Introduction

"America's favorite comedian is on trial for manslaughter, and 'the funny man''s lawyer, Barry, has a unique defense: not guilty by way of celebrity.... [An] equally sickening and humorous portrait of the celebrity as a delusional man."—Publisher's Weekly

The funny man is a middling comic in an unnamed city. By day he takes care of his infant son, by night he performs in small clubs, sandwiched between other aspiring comics. His wife waits tables to support the family. It doesn't sound like much, but they?re happy, more or less. Until the day he comes up with it. His thing. His gimmick. And everything changes. He's a headliner, and the venues get bigger fast. Pretty soon it's Hollywood and a starring role in a blockbuster, all thanks to the gimmick.
 
Which is: He performs with his fist in his mouth to the wrist. Jokes, impressions, commercials--all with his fist in his mouth to the wrist. The people want him--are crazy for him--but only with his fist in his mouth.
 
And the funny man, he is tired of having his fist in his mouth.
 
Thus, as the novel begins, his career's in tatters, his family's left him, and he's on trial for shooting an unarmed man six times. But for the second time in his life, against all odds, he's found love. This time with another celebrity, who may or may not be sending him coded messages, and may or may not be equally in love--or even know he exists. A coruscating satire of our culture of celebrity, this debut novel documents one individual's slide from everyman to monster, even as it reveals the potential for grace--and mercy--in his life.

Editorial Review

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Excerpt

1

The courtroom is not a space conducive to comedy. For

one thing the ceiling is too high; too much space for jokes to

float up and fade. And then there’s the layout, the way the various

people—judge, defendant, prosecutor, jury—are isolated in their

zones. Laughter is like a virus, more easily spread when people are

in proximity to each other, and the only person anywhere near

me is Barry, my lawyer.

Not that I’m in the mood to try out any new material, even if

Barry hadn’t hinted that levity is a bad idea when you’re charged

with manslaughter by saying, “The only one who gets to be funny

in here is the judge and if the judge is funny I’m allowed to laugh,

but you aren’t. You are going to be as serious as ass cancer.”

The viewing area is empty, the judge’s decision to prevent a

“spectacle.” I didn’t object, and neither did Barry, which is odd

because he seems to enjoy an audience almost as much as I used

to. Because I’m famous, there’s been high demand to see the trial.

Depending on the news outlet this is either the trial of the year

or the decade. I am a top story every night. There are at least ten

Web sites dedicated entirely to the trial’s goings on, reporting the

tiniest of minutia. There are daily tweets on what the jury orders

out for lunch. A large crowd hoping for a glimpse of something

interesting gathers in a roped-in designated free speech area out

in front of the courthouse every day. On the cable news crawl you

will find my name scrolling by at five minute increments. Apparently,

I spark the synapses of the national consciousness.

Crowds used to be my thing, but lately, I sometimes like to

imagine myself as the main character in one of those postapocalyptic

movies where there is only one person with one loyal dog

companion left on Earth and that vision feels pretty damn good,

relative to the present circumstances anyway.

No, two people. I would like there to be two people left on

Earth (with or without the dog), me being one of them.

Barry and I must now enter and leave the courthouse from

below ground in a car with dark windows because otherwise the

paparazzi would never allow us down the courthouse steps. They

would slowly melt me to a puddle under the heat and glare of their

camera lights.

As is, when the car leaves the underground garage, they stand

in front of the vehicle, blocking its way until they get more than

enough pictures. They seem willing to risk their lives for these

pictures (of the car, not even of me since the windows are blackened),

one hand braced on the car’s hood while they fire away with

their cameras, defying the car to run them over.

I killed a man, that’s not in doubt. We’re not arguing about that.

I said as much to the first cops on the scene when they approached

with their guns and their f lashlights drawn, the guns aimed at my

torso, the flashlights focused on my hands, because it was in my

hands that I still held the gun and they asked, “Did you shoot this

guy?” and I said, “Yeah.” And one of the cops said, “Hey, I know

you,” and the other cop said, “Me too.”

In the mug shot that you’ve probably seen I look blottoed, crazy,

my hair electrified, my eyes sunken deep into my skull, but it’s

important to remember that it was raining and I was wearing a

hood and there’s a certain amount of shock associated with being

arrested, even when you’ve done nothing wrong.

Plus, I was in love.

The trial is to determine if I had to shoot the man, if it was selfdefense,

if it was justified. It is illegal to shoot someone because

you can, or even should, or even if they deserve it. The only way

it is legal to shoot someone is if you have a reasonable belief that

your life is in danger at the moment you shot the person.

