THERE ARE QUALMS, for sure. Backstage at the club the funny man has heard all the “jokes”:
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Impressionist.
Go fuck a llama, impressionists are hacks.
Or:
Why did the prop comic cross the road?
I don’t know, why did the prop comic cross the road?
Because he was hoping to get killed in traffic because he knew he was a hack and couldn’t live with himself. Fuck a llama that has your grandmother’s face, so it’s like you’re fucking your grandmother, but she’s also a llama.
The funny man had shared these opinions, had joined in the bitter laughter dismissing those who had risen out of the backstage holding area to greater heights with impressions or trunks full of junk or ventriloquism. (Don’t even mention ventriloquism. Show up at the club with a dummy in a case and get ready for an ass beating followed by an invitation to fuck a semitruck full of grandma-faced llamas.) One of the most respected of the backstage hopeful funny men, the one everyone swears is a genius that the audience simply doesn’t “get,” once said it in a way the funny man would never forget. “You know where I carry my jokes?” he said. “Here,” he said, pointing to his head. “Here,” he said, pointing to his heart, “and here,” he said, cupping his balls. The funny man laughed as hard as anyone. It was funny because it was true. This was the code and the funny man believed in it.
But no one ever laughs at this guy. At least no one who isn’t one of the other hopeful funny men who often line up in the back to watch the unappreciated genius’s sets, so impressed by his ability to tell hilarious jokes that ricochet around the room above the audience’s heads. The guy’s clothes that never get replaced or refreshed, his sour smell, his deteriorating teeth, the dandruff that flickers in the stage lights as it falls from his head after running his hand through his hair following yet another silence, all add up to one word for all the hopeful funny men: Integrity.
Everyone does impressions, but no one wants to be known as an impressionist. Impressionists have nothing funny of their own to say. Impressionists often get good laughs and rarely bomb, but impressionists are lame, lame, lame. Prop comics, though, are the worst. While there were plenty of successful prop comics, there had never been a great prop comic. Pryor did not use props, Carlin did not need props, Bruce occasionally pretended to be leafing through a newspaper, but he was no prop comic. Gallagher used props. Gallagher’s brother, who performed as Gallagher Too, used props, Gallagher’s props. Carrot Top. Ugh.
Steve Martin used props, but for some reason no one called him a prop comic. Why wasn’t Martin a prop comic? It is because Martin was a genius, a postmodern surrealist comic, a creator then breaker of molds? Martin’s props winked at the audience. They all agreed, props are stupid, but nonetheless, take a look at this rubber chicken. Martin was the prop. The funny man tries to take solace in the Martin example. Even if it was not possible to be a great prop comic, it was possible to be a great comic who used props. Martin’s arrow through the head is in the Smithsonian.
The funny man buoys himself with these thoughts as he prepares for his first post-thing discovery performance at the club. His new talent agent has insisted on it as a test. “My instincts are unfailing,” the agent said, “but still, you never know, you know?” The other hopeful funny men look at him as he drags his small trunk into the room to wait his turn.
“You having a garage sale?” one of them cracks.
“What’s in the box?” another says, but before he can strike, the funny man delivers the punch line: “Your act: I’m giving it a proper burial.” The joke is good enough to shut down the inquiries, everyone recognizing that it’s unlikely to be topped. And anyway, they are distracted when they realize one of them has fallen asleep, which provides an opportunity for one of them to drop trou and drape his testicles and penis across the unfortunate slumberer’s face in what is known as a “Roman helmet.”
As usual, backstage is saturated with smoke and littered with empty beer bottles with spent cigarettes jammed down the necks. The funny man is one of the few who doesn’t smoke (bad for the child), but the funny man is thirsty and nervous and would like a beer. However, he is afraid to leave his trunk unattended because he is certain that they will fuck with it because that is what he would do to them under the same circumstances. The atmosphere backstage is very all for one, one for all, us versus the audience, at least until you’re suspected of having the kind of success that will allow you to escape backstage, after which you are a goddamn sellout who should fuck a llama with your grandmother’s face, in a room with your parents, who are doing each other, so you’re fucking your llama grandmother while watching your parents have sex.
They all saw the funny man talking to the talent agent after his last time and now he shows up with a mysterious trunk. Very, very suspicious. He looks at them now, snapping cell phone photos of their sleeping comrade, now wearing the genitalia on his face, and realizes that for them, this may be as good as it gets, these stories about backstage at the club, hanging out with so-and-so, who everyone knows, and this is what they call a brush with fame.
But the funny man senses he is about to be more than brushed, he is being slathered in fame, dipped in fame, cannonballing into the fame pool, which may be dangerous because he cannot swim.
