King of the Road : Bring on the rubber fish and the tales of attack kites. Dave Barry’s out on a book tour.

Inside a store called A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books (not to be confused with A Dark Sweaty Ver min-Infested Place for Books), Dave Barry is pontificating on the weighty issues of our time, such as presidential politics, family values and whether it’s possible to set a pair of underpants on fire using a Rollerblade Barbie.

Barry, 47, is probably the only person to ever win a Pulitzer Prize writing booger jokes. As syndicated humor columnist at the Miami Herald, he also has driven the world’s fastest lawn mower and ridiculed everything from the U.S. Senate (“Motto: White Male Millionaires Working for You”) to heavy metal rock (“music to slaughter cattle by”) to the ancient Egyptians, whose most significant achievement was “the famous ‘Substitute Mummy Filled With Live Weasels’ prank, which led to the collapse of the empire, but everybody involved agreed it was worth it.”

And then there’s Dave Barry the humanitarian, who once recommended, for the betterment of mankind, “the explosion of Barry Manilow’s head.” And two of his books inspired the TV sitcom “Dave’s World,” for which he claims to exercise “total 100% artistic control over where I cash the check they mail me.”

But behind the humor is a serious, sometimes tragic life. His mother was tormented by chronic depression and committed suicide in 1987; his father was an alcoholic minister; Barry rants against government about as often as Rush Limbaugh, and he’s going through a divorce with his second wife.

Somehow, he manages to keep millions of fans laughing.

The editor who “discovered” him says Barry’s secret is an uncanny ability to combine adult sophistication with adolescent lunacy.

Both sides surfaced on a recent promotional tour for his book “Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys” (Random House), which explains (among other things) why men care more deeply about sports teams than about their own spouses:

Because their wives will never make the playoffs.

This leg of the tour begins in Seattle, cappuccino capital of the known universe, where “there’s always six people in front of you [at Starbucks] ordering chemical equations.”

Barry’s favorite liquid, however, is beer, which he downs with a packet of cashews before an appearance at the University of Washington. There, about 700 people pack an auditorium to hear him spoof everything from former passengers of slow white Broncos to inane rock songs:

“In a move that’s been widely hailed in the legal community, the Supreme Court has replaced Judge Lance Ito with Judge Wapner. And in a move that should definitely speed up the trial, [Wapner] has sentenced the entire defense team to death.”

O.J. Simpson and his “Mormon Tabernacle Choir-sized” collection of attorneys are a running gag on the trip. So is music.

He recalls fallout from his worst-songs-ever column: “I got in huge trouble with the Neil Diamond people. If you think Salman Rushdie screwed up . . . [try] making fun of the song where [Diamond blurts], ‘I am, I said, to no one there. And no one heard at all, not even the chair.’ Of course the chair didn’t hear you, Neil. It’s furniture!”

But Barry has hit a few bad notes himself. At Haverford College (a Pennsylvania school whose Quaker affiliation later helped atheist Barry avoid the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector), he ingested drugs and played guitar in a string of awful bands. His latest group includes such authors as Stephen King and Amy Tan and--on one occasion--Bruce Springsteen, who would have been allowed to join permanently except he hasn’t written a book.

When asked by a boy if the band has any CDs or tapes out, Barry suggests that hearing their music “would be very bad for you. Better to start smoking crack right now.”

Other audience questions include “Have you given blood lately?” to which Barry replies: “Why? Do I look like I have too much? If God wanted us to have blood removed from our bodies, we’d have little spigots.”

Another asks: “Why do you live in Florida?”

“Think it through,” Barry wisecracks. “I work for the Miami Herald. If I didn’t live in Florida, the closest I could live would be Georgia or Alabama and the commute would be hell.”

*

Barry grew up in Armonk, N.Y., a suburb of New York City, where his Presbyterian minister father ran a social work agency and helped in the civil rights movement. His mother, a onetime secretary to nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, provided the laughs. Although plagued by chronic depression, she possessed “an absolutely wicked, unfailing sense of humor,” Barry says.

When he and his three siblings went swimming, she’d call in a June Cleaver voice: “Don’t drow-w-wn.” And they’d sing-song back, “We wo-o-n’t.”