The answer to the question of why I shot the man is a complicated

story. However, let me lay out these undisputed facts: The

gun belonged to the other man, and the other man was a wellknown

thief, an armed robber as had been proven in a court of

law twice before. And no, I did not have to shoot him. He was

disarmed, the threat neutralized. I shot him six times as an act

of kindness, of mercy. No one knows this story, not even Barry,

because he wouldn’t believe it. It seems impossible to make the

context clear. I deserve punishment for lots of things, but shooting

that man is not one of them.

That night, I was walking around the city, minding my own

business, feeling good, feeling really good for the first time in a

long time, feeling really really good for the first time since the

divorce and then the new thing bombing, my failures. Two of

my failures, anyway. I was feeling good because I had gone to the

ends of the Earth (another complicated story) and there I’d met

her and in her I had been cleansed; all things suddenly seemed

possible. I had spent the evening watching her the only way I

could, on television, a match from Monte Carlo, tape delayed as

filler. I could’ve been the only one watching for all I knew, but

it didn’t matter. It was as though each serve, every groundstroke,

was a message transmitted directly to me. As she destroyed the

teenager from Croatia, it was as though she was saying, I miss you.

I’ll see you soon.

It was raining, but following her match I couldn’t be contained

by the walls of my apartment, so I gave in to the urge to grab my

coat and walk, just walk wherever, rolling everything around in my

head, her smile, the sensation of our first kiss, savoring this change

in fortune. We were temporarily apart due to circumstances, but I

was confident that those circumstances would change. Not confident,

certain. Those were moments of certainty for me. I kept the

hood on my jacket pulled up, protection against the rain. I must’ve

looked a little dumb, walking in the rain, laughing, almost giggling

to myself when I thought of her.

I turned a corner and smirked because just at that moment I was

thinking about how my life had turned a corner and there I was,

literally turning a corner, and there was something funny in that, not

ironic funny, coincidence funny, but there was the man with the

gun saying, “Give me your wallet. No funny business.”

Barry sits, staring placidly at the empty bench, his hands

folded on top of a blank legal pad. An expensive pen rests to one

side. There are no other papers or materials either on or beneath

or beside the table. I used to have my own notepad and pen, but

Barry took them away from me earlier in the trial because the

courtroom sketch artist noticed that I had the tendency to draw

obscene doodles and this little tidbit wound up anonymously

sourced in the news, which was not good, which was described

on several of the websites as a “setback.”

The judge is often called away for urgent business in her chambers,

which means the rest of us—me, Barry, the prosecutor, the

jury, the sketch artist—are left behind, waiting. If the waiting is

expected to go on too long, the jury gets to go elsewhere, but

I am usually expected to stay. Sometimes I imagine the judge

makes us wait because she can, which isn’t fair. The headlines say

it themselves: Funny Man on Trial for His Life, the kind of

thing that deserves a judge’s full attention. Well, not exactly my

life, since manslaughter is not punishable by death, but enough

imprisonment to last the rest of my days is close enough to “life,”

in my book.

During these periods of judicial absence, Barry is serene, contemplative

without being glassy or glazed, a well-dressed Buddha.

Occasionally, he leans toward me as though to speak, his eyes

canted up and to the right at the jury, but nine times out of ten he

says nothing, or at best, a “how ya doing?”

The prosecutor, on the other hand, is busy riff ling through

accordion files, f lagging things with Post-its, scribbling notes onto

his own pad. His tie is almost always askew and there is a stack of

poster-sized exhibits resting behind him, some gruesome pictures

of the “victim” at the scene and later on the coroner’s table. A team

of three assistants sits at an auxiliary table pouring through their

own files, occasionally bringing a sheet of paper to the prosecutor’s

attention for him to look at brief ly before either shaking his head

and sending them away, or grabbing it and stuffing it into one of

his own files. They are like bees working in the hive.

During the prosecution’s case, which has just ended, this

dichotomy between the prosecution’s busy hive and Barry’s

Buddha disposition began to bother me. The prosecutor would

display one of the oversized pictures showing the “victim” on a

metal table under the glare of the coroner’s lights, the small purplish

blotch between his eyes where the only bullet that mattered

entered, and march back to his table to grab a piece of paper to

wave at the witness and ask things like, “Isn’t it true that . . . ?”

