There are keen observers of the human experience. There are chroniclers of mankind’s seemingly aimless trek through time. Then there’s Dave Barry…. Dave’s really hit the male on the head with Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys.”

  —Birmingham News

  “You don’t need to read past the first two pages to realize the Complete Guide to Guys is going to be a good time … What makes Dave Barry funny is his power of observation and his ability to take the commonplace and make it absurd. And he considers nothing sacred.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “With an appropriate dedication to ‘whoever invented the remote control,’ Dave Barry is off and running with his new humor book before he even hits the first page.”

  —San Antonio Express News

  “Going gonzo on time-tested verities—that guys love gadgets, beer, sex, and sports to the exclusion of all else—exaggerator extraordinaire Barry expatiates on the essentials of guyness…. A little earthy, a lotta fun, these sophomoric musings maintain the reputation of the bombastic booster of balderdash.”

  —Booklist

  By Dave Barry:

  DAVE BARRY’S GUIDE TO MARRIAGE AND/OR SEX

  CLAW YOUR WAY TO THE TOP

  STAY FIT & HEALTHY UNTIL YOU’RE DEAD

  BABIES AND OTHER HAZARDS OF SEX

  THE TAMING OF THE SCREW

  BAD HABITS: A 100% FACT-FREE BOOK

  DAVE BARRY SLEPT HERE*

  DAVE BARRY TURNS 40*

  DAVE BARRY TALKS BACK

  DAVE BARRY’S ONLY TRAVEL GUIDE YOU’LL EVER NEED*

  DAVE BARRY DOES JAPAN*

  DAVE BARRY IS NOT MAKING THIS UP*

  DAVE BARRY’S HOMES AND OTHER BLACK HOLES*

  DAVE BARRY’S GREATEST HITS*

  DAVE BARRY’S COMPLETE GUIDE TO GUYS*

  DAVE BARRY IN CYBERSPACE*

  DAVE BARRY IS FROM MARS AND VENUS*

  DAVE BARRY’S BOOK OF BAD SONGS

  DAVE BARRY TURNS 50

  BIG TROUBLE

  DAVE BARRY IS NOT TAKING THIS SITTING DOWN*

  DAVE BARRY HITS BELOW THE BELTWAY*

  TRICKY BUSINESS

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Books published by The Random House Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.

  This book is dedicated to whoever

  invented the remote control.

  (I’d look up this person’s name,

  but I don’t feel like getting off the sofa.)

  Contents

  Introduction

  Guys vs. Men

  Are You a Guy?

  Take This Scientific Quiz to Determine Your Guyness Quotient

  1 The Role of Guys in History

  Men Went to the Moon, but Guys Invented Mooning

  2 The Biological Nature of Guys

  Important Scientific Reasons Why They Act Like Jerks

  3 The Social Development of Guys

  Nature Alone Should Not Take the Rap

  4 Tips for Women

  How to Have a Relationship with a Guy

  5 Guy Problems

  The Pain. The Anguish. The Men’s Room.

  6 Special Medical Concerns of the Guy

  or: “It’s Just a Sprain”

  7 Guys and Violence

  The Curse of the Noogie Gene

  8 The Domestic Side of Guys (With a Side Discussion on Orgasms)

  or: The Secret Truth About Why Guys Are Better at Math

  or: Where Standards Came From

  or: Perfectly Legitimate Reasons Why a Person Might Elect to Blow His Nose on His Laundry

  or: Let’s Not Be So Darned Critical of Tapeworms

  9 Guys in Action

  Conclusion

  The Aging Guy: Settling Down and Hurling Buicks —Plus—

  Future Guys of Tomorrow:

  Is There Hope for Humanity?

  (No.)

  Introduction

  Guys vs. Men

  THIS IS A BOOK about guys. It’s not a book about men. There are already way too many books about men, and most of them are way too serious.

  Men itself is a serious word, not to mention manhood and manly. Such words make being male sound like a very important activity, as opposed to what it primarily consists of, namely, possessing a set of minor and frequently unreliable organs.

  But men tend to attach great significance to Manhood. This results in certain characteristically masculine, by which I mean stupid, behavioral patterns that can produce unfortunate results such as violent crime, war, spitting, and ice hockey. These things have given males a bad name.1 And the “Men’s Movement,” which is supposed to bring out the more positive aspects of Manliness, seems to be densely populated with loons and goobers.

  So I’m saying that there’s another way to look at males: not as aggressive macho dominators; not as sensitive, liberated, hugging drummers; but as guys.

  And what, exactly, do I mean by “guys”? I don’t know. I haven’t thought that much about it. One of the major characteristics of guyhood is that we guys don’t spend a lot of time pondering our deep innermost feelings. There is a serious question in my mind about whether guys actually have deep innermost feelings, unless you count, for example, loyalty to the Detroit Tigers, or fear of bridal showers.