Or this may be hindsight talking. It’s hard to know for sure.
The funny man was third in line by the time he’d arrived. His agent has arranged for a better slot than usual, before the patrons are drunk and wrung-out and tired. The funny man considers asking someone to help him haul the trunk onto the stage, but knows he is unlikely to get any takers. Fortunately, he has been practicing carrying it without looking awkward or at least tripping onto his face, though that could be funny now that he thinks of it.
To the side of the stage a neon star illuminates, signaling that it’s time for the current performer to wrap things up. He now has between thirty and sixty seconds to finish or he is unlikely to be invited back ever again. The schedule at the club is not to be fucked with unless a famous alumnus of the club—someone who has achieved a sitcom or movie career—decides to show up unannounced to work some kinks out of their new material, in which case the schedule is torched. The neon star is also the signal for the next performer to move into position, ready to be announced by the finishing person. At the club, backstage is not actually backstage, but is behind the audience, past a curtain and down the stairs, so the funny man carefully eases the case to the ground at the top of the stairs so as not to draw attention to himself too soon.
The man on the stage hoods his eyes with his hand and squints through the stage lights peering to the back and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a truly talented professional coming next and it looks to me like he’s got something special planned that I’m sure you’ll enjoy. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome …”
WHEN THE NEON star comes on, the funny man has just enough time for the finale. It has been going extremely well. A guy in the front row did an actual spit take when the funny man first turned around with his fist in his mouth and the funny man ad-libbed jumping off stage to mop up the mess with the sleeve of his Jimmy Cagney trench coat. By the end, just about the whole audience was convulsing with laughter and he knew that the Captain Hook twist was going to surprise and delight them. They’d never seen this before, and yet they acted like they’ve been waiting all their lives for it.
After his thank-yous and good nights, the funny man quickly tosses the final props into his trunk and kicks the lid closed with his foot while introducing the next performer, a good friend of his, a guy he used to drink with until he was stupid as they debated who was and who was not the greatest and laid odds on which of their current colleagues would make it out of the club. They’d bonded, these two. They were bros. Fellow warriors, foxhole mates. The funny man gives his good friend his best introduction, slathering the praise. At his name the funny man’s good friend charges the stage, making it up before the funny man can even stoop to lift his trunk. He grips the funny man’s hand with his right hand and clamps the left on the funny man’s shoulder and menaces into his ear, “Thanks for draining the room with that weak shit. Look at these assholes, there’s nothing left.” His good friend lets go of the funny man’s hand and shoulder and as the funny man picks up his trunk he glances at the audience and sees his good friend is right. The crowd looks wrung-out, exhausted, postcoital even. He has done that to them. Him.
The funny man doesn’t even bother going backstage. He carries his trunk out the front door into the night air and normally he takes the subway, but tonight, he sticks his arm out for a cab. He isn’t coming back because he doesn’t need to.
OUTSIDE THE HOUSE, two production assistants roll up in the big, white rented van, and double-checking the address, note that there is no oak tree in the funny man’s yard as location scouting had promised. Location scouting is almost always fucking up. It’s like, why bother scouting if it’s wrong? However, there is a nice, shady oak tree, with one swooping, low-hanging branch that makes its residence in the neighboring yard.
“Always something,” production assistant two says to production assistant one.
“Waivers?” production assistant one asks production assistant two. “Got ‘em right here.”
At the neighbor’s door, PA one adjusts the slightly crooked mailbox as PA two rings the bell. The funny man’s neighbor answers.
“Yes?” Seeing the two handsome young men, she pats at her frazzled hair and cinches her housecoat a touch tighter at her throat.
“Ma’am,” PA two says, smiling big. “How would you like that nice, shady oak tree of yours to be nationally famous.” PA one extends the waiver form with one hand, a pen with the other.
The neighbor wonders if she might still be dreaming as she signs the paper in front of her.
THE FUNNY MAN looks at his hair in the mirror. A cowlick towards the rear refuses taming. He snips it, badly, with his wife’s cuticle scissors. The funny man would like to say that the recent months have been like a dream except that a dream is easier to remember and understand than what has been happening to the funny man. Following signing the contract with his agent, a series of very strange and wonderful events have carried him to this morning when his picture is to be taken for the nationally distributed magazine with a circulation of five million.
This is how his agent said it to him: “Five million circulation,” emphasis on the million, but the funny man was most interested in the circulation word. His picture, accompanied by a three-hundred-word article, would soon be circulating through five million people. Circulating is a good word, going round and coming back again. He will be among them, part of them, circulating. If nothing else good happens for the funny man, with the picture he will achieve a level of permanence that he could only have imagined a short time ago. From his new bathroom in his new house he hears the guttural rumble of cargo trucks. They’ve come for him. In the end, it wasn’t so tough to leave the city they both loved so dearly, the crucible in which his act was forged. The new house has three bathrooms and really, the city is a stone’s throw away, provided you can throw a stone like Superman.
