The one thing that any author must do when writing any sort of essay is to make it comprehensible to the reader. In order to achieve this, the author must utilize anything to get their point across or else the writing would be futile. In Turkeys in the Kitchen , Dave Barry gives his own personal stories about his Thanksgiving and how he feels that men aren’t as useful as women in the terms of the culinary arts (kitchen), Barry’s flippant tone and his use of rhetorical devices such as similes and irony bring forth a light hearted explanation of stereotypes between men and women as well as describing how men are useless in the kitchen.
The uses of similes throughout the essay give purpose by showing how men are useless. Barry’s unique use of the simile in paragraph two shows us that Barry thinks that men helping women “around the kitchen [are as useless] as ill-trained Labrador[s]”. Barry compares men to ill-trained dogs to illustrate the idea that once a woman gets used a man’s sightly antics in the kitchen she will likely become irritated and try to shoo him away just as one would with a cute dog that got irritating. Barry’s encouragement to the stereotype that all men can’t cook is important to show because it puts women on a pedestal because of their ‘natural born’ talent in the kitchen. If men are considered dogs of the house, boiled down, women must be their rightful owners. Lastly, Barry uses another simile to drive his point home, when explaining how he “feel[s] like