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“Wha, 's the deal with Barney? Are you telling me that, with all the crushing jaws and killer claws in the dinosaur kingdom, the only species that didn't become extinct is purple, has no teeth, and a rear end the size of a king-size water bed?"
Four-year-old Olivia Plunkett sat on a tiny chair, staring blankly up at her half brother, Max Carmody.
"And the Teletubbies. Give me a break! Are they supposed to be real ? Hey, Tinky Winky, you've got a television growing out of your stomach! You live in a bomb shelter! Your vacuum cleaner is alive!
Whoa—heads up! There's a giant baby trapped inside the sun. ..."
Olivia looked at him resentfully, her lower lip quivering. "Mom, he's saying mean things about Tinky Winky again!"
Max sighed. It was one of the first rules of comedy: great material can take you only so far; the rest is up to the audience. And it helps, he reflected, if the audience is old enough to understand a joke.
But just being older didn't always guarantee that an audience would be any better. Max's best friend, Maude Dolinka, was one of the smartest girls in sixth grade. She understood all the jokes. She just didn't consider them funny.
"So you think I should be laughing because there's someone in the phone book with a dumb name."
"It's hilarious!" Max argued. "Can't you picture Mr. and Mrs. Smellie naming their newborn son Irving Martin—without realizing the kid is going to be I. M. Smellie!"
"He's lucky," Maude said tragically. "You don't know what it's like to be Maude Do-stinka. Or Odd Maude the Clod. I never know what's coming next. I. M. Smellie. He's smelly. So what? He's never going to have a nickname."
Then there was Mario, Max's stepdad. He found everything that came out of Max's mouth to be absolutely hilarious. That was no help either. He'd be cracking up before Max even opened his mouth to start a joke. You couldn't tell how your routine was going over with a guy who was determined to yuk it up no matter what you said—even if you said nothing at all. It was like going by a thermometer that always gave the same temperature.
Right before he died, the famous actor Sir Donald Wolfit said, "Dying is easy; comedy is hard." Of course, how seriously could you take a "famous" actor nobody had ever heard of? And anyway, he was dead now, so it was impossible to know if he had known what he was talking about.
But it sure made sense.
Ever since Max Carmody was seven years old, his overpowering ambition was to be a professional stand-up comic. One night, congested and feverish with flu, he sat up with his mother and Mario and watched an episode of Seinfeld , and that was the beginning. He didn't even understand the humor. But the notion that you could be there in the bright lights, the center of attention, making
everybody laugh—that would be the only life for Max.
All through elementary school, he crafted and perfected routines to be delivered to the bathroom mirror. For a long time, that was enough. The mirror thought he was a riot.
Then came the Contest.
It happened in the Bartonville Middle School cafeteria. Sydni Cox, another sixth grader, was sharing her candy bar around the table when Maude suddenly leaped to her feet with a howl of dismay.
"Oh, no!" This through a jam-packed mouth and immobilized tongue. "Wha's in there? Wha's in there?"
Sydni uncrumpled the wrapper and read off the ingredients: "Invert sugar, artificial flavor, corn syrup . . ."
But Maude's popping eyes were fixed on the label: cherry blaster. "Cherries!" she shrieked, her mouth open and drooling. "I can't swallow any! I'm allergic!"
The fourth person at the table, six-foot-tall yellow-blond Andrew Byrd (known for obvious reasons as Big Byrd) jumped up. In a motion that was both awkward and graceful, he hurled himself
behind the much shorter Maude, grabbed her around the waist, and applied the Heimlich maneuver with the power of a pile driver.
There was a violent hiccup, and the wad of chocolate shot out of Maude's mouth, hit the bulletin board, and stuck there.
Max turned to Maude with a grin. "Thanks a lot for bringing that up."
Maude guzzled a mouthful of milk, gargled noisily, and spit it out into the garbage can. "You're a real comedian," she seethed. "I'm going to itch all over because of this! I can't even be in the same room as cherries!"
And that was when Max caught sight of it, the poster under the oozing gob of cherry chocolate.
A message that could only have been meant for him. A message that would change his life.