“Every family has its values that it passes along,” Barry recalls. “Our No. 1 value . . . was to not take ourselves too seriously.”

In high school, Barry was elected class clown. “That is my permanent self-image: little and dweeby and people only pay attention to me because I’m funny. . . . [Even at age 47], I find I really only trust the people who knew me before I became a syndicated humor columnist, or who don’t like my column but still like me.”

“You’re my hero,” a man tells him at a book signing.

“Get over it,” Barry quips.

In Seattle, people bring him rocks and beer, ask him to autograph rubber fish and Mad magazine books, and tell him stories about kites that attack humans and objects that urologists have removed from male private parts. These include a Ramada Inn swizzle stick and a watercolor paintbrush. “How do the patients explain this?” Barry asks. “Something like, ‘I was painting naked and I fell’?”

Later, the doctor who told the tale gives Barry a leather case containing assorted urological implements, including vacuum pumps, a jumbo tube of K-Y jelly and a video titled “ErecAid.” The next day, before flying to San Francisco, Barry “inadvertently” palms off the case to a reporter, who panics as it disappears into the airport X-ray machine: “What if security decides to inspect this thing?”

*

Barry has mixed feelings about his fans.

On the one hand, his career would be over without them. Not only do they buy his books, but their letters (hundreds a month, each of which he answers) have provided fodder for numerous columns on exploding cows, snakes in toilets and ways to reduce the federal deficit (“rent the Stealth bomber out for proms”).

But he is weary of the fawning, the loss of privacy and the people who approach him in public and try to out-funny him, as if he were a comedy quick-draw.

The recognition was a rush at first, he says. “But it quickly gets replaced by an ‘Oh my God, I can’t just eat my cheeseburger here because people are going to watch how I eat it. . . . I mean, it’s nice when people come up and say they like my column--they mean well by it--but it forces them and me into this awkward interchange where neither of us is being just a person.”

Barry also froths at those who would find meaningful social commentary in his writing. “I’ve never thought I had something important to tell people. . . . I think of myself [strictly] as an entertainer. I would be most happy if my column ran on the comics page.”

But even creating something absolutely meaningless isn’t easy.

During the two-hour flight, southpaw Barry pecks at his laptop computer with all the speed of a chicken on Quaaludes, producing a mere two paragraphs. Actually, that’s a decent output, he says: “I’ve been known to spend two hours just on the first sentence.”

Success as a columnist also came slowly.

He began his journalism career at a tiny suburban Philadelphia paper called the Daily Local News, where he covered “a series of incredibly dull municipal meetings, some of which are still going on.”

He also met his current wife, Beth, at the paper and divorced his college sweetheart.

In 1975, he joined an effective-writing seminars company, teaching businessmen how to avoid penning lines like “Enclosed please find the enclosed enclosure.” And he started doing humor columns on the side, selling them to his old paper for $22.50 apiece.

His first break came in 1981, when the Philadelphia Inquirer picked up an essay on natural childbirth. One of the people who saw it was Gene Weingarten, then Sunday magazine editor at the Miami Herald.

Two years later, Weingarten cajoled dubious Herald executives into hiring Barry full time. But it took awhile for his particular brand of humor to catch on.

“There was a period of time when no one got what he was doing,” Weingarten says. “He’d write about a Little Leaguer throwing 200 m.p.h. and we’d get physics professors writing to say ‘Well, technically, that’s not possible.’ ”

Today, the column runs in 435 papers, and several of his dozen-plus books have crashed bestseller lists.

*

“Is it fun for you to come here to San Francisco?” Barry is asked by the 12th radio host he’s talked to in less than 48 hours.

“Is that where we are?” he replies. “On book tours . . . you get the impression that every town just consists of radio stations, that any random building you walk into is going to be a radio studio.”

There’s also the bathroom-break problem: “I don’t get to pee until Los Angeles.”

His schedule at home in Miami doesn’t sound much better. Sandwiched between the weekly columns, from which he has never taken a vacation or sabbatical, are magazine articles, other book projects, speaking engagements--and his latest presidential campaign.

In 1992, he chose Dan Quayle as his running mate (“Slogan: Just what we need--two white guys in their 40s”). For ‘96, he might hold a reader poll to select a vice president.

