Authors Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson Bring the Laughs at Mission Viejo Book Signing

One is the king of toilet humor. The other writes murder mysteries.

Together, they're starting a detective agency.

Just kidding--together Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist Dave Barry and bestselling crime-thriller author Ridley Pearson told jokes and met with fans at a book signing in Mission Viejo on Friday night.

More than 400 people attended the 7 p.m. event at the Norman P. Murray Center, where the coauthors discussed their latest book, The Bridge to Neverland.

Pearson and Barry coauthored the Peter and the Starcatchers series, a collection of four young adult novels about the origins of Peter Pan: how the hero met Capt. Hook and Tinker Bell, how he learned to fly and how he made it to Neverland.

Pearson has written a number of mystery-thrillers, including The Body of David Hayes, In Harm's Way and Killer Weekend, and Barry has written a number of humor books including Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits, Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys and Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States.

At the event, Barry, who lives in Miami, and Pearson, who lives in Missouri, showed photos of funny incidents in their lives, like the time someone at a book signing thought it would be good to bring out a gigantic, terrifying python or the time they got stuck in a small room with an actor playing Peter Pan … who wouldn’t stop pretending he was Peter Pan.  

Here are some of Dave’s choice comments from the evening.

• We're here to talk about our book … Skippyjon Jones. (another famous children’s book that they did not write)
• Neither Ridley or I thought of ourselves as writers of children's books. In fact, for most of our careers, neither one of use wrote anything we would want a child to read.
• I wrote a humor column. I sat around in my underwear and made stuff up. Little tip: You can sit around in anyone's underwear and make stuff up.
• It's not when your child moves off to college that's the big moment in your life. It's when your child gets his own medical benefits.
• Ridley is very good at thinking of ways to kill people--in print, so far. But we have to keep buying his books, so he has a healthy outlet for this tendency.
• He (Capt. Hook) loses his hand in a duel with Peter Pan, but our book started before that. So what are you going to call him? You can't call him Capt. Hand.
• I live in Miami. I moved there in 1986 from the United States.  I know you think we have a bad reputation, but it's a great city. We have a new attitude down there, a new tourism promotion slogan: Come back to Miami, we weren’t shooting at you.
• There are six Wienermobiles. Lot of people don’t know that. This nation leads the world in Wienermobile technology. Although Iran is developing one.
• We did a lot of research in London (for The Bridge to Neverland). Ridley and I went over there on tax-deductible trips.
• Your main job as a parent is to embarrass your children. That's how you control them. You have to remind them that at any moment you could burst out into song and ruin their lives. It's a very effective tool.

Before signing books, Pearson and Barry donned pirate hats and read a section from The Bridge to Neverland, which is set in the same universe as the Starcatchers series but takes place in present day.

The two also detailed how they met (in a band called the Rock Bottom Remainders, which included Stephen King and Amy Tan), how to embarrass your children (Dave Barry showed up at his son’s middle school driving the Weinermobile) and how they came up with the Star Catchers series (Pearson’s daughter asked him how Peter Pan met Capt. hook).

Pearson said he remembered talking to Dave about working on the project together:

"You write booger jokes for a living and I kill people. Maybe if we put those things together we could have a 'suspenseful-funny' book about how a boy became Peter Pan."

One of the attendees was 11-year-old Allyson Trussell of Mission Viejo.

Allyson said she has read all of the Starcatchers series and that it was "really cool" to meet the authors.

"I was at Mission Viejo library and I saw a poster (for this event) and I was like 'I have to go to this.' "

Which of the four books is her favorite?

"That’s a hard question," Trussell said. "I love them all."

However, without hesitation, she said Peter Pan was her favorite character.

Longtime Mission Viejo resident Jean Stewart said she likes both the thrillers of Pearson and the humor columns of Barry and was captivated by their latest co-authored books.

Standing beside her husband, Bill, who was holding a stack of about five Pearson/Barry books, Jean said, "We’re hooked. And we bought these for our grandchildren, but we’re going to read them before they get them."

Bill Stewart, who along with Jean has lived in Mission Viejo for nearly four decades, said, "Now that we don’t have Harry Potter anymore, they fill the gap that’s left."