The Funny Man (2 page)
“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 flush 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 scuffle starting and then a scuffle 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 fluke 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.”
O
N 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 significant 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 flop, 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 inflated 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.”
A
T HOME, IN
the apartment, the funny man spoons gray mush into the child’s mouth. The child laughs and claps his hands. “More?” the funny man asks the child. He can’t imagine wanting more of the stuff. It looks unbelievably disgusting. A new bit begins to form in his head, something about feeding babies high-end pureed food if we want to get them to eat, but as the child stretches his mouth as wide as it will go, the funny man must concentrate on aiming the spoon and the bit is lost.