  But although I can’t define exactly what it means to be a guy, I can describe certain guy characteristics, such as:

  Guys Like Neat Stuff

  By “neat,” I mean “mechanical an
d unnecessarily complex.” I’ll give you an example. Right now I’m typing these words on an extremely powerful computer. It’s the latest in a line of maybe ten computers I’ve owned, each one more powerful than the last. My computer is chock full of RAM and ROM and bytes and megahertzes and various other items that enable a computer to kick data-processing butt. It is probably capable of supervising the entire U.S. air-defense apparatus while simultaneously processing the tax return of every resident of Ohio. I use it mainly to write a newspaper column. This is an activity wherein I sit and stare at the screen for maybe ten minutes, then, using only my forefingers, slowly type something like:

  Henry Kissinger looks like a big wart.

  I stare at this for another ten minutes, have an inspiration, then amplify the original thought as follows:

  Henry Kissinger looks like a big fat wart.

  Then I stare at that for another ten minutes, pondering whether I should try to work in the concept of “hairy.”

  This is absurdly simple work for my computer. It sits there, humming impatiently, bored to death, passing the time between keystrokes via brain-teaser activities such as developing a Unified Field Theory of the universe and translating the complete works of Shakespeare into rap.2

  In other words, this computer is absurdly overqualified to work for me, and yet soon, I guarantee, I will buy an even more powerful one. I won’t be able to stop myself. I’m a guy.

  Probably the ultimate example of the fundamental guy drive to have neat stuff is the Space Shuttle. Granted, the guys in charge of this program claim it has a Higher Scientific Purpose, namely to see how humans function in space. But of course we have known for years how humans function in space: They float around and say things like: “Looks real good, Houston!”

  No, the real reason for the existence of the Space Shuttle is that it is one humongous and spectacularly gizmo-intensive item of hardware. Guys can tinker with it practically forever, and occasionally even get it to work, and use it to place other complex mechanical items into orbit, where they almost immediately break, which provides a great excuse to send the Space Shuttle up again. It’s Guy Heaven.

  Other results of the guy need to have stuff are Star Wars, the recreational boating industry, monorails, nuclear weapons, and wristwatches that indicate the phase of the moon. I am not saying that women haven’t been involved in the development or use of this stuff. I’m saying that, without guys, this stuff probably would not exist; just as, without women, virtually every piece of furniture in the world would still be in its original position. Guys do not have a basic need to rearrange furniture. Whereas a woman who could cheerfully use the same computer for fifty-three years will rearrange her furniture on almost a weekly basis, sometimes in the dead of night. She’ll be sound asleep in bed, and suddenly, at 2 A.M., she’ll be awakened by the urgent thought: The blue-green sofa needs to go perpendicular to the wall instead of parallel, and it needs to go there RIGHT NOW. So she’ll get up and move it, which of course necessitates moving other furniture, and soon she has rearranged her entire living room, shifting great big heavy pieces that ordinarily would require several burly men to lift, because there are few forces in Nature more powerful than a woman who needs to rearrange furniture. Every so often a guy will wake up to discover that, because of his wife’s overnight efforts, he now lives in an entirely different house.

  (I realize that I’m making gender-based generalizations here, but my feeling is that if God did not want us to make gender-based generalizations, She would not have given us genders.)

  Guys Like a Really Pointless Challenge

  Not long ago I was sitting in my office at the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine, Tropic, reading my fan mail,3 when I heard several of my guy coworkers in the hallway talking about how fast they could run the forty-yard dash. These are guys in their thirties and forties who work in journalism, where the most demanding physical requirement is the ability to digest vending-machine food. In other words, these guys have absolutely no need to run the forty-yard dash.

  But one of them, Mike Wilson, was writing a story about a star high-school football player who could run it in 4.38 seconds. Now if Mike had written a story about, say, a star high-school poet, none of my guy coworkers would have suddenly decided to find out how well they could write sonnets. But when Mike turned in his story, they became deeply concerned about how fast they could run the forty-yard dash. They were so concerned that the magazine editor, Tom Shroder, decided that they should get a stopwatch and go out to a nearby park and find out. Which they did, a bunch of guys taking off their shoes and running around barefoot in a public park on company time.

  This is what I heard them talking about, out in the hall. I heard Tom, who was thirty-eight years old, saying that his time in the forty had been 5.75 seconds. And I thought to myself: This is ridiculous. These are middle-aged guys, supposedly adults, and they’re out there bragging about their performance in this stupid juvenile footrace. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “I could beat 5.75 seconds.”

