Dave Barry's new book spins Christmas for laughs

NEW YORK, Nov 21 (Reuters) Carolers have long called Christmas ''the season to be jolly,'' and US humorist Dave Barry has tried to deck the pages of his first Christmas book with more belly laughs than April Fool's Day.

A ''manger war'' between neighbourhood churches; a wise man with a rubber cigar; red ants stinging children in a station wagon; a ''Betsy Wetsy Jesus'' and a near-fatal pile of frozen bat dung are a few of the ornaments Barry has strung through his latest book, ''The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog.'' Barry's fictional pseudo-memoir skewers his own childhood memories of going to school and performing as a shepherd or a wise man in the church Christmas pageant. There are also liberal dollops of early 1960s nostalgia such as the Sputnik, the twist and Oldsmobile station wagons. There is even a mention of Fabian, the pre-Beatles teen idol.

''I wanted the book to have a Christmas feel to it, but I also wanted it to have a real-world '60s feel,'' Barry said in an interview.

The book, released on November 7, also recycles some stories from the author's newspaper career, after changing them almost beyond recognition. One story involved a man who disposed of his dead pet goat by standing it up, frozen by the winter cold, in the middle a manger scene.

''I didn't want to use that story exactly because it was too cold-hearted,'' he said. ''I tried to make it part of the story in a positive, uplifting, or at least not creepy way.'' Barry, 59, said his publisher had ''bugged me for years to write a Christmas book. ... The columns I had written about my childhood Christmas experiences always got a good response,'' so he decided to build on those with a pseudo-memoir.

One incident in the book is related exactly as Barry remembers it happening to him in real life. After sitting through a boring science lesson during which the teacher demonstrated how to melt ice to obtain water, the youngster in the book waits until the class is perfectly quiet, then says: ''So what you're saying, Mrs. Forrester, is that ice is actually ... frozen water!'' ''That happened, pretty much verbatim,'' Barry recalled with a smile. ''I was a 'wiseguy' in school and I would do things like that because I couldn't stop myself. If I thought of a line, I just had to say it, and that is a true line that I said in Mrs. West's science class in eighth grade.'' In the book, the classroom erupts in laughter and the teacher sends the boy to the office, where the assistant principal cracks him on the head with a ring and lectures him ''on how I should stop wasting my brain being a clown.'' Barry, who went on to become one of the best-read humorists in America, is glad he did not take that advice. ''Even when I was in school, I always thought I was funny,'' he said. ''I always wanted to do humor, but the idea that I could make a living at it never occurred to me.'' REUTERS SB VA RAI1010