'People are still funny'

      People think of Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain as wits. And rightly so. But while they said a good many smart things, they didn't say everything attributed them; countless quotes are laid at their doorstep that they never said, sometimes never could have said. I'll see some powerful, contemporary thought tacked under a portrait of Hemingway, think "He never wrote that," and be halfway to fact-checking a meme before I realize that, once I plunge down that rathole there's no escape.
     But Dave Barry really did write, in a column of 25 things he learned at 50: "You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at the moment."
    I've quote that line for years, never realizing it was Dave Barry. Great advice, the general dissemination of which could spare the world countless awkward encounters, painful both for the blunderer and for the woman accused of being with child. 
     I asked Barry about it Tuesday morning, in an interview for Wednesday's column, and he said, yes, he believes he indeed coined that phrase. The conversation went all sorts of places I couldn't fit into the column and still say something about the reason we were talking: his excellent new book, "Class Clown," published Tuesday.
    What I really wanted to talk about with him was Gene Weingarten. The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist whose collection, "Fiddler in the Subway," should be pressed into the hands of every sentient human being. Reading it made me proud to be in the same profession.
     But he also wrote this, in a blog in 2021, destroying his career:

     The Indian subcontinent has vastly enriched the world, giving us chess, buttons, the mathematical concept of zero, shampoo, modern-day nonviolent political resistance, Chutes and Ladders, the Fibonacci sequence, rock candy, cataract surgery, cashmere, USB ports ... and curry.
     Indian foods are the only ethnic cuisine insanely based on one spice. If you like Indian curries, yay, you like one of India’s most popular class of dishes! If you think Indian curries taste like something that could knock a vulture off a meat wagon, you do not like a lot of Indian food. I don’t get it, as a culinary principle. It is as though the French passed a law requiring a wide swath of their dishes to be slathered in smashed, pureed snails. (I’d personally have no problem with that, but you might, and I would sympathize.)

     "Based on one spice." Is that ignorant? Sure, in the sense that there are all kinds of spices in Indian cuisine. I know that by direct, hand-over-fist experience. He did too. It was what we call in the profession "a joke." Not a particularly good one, true. But was Gene's crack the language of hate? I don't think so. Didn't matter — he was frog-marched out the door at the Washington Post. No party. No big farewell section. Hasta la vista, baby. It seems now a dry run for the kind of professional collapse the newspaper would do at the feet of Donald Trump.
     "That had to be scary  to someone whose written 1000 jokes more offensive than that," I said to Barry, who was edited for years by Weingarten. "It must have been sobering for you when Gene got the heave-ho."
       "Yeah, I kept going back over it," he said. "I've known Gene for 40 years. To see him shoved off a cliff over that. He makes it really clear, 'I'm an idiot but I'm pretending to be a genius.' It couldn't be more obvious. His schtick is, he starts out with this long thing how he respects Indian culture. I don't think if it happened that same thing would happen. That happened at the absolutely the height of 'Let's everybody be so sensitive that we really can't say anything,' mania. That was awful, to have Gene called a racist. Gene's not a racist." 
     I'd planned to highlight some other points we talked about, but honest, I want to shift over to something a reader in Florida, who had worked as a first responder, sent in on Wednesday. He wrote:  

     Our rescue crew were the one’s who responded to Dave’s son after he was involved in a bike vs. car crash. His column about the experience mentions us as ambulance guys. It is one of his very, very few serious ones.
     He rode with us to the hospital, certainly shaken (Who wouldn’t be?) but very humble and cordial.

     I read that column and thought, "Wow, what an excellent, excellent column." It made me regret not paying closer attention to the man's work over the past 40 years — I think it was conceited of me — and glad that I've been able to remedy that, a tiny bit, this past week. Better late than never. He's still humble and cordial.