THE DAY AFTER his successful appearance at the club, the funny man’s new agent called him and said he’d booked him for a gig that weekend, an opening slot for another comedian, but a good show, good money.
“How much money?” the funny man asked. His agent told him the figure.
“How much?” His agent told him the figure again.
“Say it again,” the funny man said and his agent did so. The gig was out of town, his first gig that he would travel to on a plane instead of the subway. When he told his wife how much he was earning for approximately twenty minutes of work, she looked at the ceiling and moved her lips, doing the math in her head. “That’s ten percent of what I earned all of last year,” she said.
When the funny man received his boarding pass from the ticket agent he thought there must be a typo. 2A. He’d never seen a row number that small. He had spent his life up to that point confined to 24F, 37D. He had a choice of personal videos at his seat and the food was tolerable. He did not anticipate any food poisoning. At his destination, when he descended the escalator to the baggage claim area, he saw a man in a black suit wearing a driver’s cap holding a dry erase board with the funny man’s name on it.
At the hotel they did not ask for a credit card imprint, which was good because he didn’t have one untethered to his bank account, which would not have contained nearly enough to pay for even a couple of hours in this particular hotel. His room was bigger than their apartment and a basket of consumer goods worth hundreds of dollars waited for him on the dining room table, thanking him for something he hadn’t done yet. His hotel room had a dining room table. His apartment did not.
With shaky hands he dialed the phone home and when his wife answered he told her all about the trip thus far. “It’s like another world,” he said.
“I could get used to this,” he said.
A YOUNG BOY wobbles down the street on his bike, tossing morning papers onto lawns. (It really was that kind of neighborhood.) The production assistants bounce the tractor tire out of the back of the van and roll it to the neighbor’s oak tree. They throw loops of hemp over the low-hanging branch and lash the hemp to the tire so it dangles several feet off the ground. PA one climbs on.
“Push me,” says PA one to PA two.
PA two grabs the tire and walks backward. “Underdog,” he says, running forward as fast as he can, pushing PA one skyward.
The tree limb groans under the weight.
“Wheeeee,” PA one says.
Soon, the production trucks roll up and disgorge barricades for the street, banks of lights, folding chairs, a live llama, and finally a long table of pastries and crullers.
The neighbor peeks through her curtains at the whole scene and wonders if it’s safe to go outside.
THE SHOW WAS the first time he would ever do the thing for such a large audience, the first time he’d do anything for such a large audience and the funny man was hella nervous. Trying to bond with the headliner, the funny man asked for any useful tips. The headliner was known as a “comic’s comic,” a bit cerebral, a practitioner of perfectly crafted jokes larded with arcana sometimes so subtle the audience laughed several seconds behind the beat. The headliner had hosted his own series of shows (cable, not network), all of which were critically praised but mostly ignored by viewers, but still, this guy was in television and even a handful of movies here and there in parts tailored to his persona. It was widely said by other comics that the headliner should be more famous than he was, but the other comics did not really believe this because most of them didn’t get the jokes either. The headliner looked up and down at the funny man. “Don’t fuck up,” he said.
The funny man laughed. The headliner didn’t.
The crowd was almost totally silent through the funny man’s opening material. He’d never been on a stage elevated so far above the audience and it was disorienting, and between bits his brain searched for each segue. Full-on amateur hour. “I’m fucking up,” he thought. “I’m really fucking up.” He imagined that it might be possible to jump from the stage and plunge to his death, it was so high. He would at least break a leg, which might engender some sympathy. At least they wouldn’t be silent anymore, he thought. At least he was able to cram all those consumer goods from the gift basket in his suitcase. His wife would enjoy the Swiss chocolates.
But then he turned to the steamer trunk filled with the hook and his costumes for the thing, and dragging it to the front of the stage, it made a hideous squeak that got a few laughs. Working with the moment, the funny man pretended to struggle to get the trunk open, making a show of his inability to raise the lid. He kicked and cursed at the trunk, the sounds of the laughter swelling in his ears, until fully inspired, he invited someone from the front row to come up and help, a frat-boy-looking guy who looked unsure as he mounted the steps to the stage, but gave the full-on dude double-fist thrust salute into the air as the spotlight hit him. Frat-boy-looking guy strolled over to the trunk and braced himself for the effort of raising the lid that the funny man had found so impossible to move, and flinging it open, fell flat on his ass to massive applause.