  So we went out to the park and measured off forty yards, and the guys told me that I had three chances to make my best time. On the first try my time was 5.78 seconds, just three-hundredths of a second slower than Tom’s, even though, at forty-five, I was seven years older than he. So I just knew I’d beat him on the second attempt if I ran really, really hard, which I did for a solid ten yards, at which point my left hamstring muscle, which had not yet shifted into Spring Mode from Mail-Reading Mode, went, and I quote, “pop.”

  I had to be helped off the field. I was in considerable pain, and I was obviously not going to be able to walk right for weeks. The other guys were very sympathetic, especially Tom, who took the time to call me at home, where I was sitting with an ice pack on my leg and twenty-three Advil in my bloodstream, so he could express his concern.

  “Just remember,” he said, “you didn’t beat my time.”

  There are countless other examples of guys rising to meet pointless challenges. Virtually all sports fall into this category, as well as a large part of U.S. foreign policy. (“I’ll bet you can’t capture Manuel Noriega!” “Oh YEAH??”)

  Guys Do Not Have a Rigid and Well-Defined Moral Code

  This is not the same as saying that guys are bad. Guys are capable of doing bad things, but this generally happens when they try to be Men and start becoming manly and aggressive and stupid. When they’re being just plain guys, they aren’t so much actively evil as they are lost. Because guys have never really grasped the Basic Human Moral Code, which I believe was invented by women millions of years ago when all the guys were out engaging in some other activity, such as seeing who could burp the loudest. When they came back, there were certain rules that they were expected to follow unless they wanted to get into Big Trouble, and they have been trying to follow these rules ever since, with extremely irregular results. Because guys have never internalized these rules. Guys are similar to my small auxiliary backup dog, Zippy, a guy dog4 who has been told numerous times that he is not supposed to (1) get into the kitchen garbage or (2) poop on the floor. He knows that these are the rules, but he has never really understood why, and sometimes he gets to thinking: Sure, I am ordinarily not supposed to get into the garbage, but obviously this rule is not meant to apply when there are certain extenuating5 circumstances, such as (1) somebody just threw away some perfectly good seven-week-old Kung Pao Chicken, and (2) I am home alone.

  And so when the humans come home, the kitchen floor has been transformed into Garbage-Fest USA, and Zippy, who usually comes rushing up, is off in a corner disguised in a wig and sunglasses, hoping to get into the Federal Bad Dog Relocation Program before the humans discover the scene of the crime.

  When I yell at him, he frequently becomes so upset that he poops on the floor.

  Morally, most guys are just like Zippy, only taller and usually less hairy. Guys are aware of the rules of moral behavior, but they have trouble keeping these
rules in the forefronts of their minds at certain times, especially the present. This is especially true in the area of faithfulness to one’s mate. I realize, of course, that there are countless examples of guys being faithful to their mates until they die, usually as a result of being eaten by their mates immediately following copulation. Guys outside of the spider community, however, do not have a terrific record of faithfulness.

  I’m not saying guys are scum. I’m saying that many guys who consider themselves to be committed to their marriages will stray if they are confronted with overwhelming temptation, defined as “virtually any temptation.”

  Okay, so maybe I am saying guys are scum. But they’re not mean-spirited scum. And few of them—even when they are out of town on business trips, far from their wives, and have a clear-cut opportunity—will poop on the floor.

  Guys Are Not Great at Communicating Their Intimate Feelings, Assuming They Have Any

  This is an aspect of guyhood that is very frustrating to women. A guy will be reading the newspaper, and the phone will ring; he’ll answer it, listen for ten minutes, hang up, and resume reading. Finally his wife will say: “Who was that?”

  And he’ll say: “Phil Wonkerman’s mom.”

  (Phil is an old friend they haven’t heard from in seventeen years.)

  And the wife will say, “Well?”

  And the guy will say, “Well what?”

  And the wife will say, “What did she say?”

  And the guy will say, “She said Phil is fine,” making it clear by his tone of voice that, although he does not wish to be rude, he is trying to read the newspaper, and he happens to be right in the middle of an important panel of “Calvin and Hobbes.”

  But the wife, ignoring this, will say, “That’s all she said?”

  And she will not let up. She will continue to ask district-attorney-style questions, forcing the guy to recount the conversation until she’s satisfied that she has the entire story, which is that Phil just got out of prison after serving a sentence for a murder he committed when he became a drug addict because of the guilt he felt when his wife died in a freak submarine accident while Phil was having an affair with a nun, but now he’s all straightened out and has a good job as a trapeze artist and is almost through with the surgical part of his sex change and recently became happily engaged to marry a prominent member of the Grateful Dead, so in other words he is fine, which is exactly what the guy told her in the first place, but is that enough? No. She wants to hear every single detail.