And the answer from the witness always sounded very bad, very

damaging to my case, a “major setback,” if you will. All the while

Barry maintained his look, calm yet alert, centered, speaking only

occasionally to object to the way a question was phrased, after

which the prosecutor would simply reword to the same effect and

there came the damaging information anyway. It was as though a

hand was raised to block a blow to the head, only to invite one to

the gut. I’ll admit, it was maddening, borderline infuriating even,

and finally at the end of one of the days of the trial as Barry and

I rode in the back of the car with the darkened windows, being

buffeted by the paparazzi trying to shoot us through the front

windshield, I exploded. There was a time where I would’ve gladly

subjected myself to the judge and jury’s harshest punishment, but

I was ready to live and it seemed like Barry was helping them kill

me. The car rocked gently as it eased through the mass of reporters,

the driver tooting his horn with every inch.

“We’re getting killed! You’re killing me!” I said, my hands

trembling in my lap, one eye on Barry, one on the stubbly back

of the driver’s head. “Even I’m going to think I’m guilty by the

time this is over! Why don’t you do anything? Look at all the stuff

they have! The reports, the pictures, the diagrams, the re-creation

animation!” I felt my face f lush and I pounded my hand against

the armrest as I shouted.

Barry maintained the infuriatingly calm look and placed one

hand gently on my leg as the other reached for the switch that raised

the divider between us and the driver. As the barrier swooshed

into place, he started to speak.

“I am doing great, better than great, actually. You, on the other

hand, are going to cock things up with your fidgeting and wincing

every time they ask something and even a slightly unfavorable

answer comes out. Half the time you look like someone’s got

electrodes on your nads. It’s not pretty and it’s not helpful.”

“Not helpful! You’re doing nothing! No-thing! Did you see

those pictures he has? Gah! This guy is slaughtering you and you

do nothing! I just want you to do something!”

I shook my fists like a frustrated baby. It was a worse moment

among bad ones. Barry sighed and grabbed my arms and pulled

them down and gripped me by the hands. The look on Barry’s face

remained unchanged, unbothered, placid, but the grip was extremely

strong. I could feel my knuckles shift underneath my skin.

“You are under a misapprehension,” Barry said, maintaining

his grip. “You, like our prosecutor friend, believe that a trial is an

exercise in logic, that Sherlock Holmes is on the scene, deducting

and inducting until we arrive at a common understanding of who

is guilty and why. You believe that a trial is like solving a puzzle of

what happened that night in that alley, and why, each piece locking

into place until the picture is clear for all to see. Yes?”

I nodded. These things had seemed self-evident to me, the

page that all of us—judge, prosecution, jury—were on. This was

the given, the thing to be understood and accepted and while—

because of the plausibility issues—I could never tell the full story,

I had been hoping that Barry would come up with a reasonable

facsimile that would prove convincing to the jury. Barry loosened

his grip a little and began rubbing the top of his thumb over the

back of one of my hands. It felt good, actually.

“This strategy would suggest that we need to be contesting each

and every inch of forensic evidence, and from there move on to

destroying the credibility of their witnesses, the ones who said they

heard a scuff le starting and then a scuff le ending and then maybe

some pleading from an unidentified voice that is probably not the

defendant, since the defendant’s voice is rather recognizable, and

only then a gunshot. Check that, multiple gunshots, suggesting

that you may just have executed this poor wretch of a man forced

to steal from people with enough money for a hundred lifetimes

to feed a drug habit that has already twice landed him in jail.

“If this trial is an exercise in logic,” he continued, “we should

want to muddy the picture of that puzzle so the jury can’t tell if

they’re looking at a picture of Mount Rushmore, or a basket full

of golden retriever puppies, or an autumn scene in New England,

right?”

I nodded again, relaxing slowly. My hands puddled inside of

Barry’s grip. His skin was downy soft. We held onto each other

like husband and wife at the wedding altar. Barry continued.

“You believe that trials are won and lost on the basis of who

presents the most compelling arguments in the most cohesive and

logical fashion, but as history and experience have shown, this is

nonsense, a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and

decision making. Here’s an analogy. I assume you’ve voted before.

Do we happen to elect the person who is most qualified, who is

best prepared for the challenges of the office? Do we sort through

the criteria for being a good president, weigh the pros and cons,

and then select the right person for the right time? No, we do not,

because human beings are irrational creatures. We are subject to

swings of emotion. We are governed by illogic. You, above all,

should recognize this by now, considering your life.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but no sound came out.

“A trial is not a logic puzzle. A trial is not Tetris. A trial is a

story. A trial has characters and conflict and action and symbolism

and theme and a climax, and all those other things. Now, I bet you

can picture the climax we’re hoping for. I know I can. In fact, I

visualize it daily. It is part of my morning ablutions, all of us turned

toward the jury, quiet enough in the courtroom to hear a pin drop,

breaths held in anticipation as the foreperson unfolds the slip of

paper and reads from it, despite already knowing what’s printed

there, and says, ‘Not guilty, Your Honor.’ Would you agree that

this is the climactic moment we’re hoping for?”

