This program attempted to answer the age-old question – should you really trust a person with two first names?

It was clear from his comments that Barry doesn’t expect to be trusted. He told the audience several times that his readers shouldn’t believe anything he says, that he’s a self-described silly humorist, a liar.

Thus he finds great pleasure in receiving countless letters, correcting him for “errors” in his work, from people who don’t get that he’s kidding. He writes everyone back, often extending the joke (lie) and thereby compounding the correspondent’s misconceptions and fury over the “mistakes”.

Barry says he got his sense of humor from his edgy mother, who, though she suffered from great depression and eventually committed suicide, did not foist her problems upon others.

When asked, Barry doubled down on his chosen career, saying that, although he started out as a newspaper journalist, his first calling had always been comedy, not writing.

Perhaps his best story of the evening related to the day it was announced that he had won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary (1988), which led to a photo of his son (a later Pulitzer winner himself) giving him a big hug, which, in fact, was unrelated to the award, but rather the result of Barry having told the boy seconds earlier that Barry was buying him a Nintendo. As Shakespeare first said in 1599, timing is everything.