In real life, Barry is a staunchly anti-government Libertarian. He wasn’t even registered to vote until a few years ago, and the only reason he changed was because “I might get called for jury duty and that would be a good column.”

Disdain for bureaucracy is a recurrent theme in his writing.

Tom Shroder, his current editor, says anger fuels some of Barry’s finest work. “If something in the news ticks him off, you know that will be one of his best columns.”

Other infamous essays--which fans can’t get enough of during the book tour--include Rollerblade Barbie and the Icy Gopher.

The Barbie column was inspired by a news item about a Tennessee girl who accidentally set her brother’s underwear ablaze while playing “beauty shop” with hair spray and a Rollerblade Barbie.

Underwear arsonist Barry conducted his own experiment, which had neighbors questioning his sanity: “Try to explain why you’re squatting in your driveway over a pair of burning underpants with a Rollerblade Barbie in your hands.”

One of the columnist’s catch phrases, when facts prove more bizarre than his fiction, is “I am not making this up.”

In Cupertino, someone asks: “What guarantee do we have that you are not making it up?” Barry’s answer: “You cannot make up things like the janitors who tried to freeze a gopher [and ended up causing an explosion that injured 17 people, but the gopher lived]. You could take any number of pharmaceuticals and not come up with that. I went all through the ‘60s--if you know what I’m saying--and never, no matter what we were listening to, did we ever think about freezing a gopher.”

The talk winds down and Barry signs autographs for more than 100 fans. Someone asks what his wife thinks of the new book on guys. He changes the subject. Although he has been candid about private matters in the past, this topic is touchy.

Barry is divorcing Beth, with whom he has a 14-year-old son, reportedly to marry a young sportswriter from Detroit. “I’m seeing [journalism] from the other side,” he says. “It’s very difficult to go through a [tough] personal time . . . and feel like gossip meat.”

*

Yet Barry has a remarkable knack for staying funny even amid tragedy.

Two days after his mother killed herself with an overdose of Valium and liquor, he turned in a column about his son’s gerbils, Weingarten recalls. “It was hilarious. I called and asked how he could possibly write this . . . [and] he said humor is the greatest form of denial. ‘If you’re trying to be funny, you can’t possibly be thinking about anything negative or morose.’ ”

Adds Barry: “If you write humor for a living, you just learn to do it. It doesn’t matter what mood I’m in. I view it as my job.”

And nothing more.

He professes no aspirations to change the world or leave a mark upon history:

“I don’t care what my obituary says, because I’ll be dead. If I’m not dead, that would be a great column.”

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The World According to Dave

On whether Vikings reached America before Columbus:

More and more, historians argue that they did, because this would result in a new national holiday, which a lot of historians would get off.

On males in the ‘90s:

Today’s man is making radical lifestyle changes such as sometimes remembering to remove the used tissue wads from his pockets before depositing his pants on the floor to be picked up by the Laundry Fairy.

On travel:

Never board a commercial aircraft if the pilot is wearing a tank top.

On the Republican takeover of Congress:

The Democrats, who had been in charge of Congress for thousands of years, have been thrown out into the street; you see hordes of them wandering aimlessly through traffic, freezing, holding crudely lettered signs that say, “WILL INVENT HUGE WASTEFUL GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS FOR FOOD.”

On Wall Street:

Statistics show that . . . investing your money in the stock market is nearly twice as secure, over the long term, as feeding it to otters.

On the difference between TV and newspaper journalism:

I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the “bare bones” of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring.

On Republican presidential candidates:

If Lamar Alexander hopes to be taken seriously, he’s going to have to change his first name to something presidential, something that has the ring of authority and toughness. Such as “Hillary.”

On trends in journalism:

If you read your newspaper carefully, you’ll notice that you’re seeing fewer stories with uninviting, incomprehensible, newspaper-ese headlines like PANEL NIXES TRADE PACT, and more punchy, “with it” headlines designed to appeal to today’s young people, like PANEL NIXES TRADE PACT, DUDE.

On President Clinton’s reelection chances:

Polls show that a bale of peat moss, if it were wearing a blue suit, would have a serious shot at beating Bill Clinton, especially if they had a debate.