I nodded. I hadn’t dared visualize it before, but as he spoke it

appeared before me and I had the urge to run toward it.

“Good. So we’re on the same page there. Now, to bring about

this climax, something very important has to happen and that is

that regardless of whether or not you committed the act in the way

the prosecution alleges, when we get to that moment, we need that

jury to want you to be innocent. Let me say that again in a slightly

different way. It doesn’t matter if you are or are not innocent on

the facts of the case. It is not what happened that matters, it is why it

happened. They must be rooting for you to be innocent. In rooting

for you to be innocent they will realize that they have the power

to make it so and after we hear that verdict you’ll be shaking my

hand and hugging me and pounding me on the back as tears roll

down your cheeks. But . . .”

“But?”

“Yes, there is a but. I didn’t want to have to share this with

you, but at this point, we have no real choice. As part of our trial

preparation we have been focus grouping you.”

“Focus grouping?”

“Yes, we gathered the unemployed, the elderly, the unemployed,

the unclever, the unemployed, in short, the sorts of people who

were likely to—and indeed did—wind up in a jury of your peers,

and we asked them about you, what they know, what they think,

and it was not pretty.”

“No?”

“No. The words most commonly associated with you among

our target potential jury demographic were untalented, successful,

and bad husband and father.”

Barry said the words matter-of-factly, a declaration as straightforward

as name, rank, and serial number.

“Successful is good, though, right?”

“Not when coupled with untalented, no. The perception is that

your success is unearned, either a f luke or a function of a decaying

society, an early sign of the end-times-type thing. If the world

were a better place we never would have heard of you. You are a

symptom of a collective societal weakness for the gimmicky and

trivial. The overwhelming feeling among these people is that you

should just go away. To these people, you’re not likable enough

to pity, not interesting enough to hate. Either of these could be

compelling reasons for a jury to find you not guilty. Right now,

you are simply what is happening and they’re eager to move on to

whatever is next while still recognizing the need for closure with

regards to your particular tale. They feel that you are holding them

hostage. They wish for resolution, but don’t particularly care what

it is. ‘Just get it over with,’ they say. ‘Whatever,’ they say. Needless

to say, this narrative is toxic to our chances. They want you gone

because they can’t bring themselves to look away.

Barry released my hands and sat back in the seat and turned his

eyes forward. The driver had wormed free of the paparazzi and

we were speeding down an avenue, the lights going green for us

as though by Barry’s command, the soft shocks of the town car

absorbing all bumps. I stared at Barry, still gape-mouthed, my mind

swirling, disordered like a snow globe shaken and dropped, and

finally asked, “So which am I going to be? Hero or villain?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out.”

2

On the small, nightclub stage, the funny man says funny

things to the small audience arranged around the small tables

before him. As the laughter fades between these funny things,

the funny man hears ice shift in cocktail glasses and throats being

quietly cleared. Toward the end, someone lets loose a big, wet

cough that sounds tubercular and a drunk man orders his next

round loud enough to drown out a punchline. All in all, though,

a damn good night.

This is maybe the five or six hundredth time the funny man

has tried his hand at this and “damn good” is a signif icant

improvement over his initial attempts. The number of people

he has performed for has varied from none to slightly more

than none, to seven (including three bachelor party revelers

who were unconscious, greening upchuck crusted to their

shirtfronts), all the way up to 125 when he was scheduled on a

night when there was a rumor that a “comedy legend” would

be doing a rare club appearance to work on new material. The

legend never appeared because it was the funny man who started

the rumor, maybe the cleverest thing he had done in his life

up to that point.

Six years the funny man has been coming to this club, from the

moment he was old enough for his parents to trust him to drive

alone into the city, fueled by an indestructible belief that he was

indeed funny and that someday people would pay to hear him

say and do funny things. The funny man doesn’t know where

this belief, or the seemingly inexhaustible fuel that accompanied

his desire to have others agree with this self-assessment, came

from. This belief remained unshaken despite the number of times

someone, unsolicited, had shouted up to him on the stage, “Fuck

you, you’re not fucking funny.” (Forty-nine.) The funny man had

been told to “eat shit,” to “die,” to “eat shit and die,” and to “eat

shit and die horribly,” which actually made him laugh. Shielded

by the stage lights blocking the funny man’s view, patrons had

yelled at the funny man to fuck himself, to fuck his mother and to

fuck himself with his mother’s dick, and yet at every opportunity

he climbed on to the stage, hopeful each time that it would go, if

not “damn good,” at least “pretty good.” If you want to call that

a sickness, that’s your business.

