Dave Barry of The Miami Herald is about to take a sabbatical. Every newspaper reader who has laughed at his weekly column will pray he comes back soon. He has the gift of “writing funny.” In the universe of the writing art, nothing is more difficult.

Here I speak from experience. My first city editor, 60-odd years ago, suffered from the delusion that I could turn out an occasional “brite.” That was the way he spelled it. His name was Charles Henry Hamilton. I was on the rewrite desk. He used to stop at my typewriter with some oddball clipping in his hand. A sow had delivered a dozen polka- dotted pigs, or the groundhog had seen his shadow. That sort of thing. Hamilton would hand me the clipping with a curt instruction to rewrite it for the first afternoon edition: “Be funny, Kilpatrick!” This would be at 6:15 in the morning. At that unspeakable hour, the funny bone rebels.

Dave Barry’s funny bone has been functioning splendidly for more than 20 years. After graduation from Haverford College and a brief stint with The Associated Press, Barry drifted to The Miami Herald in 1983 and began to “write funny.” He won a Pulitzer prize in 1988. His weekly column now runs in nearly 600 newspapers. No other humor columnist is even close.

How has Barry managed to stay at the top of his craft? One obvious answer is that he works at it. Let no one be deceived. The hardest workers in a traveling circus are the clowns. This is because their craft carries the greatest risk. A lion tamer may be nicked; he will recover. The juggler may drop a bowling pin; no matter. In our little world of prose composition, good reporters and sportswriters live forever, but the writer who sets out to be a humorist walks on metaphorical nails. If he falls off too often, “He just isn’t funny anymore.” Bye-bye!

There’s more to the comic art than sweat of the brow. The great funnymen find a niche or a gimmick and make it their province. It is the equivalent for writers of Groucho’s trademark walk and Durante’s bulbous nose. One such device is the art of impossible exaggeration. Read Mark Twain on French duelists or Ring Lardner on baseball players. P.G. Wodehouse created Jeeves the impeccable butler and Bertie Wooster the blithering bungler. Everything is drawn to some wildly overblown scale.

Dave Barry loves the trick. He recently watched his 4-year-old daughter playing for the pre-kindergarten Wolverines in a soccer match. The rival Dragons won 4-2, but the Wolverines turned better cartwheels.

The anatomy of humor defies post-mortem analysis. One element, I suppose, is a funny­man’s sense of timing, of cadence, of the arrangement of elements. Often the joke depends upon surprise: We don’t see the punch line coming. Depending upon the writer’s skill, we smile, grin, chuckle, snicker, groan or hoo-haw. Barry masters the whole comedic range.

Not long ago I came across a slim little joke book, “Laughter Cures All,” compiled by Ernie Hardin, a retired accountant who lives at 182 Pin Oak Drive in Chelsea, AL 35043. I can tell you, because I telephoned him and asked, that he sells this modest anthology for $10 plus $1.50 handling. I first read it sitting down, and almost fell off.

Ernie is 81. Most of his 100 “Pills” are much older. Some are older than Aristophanes. Some date only from 1950. (I know about these, because I used Pill No. 47 when I was making speeches 40 years ago.) The dumb blonde jokes are clunkers, and many gags are a tad riskay, but there’s nothing here that couldn’t be told in mixed company. If you can’t get a horse laugh, or at least a whinny, out of Pill No. 1, or Pill 75, or Pill 98, stop trying. You won’t like Dave Barry either. You’re probably dead.

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.

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