DAVE BARRY 2020: Florida Man for President.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine

WHEN PEOPLE INTRODUCE Dave Barry, they always say he won a Pulitzer Prize. Which is impressive, of course. But it doesn't really seem like the most salient fact about him. The funnyman is the author of almost 60 books and approximately eleventy billion articles. He is a member of the World Famous Lawn Ranger Precision Lawn Mower Drill Team. Most importantly, the last line on his Wikipedia page is "See also: exploding whale."

For four decades from his home base at the Miami Herald, Barry wrote a syndicated weekly column, for which he earned the aforementioned Pulitzer. He continues to author an annual despairing, hilarious "Year in Review." A longtime libertarian, he once warned that "as Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful, and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government."

Barry's books formed the basis for a '90s sitcom about his life, Dave's World, and his novel Big Trouble was made into a film of the same name. It's the story of a group of miscreants who wind up inadvertently stealing a nuclear suitcase and hijacking a plane due to their own incompetence. The film was set to be released--inauspiciously--on September 12, 2001. (It was delayed until the following year.) He has also been running for president on a vaguely libertarian ticket continuously since the 1980s, when he kicked off his first campaign in anger over toilet regulations.

In June, Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Barry at Reason's Washington, D.C., office to talk about America's strategic helium reserve, the jokes he can't tell anymore, and his new book, Lessons from Lucy: The Simple Joys of an Old, Happy Dog (Simon & Schuster).

Reason: When you spoke to us in 1994, you were running for president. Are you still running for president?

Barry: Well, yeah. I used to view it as sort of a joke, but it's getting harder and harder.

But the Barry 2020 campaign is taking off. What is your platform?

Well, the No. 1 thing that really got me started--this is sort of a Reason-related thing--was low-flow toilets. I was against them. I was one of the first people against them. I'm still against them, and I think we still have them. We had really great toilets in this country. As I grew up, as you grew up, we had really great toilets.

Make America's bathrooms great again?

We could suck down a mature sheep with our toilets. And now, look what we're dealing with. So that's the bedrock principle. That's my equivalent of Trump's wall. It's sort of a deregulation thing. And then of course I'm always up for accepting campaign contributions. That's a fundamental part of my campaign, is people giving money to it.

You have a long, glorious history of using the federal government as a punchline.

Well, I've said this for many years: If you view the federal government as a form of entertainment, it's a lot easier to cope with it mentally. So when I write the quarterly check for my income taxes, I think: I'm getting a lot of value for that. Lately, I feel the federal government--just strictly as an entertainment medium--is pretty good.

What's your response to people who say, "Dave, that's all very well and good, but things are really serious now."

I'll give a semi-serious answer to that. There are issues that they should be upset about, issues we're all upset about. But I really had a lot of friends who, when Trump was elected president, honestly thought--and I don't know why they thought this--but they thought they were going to be in trouble with the police for I don't know what. And I would say to them, if the Coral Gables police find a time to come around to your house, let me know and I'll do something. But there was that level of concern. That's insane.

I think those people have figured that out at some point that...