The club is the only venue that matters, the place where all of

the famous funny men (and women, though there aren’t that many

women) have been spawned. They come to the club as embryos

and the stage is where they gestate and careers are either birthed

or aborted. The club is small and ugly and certainly not the kind

of place that should be seen in daylight under any circumstances,

but it is and always has been the place. The hopeful funny people

come to bomb until the day they no longer bomb and then they

are said to have “passed,” at which time you are allowed to perform

on a Friday or Saturday night and you earn twenty dollars

for the privilege.

But this night, for the funny man, no bombing, only applause,

or mostly applause among the usual indifference. One of the things

the funny man has come to realize during his times on stage is that

the people in the club who are not shitfaced into oblivion want

to laugh. They are almost desperate to laugh, having paid their

fifteen-dollar cover charge and drunken their required minimum

of drinks. They are like cans of soda shaken up, ready to explode

and all it takes is to open them. It is the funny man’s job to unearth

the funny things they already hold in their brains, they just don’t

know it yet. And yet, so many of the prospective funny people

bomb, or tank, or f lop, because the wannabe funny people are

equally desperate to get them to laugh and the mutual desperation

meets like two magnets tuned to the same poles, pushing each

other farther and farther apart until there is only silence, or even

worse, a comic who turns on the audience, seeking laughs in that

guy’s mole, or her oversized breasts, blaming them for his (it is

always a he) own shortcomings, the most significant of which is

that he just isn’t funny.

Upon finishing, the funny man thanks the audience for having

him and tells them that they’re really too, too kind. As is custom,

he introduces the next performer and steps from the stage lights

into darkness and wipes the sweat from his brow and this moment

always reminds the funny man of the moment after orgasm where

just instants before you were thinking that this is the best thing ever

and then all of the sudden it’s all, “what’s the big deal?” and then

two minutes later you feel kind of dirty about the whole thing.

Near the bar, a man loudly claps two fat hands together, whistles

with his fingers at his lips, and then claps again, repeating the

sequence long after the rest of the room is silent. The man is round

and dumpy like those toys that can’t be knocked down. He gestures

the funny man backstage. The funny man follows. The man’s neck

is thick and wrinkled like a Shar-pei.

The clapping man claps the funny man on the back. Regular

people are not allowed backstage, so the funny man knows this

man is irregular. He is part of the industry. “That was killer,”

the man says. “You killed. That slayed me. Funny, funny shit.

I’m dying here.” The clapping man leans on a chair and breathes

heavily as he hands the funny man a card. “You’ve cracked the

code. You just need a ‘thing’ now. That’s the clincher. A thing.

The arrow through the head, the inf lated surgical glove, watermelons

and sledgehammers, crazy hair, screeching, turtlenecks,

obesity, something. Call me when you get one,” he says. “I’ll take

you places.”

The funny man looks down at the card as he massages the

back of his own neck. The other hopeful funny men lounging

around the broken-down couches sucking on beers and smoking

themselves into early graves look at him with deep and intractable

loathing. Talent Agent the card says, with a number below.

“Where?” he asks, looking up, but the man has already left. On

the way home he rolls this word around his head: Talent. “I have

talent,” he thinks. “Talent talent talent.”

Excerpted from The Funny Man by John Warner. Copyright © 2011 by John Warner. Excerpted by permission of Soho Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Is the funny man a sympathetic character?

2. Do you think the White Hot Center really exists? (In the novel, not the real world, though come to think of it, its real-world existence would explain a lot of things.)

3. During the course of the book, we find out that it is the funny man who is writing the chapters told from the 3rd person point of view. Why do you think he chose to do it that way, rather than in the 1st person?

4. At the end of chapter 5, Barry tells the funny man that “We’re all monsters.” What do you think the meaning of this is in the context of the book? What does Barry mean by this statement?

5. Do you agree with Barry’s take on humanity? Are we all “monsters”?

6. The Funny Man uses some of his early riches to buy an expensive massaging chair that doesn’t live up to its promises. Have you ever purchased anything you knew you didn’t need, but wanted anyway, and then didn’t meet your expectations? Why do you think we want these things?

7. Could Kick in the A$$ be broadcast on American television?

8. Would you rather be rich or famous?

9. Is the course of our lives fated, the product of chance, or do we control our own destinies? Could the funny man break free from his career and life death spiral?

10. The Funny Man is a satire on contemporary America. Was there anything specific that you thought was being satirized?

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