The Funny Man

July 4, 2011
This debut novel from the editor of McSweeney's Internet Tendency is a surprisingly tame takedown of celebrity culture.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. Fame itself frees the funny man from responsibility over his actions; in Barry's legal terms, "At the very least any celebrity by definition has a prima facie case of diminished capacity." The same, we soon discover, could be said of the funny man's rise to fame: from comedy club obscurity to a starring role in a road trip flick and a hit TV show called Kick in the A$$, his success relies on a gag he can't afford to quit: he performs with his entire fist shoved into his mouth. As the funny man, under house arrest, awaits his fate, we learn that the trial is a mere cherry on top of the requisite celebrity meltdown sundae:
divorce, drug problems, abuse of domestic help, child neglect. An obsession with a hot young tennis star makes this equally sickening and humorous portrait of the celebrity as a delusional man complete.

July 15, 2011

The sardonic tale of a hapless comic who rockets to fame with an idiotic gimmick only to find his life in worse turmoil—especially after emptying a gun into a guy on the street, for reasons left unexplained until the end.  

Warner, a writer-editor associated with McSweeney's, makes his fiction debut with a novel about a character referred to only as the funny man—not the Funny Man, but the lower-case kind. The funny man's shtick is to deliver impressions and one-liners with his fist shoved deep into his mouth. His ticket to greater fame is a movie so awful—a bunch of hand-in-throat outtakes—that audiences mistake it for something brilliant. The funny man loves all the money and celebrity and limo sex, but it doesn't make him any less pathetic. His wife leaves him when a publicity-seeking actress claims she had sex with him during filming, comes back after he falsely fesses up and then leaves him again when he insists on the truth. His lawyer's genius strategy to plead him not guilty by reason of celebrity is a non-starter. And then there's the obligatory blow to the crotch the funny man suffers, in a batting cage. Redemption comes, sort of, in the form of the one-time tennis star he has been smitten with since detecting she was beaming him private messages in her TV ads. Much of the book seems beamed from the past as well. Warner's cultural commentary is passé when not obvious, and in going after a George Saunders–type absurdism, he isn't especially funny or clever (the protagonist's fondness for Kick in the A$$, a reality show he invents on which volunteers get booted in the rear for money, is indistinguishable from Warner's). Warner also should note that no comic would use "You dirty rat," the most famous line James Cagney never actually uttered, in a Bogie impersonation.

It's certainly possible to write a hilarious novel about a bad comic, but Warner never breaks through the smug sensibility of his debut to transcend his subject.

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