Years ago, Dave Barry was in a Hyatt hotel room when he noticed a sign warning guests that they would be charged $75 if they stole towels from the rooms. So he stole the sign. He displayed it in his home bathroom to amuse visitors. Years later, Oprah Winfrey invited Dave onto her show, asking him to confess some sin and make amends for it. He decided to admit to the sign theft and hand it to Oprah so that she could return it to the Hyatt. Unfortunately, Oprah's show was recorded in a Chicago studio, while the sign was at his home in Florida. Thinking fast, Barry realized he was staying at another Hyatt, so he stole another sign from that hotel, so he would have something to give to Oprah.

These are the kind of anecdotes Dave Barry tells in his new memoir, "Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass: How I Went 77 Years Without Growing Up."

Barry discusses his life, career, and family, interspersing the narrative with excerpts from the columns he wrote as a humorist for decades.

I read Dave Barry's column regularly for years. The Miami Herald syndicated it into numerous newspapers where I lived. I remember the column he wrote, finding issue with a Neil Diamond lyric in which Diamond complains that the chair cannot hear him saying "I Am, I Said." According to this book, Dave received a lot of hate mail from Neil fans over that one.

I recall some of his catch phrases, as he mentioned "alert readers," who had sent him quirky local news items. I grew to love his style, which often consisted of wildly implausible tales, followed by "I'm kidding, of course" or absurdly bad advice to the reader. His columns contained so much misinformation that he had to include a parenthetical "I am not making this up)" when writing something crazy-sounding, but true.

Not everything in "Class Clown" is played for laughs. Mr. Barry loved his parents but tells an honest story about his father, whose alcoholism led to an early death, and his mother's battle with depression, which ended in her suicide.

But most of this book is light-hearted and much of it is laugh-out-loud funny. Seriously, even the footnotes are often hilarious. Dave even reveals why he stopped writing a regular column: He wanted to quit before he stopped finding himself funny.

He concludes with some life lessons that I will share:

1. You should not confuse your career with your life.
2. A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter is not a nice person.
3. No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
4. Your friends love you anyway.
5. Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.

I finished "Class Clown" in a couple of days and (I am not making this up) I loved it!