SETBACKS AT EVERY turn, but what his manager has come to tell him about is a magic word to celebrities, a onetime only get-out-of-jail (metaphorically speaking) free card available to each and every one of them. “It’s not all bad,” the funny man’s manager says to him. He is speaking softly. His movements are slow and precise, like a technician defusing a bomb, which for all practical purposes is what the funny man is. He would like to explode and he knows in doing so, he could do some real damage, could fuck up a few lives, take a lot of people down with him. Free-floating rage, indeed.
“Comeback,” the manager says.
“Comeback?”
The manager nods. “People love a good comeback story, something they can root for, something they can get behind, something grounded in real American values.”
The funny man likes the sound of the word comeback. He was gone, but now he is back; missing, then found. Come back, funny man! Come back! He is also crushingly bored in this apartment with nothing to do except wait or not wait for the time to take the next pill. He asks the manager what the plan is.
“Small series of club dates, unannounced, but strategically leaked, handpicked reporter to follow you around and do a profile. We’ll give the proceeds to charity, something for orphans or amputees, or orphan amputees. We’re thinking a new haircut, something cleaner, low-maintenance. You’re both humbled and grateful. If phase one works out, you’ll go oversees and entertain the troops.”
“Wait,” the funny mans says. “Why can’t I just do that first? That actually sounds kind of cool.”
The manager looks at his shoes, knowing that his snippers are poised to cut the wrong wire.
Recognition dawns on the funny man’s face. “Because they don’t want me.”
The manager half nods and half bows. He could’ve also said because they don’t allow pill-popping addicts to fly on military transports, but he doesn’t.
The funny man considers going back to the clubs. He enjoyed the clubs, he really did, the way they would be downright chilly when he’d arrive in the evening, but hot and sweaty with body heat by the time he left. He loved the proximity to the audience, seeing the jokes land and their faces open up with surprise. It begins to sound real good to the funny man, mostly.
“I can’t do the thing anymore. I just can’t,” he says. There are not enough pills in the world to make it tolerable.
The manager’s face brightens. “No, exactly, that’s fine. That’s not for the comeback. We save that for years down the road for the nostalgia tour; no, no, no, no, no, we’ve got to mothball that for now, make them miss it, exactly right. We’re totally on the same wavelength here. No, we need a new thing.”
“A new thing?”
“Yeah, something new, that they haven’t seen before but still can’t stop talking about.”
“Fresh lightning,” the funny man says.
“Exactly,” the manager replies.
AND SO THE funny man sits around the apartment and tries to conjure a new thing. Because of the pills, the fully coherent hours of the day are limited, which is a problem to begin with, and during those times the funny man’s mind usually remains entirely blank. Later, when the pills have a firmer hold and his body feels like it is encased in cotton candy, he will experience what he is sure is an incredible burst of creativity, writing down dozens and dozens of ideas in his notebook that unfortunately make little sense in the light of the next day.
For awhile, he thinks that perhaps something involving ears is promising. He has seen a special on the exotic travel channel where they visit a tribe of dark, naked people who dangle progressively heavier weights from their ears until their lobes are stretched practically to the ground. Apparently, in their culture, dangling earlobes are like large breasts in America.
The funny man spends some time tugging on his ears and finds them to be agreeably stretchy. Pulling them down while looking in the mirror, he sees that he looks pretty funny and that people may laugh at that.
But once out of the drug haze, he thinks through the ear thing rationally. To pursue it would mean courting a kind of permanent disfigurement, like people who tattoo their faces. There’s no coming back from that kind of thing. Post—face tattoo the first thing everybody thinks when they see you is, “oh yeah, that guy’s got a tattoo on his face,” and it blots out just about everything else. Everywhere in the world he would be stared at because of his physical freakishness. Everywhere except the tribe of dark, naked people, though even there, they would ask him why he is so pale and his ears hang like a chick’s.
So that won’t work.
Screaming has been done more than once. Mumbling too. As has accompanying one’s own jokes by playing a guitar that is smashed at the end of the set. (The same deal has even been pulled with an accordion.) He is too clumsy for magic and he can’t sing. Singing poorly has been done, anyway. A comedy act involving constrictor snakes could be fresh, but the damn things are awfully unpredictable and having a python wrapped around your neck while you tell jokes seems like it might be a distraction.
It becomes increasingly clear to the funny man that everything has already been done. There are no more “things” to be had. On the one hand, this increases his already outsized self-esteem because it reinforces how difficult it was for him to develop the first thing even though it was actually demonstrated to him by an eighteen-month-old baby. On the other, it means there will be no comeback.
Finally, one day, to relieve stress and shake the cobwebs loose, he puts on some music and begins dancing around the apartment. He is not a good dancer, and knowing this, he emphasizes this fact, shaking his limbs arrhythmically, outside of the beat. He concentrates on one limb at a time, shaking it as crazily as he can before adding another limb and another until his whole body jitters in a million different directions. As he catches glimpses of himself in the apartment’s reflective surfaces he begins to laugh. “Hey, that’s pretty funny,” he thinks.
He dances and dances. As evening turns to night, with the apartment lights on, he can see his reflection in the windows and he is now doing a move that involves mostly flopping a single leg around so it looks like the tendons and ligaments of his ankle have become unattached. The foot seems to be able to rotate the full 360 degrees, and even imperfectly captured in the windows, it cracks his shit up. When he tries to put pressure on the foot he realizes that the reason it looks like the ligaments and tendons have become detached is because they have. Rather than pointing straight as it should, his foot points at his other foot. There is pain, for sure. It is hilarious. It is grotesque. The funny man feels a flush of pride. I am suffering for my art.
With practice and some manipulation, the funny man finds that he is, more or less, able to put everything back into place before detaching it again and what he has now is a replicable comedy phenomenon. After a week of practice, he makes an appointment to show it to his agent.
He shows it to his agent.
“Whoa,” the agent says at the end. The funny man is frowning as he tries to manipulate the foot back into proper alignment.
“What?”
“That’s weird.”
“Funny weird.”
“No, weird weird, gross weird. Cover your face and turn away and don’t even look at it through parted fingers weird.”
“Really?”
“Hell, yeah. Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Not as much as you’d think.” The funny man looks down and flops his foot around a little more. He’s found that if he does it for too long, the skin starts to turn blue, which is a little gross, but the flopping itself, hilarious.
His agent holds his hands in front of his face, not even parting his fingers, trying to block the view. “Don’t ever do that in front of an audience.”
“But it’s good. I know it’s good. You’re reacting. Reaction is good.”
“Laughter is good. Tears can even be good. Shock and horror is not good.”
The funny man sits down and tugs his foot back into place so his agent will stop wincing. “What a wuss,” the funny man thinks. “This is it,” the funny man says. “This is the new thing. This is the comeback.”
“I don’t think so,” the agent says. “I can’t let you show that to the world.”
Normally, the funny man would simply demand what he wants from his agent and he would get it, but in this case, he doesn’t just want what he wants, he wants to be right. It is important that the agent agree, that the funny man be redeemed, not just coddled or handled. “Tell you what,” the funny man says, “one show, a test, and then you’ll see that I know what I’m talking about.”
Relieved that the funny man is not going to take more flesh from his hide, the agent agrees.