When frat-boy-looking guy got home he told his parents that the show was “the coolest thing ever.”
THE MAKEUP ARTIST circles the funny man and mutters something about pores. After giving up on the funny man, he turns to the funny man’s wife, and shouts “perfection!” causing the funny man’s wife to blush, which adds just the right amount of additional rouge to her cheeks. Oldest trick in the book.
THE FUNNY MAN could not contain his grin as he left the stage after performing the thing. It was clear that they’d never seen anything like that before and would be going home to tell their friends and neighbors about it. The headliner stood in the wings, arms crossed and frowning. “Nice job, fuckwad. A pox on you and your shitty act.”
The funny man laughed. The headliner didn’t.
Back at the hotel, talking on the phone, his agent said not to worry about it. “You’re never opening for anyone ever again.”
The next week the funny man was booked on the late, late-night show, the one that’s watched by fewer people, and not so much watched, but something that’s on in the background during sleep, or sex, or drinking oneself to death, but still, television! The funny man did a truncated version of the thing. At the end of his act the host came over to shake his hand before throwing it to commercial. “Great great stuff,” he said. “Back after a break!” As the camera light clicked off, while still gripping the funny man’s hand, the host, a former comic himself, leaned in and said, “Everyone else is going to hate you for this. You know that, right?” The host released his grip and patted the funny man on the back, the final pat feeling something like a shove off the stage. Once could be a fluke, twice begins to be suspicious, but a third time is, for sure, a pattern. The funny man was not going to be loved by the other funny men. His rise to comedy fame is to be a solo, rather than a team sport. This is how it always is, though. Even in ensemble situations, all for one and one for all means more for some. For every Rachel, there is a Phoebe. For every Chevy, a Larraine. He is comfortable with this because he has no choice.
WHEN THE PHOTOGRAPHER arrives he surveys the setup and asks if this is the architect everyone is talking about who designs the tiny homes, or is this the cancer survivor that hopscotched across the state, or perhaps the young author who everyone thinks is so rude? Is this the man who started a multimillion-dollar charity by banding the homeless together to sell chocolate chip cookies shaped like American presidents?
“Where am I, anyway?” he asks. “Can a guy get a latte?”
He looks at the llama and waves it away. The llama doesn’t seem to care.
The production coordinator points at the tire. “Straddle it,” he tells the funny man. “One leg down each side of the tire with the wife and kid sitting in the middle. Zany, but also precious. Beloved and unpredictable.” This looks decidedly impossible to the funny man. The extent of his athletic prowess was a college intramural championship in Ultimate Frisbee. He is not flexible in any sense of the word. He suspects that his tendons are shorter and more rigid than average.
The funny man climbs to the top and gingerly stretches his legs around the tire. He feels a tug in his groin.
“Don’t move,” the production coordinator says to the funny man. “Tickle the baby,” the production coordinator says to the funny man’s wife. “Perfect.”
A line of sweat leaks down the funny man’s face. It seems possible that the muscle in his leg may detach from his knee. Did he not once see a show on one of the science channels that demonstrated how each muscle is a bundle of many fibers and that exercise is actually a form of destruction, where the muscle is damaged on purpose so that it may grow stronger in defense? But damage is different from destruction, which is what seems to be happening here. Damage is reparable, destruction permanent. For sure surgery, rehabilitation, a permanent limp or hobble. He breathes loudly through his mouth. His wife stage-whispers up at him through her smile: “Are you okay?”
“Ah, ah, ah,” the funny man replies.
Putting down his latte, the photographer approaches the scene, squinting through one eye as he moves toward the camera. He squats down to his haunches and cups his hands around his eyes. “We’ll fix that look on his face in post,” the photographer mutters to the production coordinator.
“Shoot them,” he tells the production coordinator. “Shoot them now.”
Triggered by remote, the camera fires over and over and over.
A COUPLE OF weeks later, standing in the supermarket aisle, the neighbor tears through the issue of the magazine and there, on page 37 is her tree with the neighbors hanging from it. She always knew the wife was pretty and the husband is better looking than she’d thought, though up to that point she’d only seen him in sweatpants as he went to retrieve the morning paper. She did not know their names before, but now she does and she will never forget them again. They probably will not speak to each other because she does not want to be a bother, but she will wave when appropriate. Years from now she will tell stories about how she used to be neighbors with the famous funny man and his wife and how wonderful it was.
The picture is amazing to her. Every day for the past seventeen years she has looked out her front window at that oak tree. She has driven past it up her driveway, thousands and thousands of times, yearly she has ordered her husband into the yard to rake up its leaves, but here, in this glossy magazine, for the first time, she feels like she really sees it, you know? She buys ten copies.