I Even Funnier

by James Patterson

  And then, to make things worse, Ray Romano ambles over to shake my hand.

  “Hey, Jamie,” he says. “Caught your act on YouTube. Funny stuff.”

  And what do I say to my comic idol in reply?

  “Uh, er, um—ba-doh, ba-doo, ba-doodle-ay.”

  Yes, if this were 1957, I could write doo-wop lyrics.

  A stage manager shouts, “Five minutes, everybody! Five minutes!”

  I’m sweating like a pig in a bacon factory. A turkey on Thanksgiving Eve.

  Suddenly, somebody is shaking me.

  Stevie Kosgrov is backstage. He’s jerking me back and forth in my chair. Bouncing me up and down on my cushioned seat.

  “Don’t you dare black out, freak out, choke, or whatever it is you do when you go all spastic before one of these comedy contests. This one is gonna be on TV. Tee-Vee! And I will be in the audience, which will also be on TV. This will be the biggest, most awesome night of my life, so don’t you blow it. Or I swear I’ll put your face in a wheelchair, too!”

  Strangely, that helps.

  I snap out of it.

  I remember my name. Jamie Grimm.

  Now all I have to do is remember a few of my jokes.

  Chapter 68

  THE WILD WILD-CARD CONTESTANTS

  Welcome back to the search for the Planet’s Funniest Kid Comic!” booms an offscreen announcer. “Tonight—it’s the Judges’ Picks Wild Card Show.”

  It’s supposed to be an hour-long program, so each comedian is only given three minutes at the microphone. That means twenty-four minutes for jokes, maybe twenty minutes for commercials, and sixteen for Ray Romano, Chris Rock, Ellen DeGeneres, and our “surprise celebrity guest judge,” Jerry Seinfeld, to crack wise.

  I’m supposed to go on last. The eighth comic up.

  This gives me a little more time to mop the tsunami of sweat off my face. Fortunately, Mrs. Smiley grabbed a towel out of the hotel gym for me. Too bad she didn’t find a sponge or a squeegee.

  Ray Romano starts the show talking about his own kids and how he’ll do anything to get out of the house these days. “Does anybody need anything? Anything at all? Anything from the, uh, motor vehicle bureau, how about that? Can I register something for you?”

  The crowd laughs and claps.

  I am only vaguely aware of the other contestants.

  There’s an African-American kid who break-dances while delivering material that rivals Chris Rock’s best routines. In fact, some of his material comes directly from Chris Rock’s routines: “My mother is the kind of woman you don’t want to be in line behind at the supermarket. She has coupons for coupons.”

  I guess the kid is more of a dancer than a joke writer.

  There’s also a gangly seven-foot-tall guy from New Orleans. His name is Hurricane and he’s kind of intimidating. He has an accent like an alligator as he talks about life in Louisiana. “Possums sleep in the middle of the road with their feet up. People actually eat okra. Fixinto is one word. And it’s a verb. I’m fixinto go to the store.”

  Clara Rodriguez from Miami does all her jokes in two languages. Spanish, then English.

  “Entra un tipo muy feo con un loro en un bar, y el camarero pregunta: -¿Habla el animal? -¡Y yo qué sé!, responde el loro.”

  Jerry Seinfeld chuckles. Guess he speaks Spanish.

  Clara does the same joke again. “An ugly guy walks into a bar with a parrot. The bartender asks, ‘Does the animal speak?’ ‘I don’t know,’ replies the parrot.”

  The bilingual trick is kind of cool. And educational. It’s also extremely slow. Three jokes and her three minutes is up.

  As the other contestants take the stage one by one, my brain shifts into Mission Control mode. “Ten… nine… eight…”

  I’m counting down to blastoff. The moment when Ray Romano calls my name and I roll out onstage to explode with a fiery burst of high-octane comedy.

  Or choke.

  One of those.

  Chapter 69

  WHO AM I? WHERE AM I?

  Comedian number seven, a kid from Milwaukee who’s wearing a cheesehead hat, takes his bow.

  “Okay,” says Ray Romano. “That was, uh, very gouda, I guess. Next up, our final wild card contestant… hailing from my corner of the country, New York—let’s welcome to the stage… Jamie Grimm!”

  I head out onto the stage and…

  Chapter 70

  AND THE WINNER IS???

  Sorry about that.

  Didn’t mean to totally abandon ship.

  But to tell you the truth, I don’t remember anything about what happened while I was onstage. All I remember is Ray Romano calling my name, and me rolling my chair into the bright circle of light behind the microphone stand and slipping into a total mental fog.

  Did the audience laugh?

  I don’t know. I can’t remember.

  Did I win? I don’t know.

  Yes, you’re right, I would’ve remembered winning, no matter how deeply I disappeared into that weirdly blank blackout zone.

  But the winner won’t be announced until tonight, when the show’s on TV. I guess the judges want to play back the performances. See how we look on camera, not just in person at the comedy club.

  So I’ll find out if I won at the same moment the rest of America hears about it.

  I’m with the Smileys in our hotel suite at the Tropicana.

  The seven other contestants and their families are on the same floor, in their own suites. There’s a crew with a portable video camera out in the hall, just waiting for their cue to barge through a door and zoom in on whoever wins when Ray Romano reads the results.

  So, for better or worse, I get to watch the whole show.

  “Good luck, Jamie!” says Mrs. Smiley from the couch when the show’s opening music blares out of the plasma screen TV.

  I hear gagging.

  Stevie is behind the couch, where his parents can’t see him, pretending to strangle himself. I guess he knows I choked. Hey, he was out in the audience during my three minutes. I was stumbling blindly in that mental blizzard.

  We watch Hurricane and the break-dancer. The bilingual girl and an Elvis Presley impersonator, who says, “Uh, thank you, thank you very much” every time anybody laughs or applauds. It’s about half his act.

  A stubby kid in a baggy suit and loose tie comes out to do a junior Rodney Dangerfield routine. His catchphrase is “I tell ya, folks—it’s tough being a kid,” and he is hysterical. I crack up when he talks about his mother licking wads of Kleenex that have been in her purse “since the Nixon administration” to wipe a peanut butter smudge off his face. “In the cafeteria. At school. I tell ya, folks—it’s tough being a kid.”

  Finally, Cheesehead comes on. But I don’t hear a word he says because I know I’ll be the next comic behind the microphone.

  On national TV!

  I have never been so nervous. It’s like I’m in the audience for my own show—or the pews for my own funeral. I feel the way parents must feel when they go to school band concerts and their kid has a solo on the oboe or the clarinet. One of the squeakier instruments.

  “Don’t blow it, son. Please, don’t blow it.”

  I’m thinking the same thing.

  And suddenly, there I am. In my wheelchair. In the spotlight. Smiling.

  And BOOM!

  I launch into three minutes of my best material ever.

  It’s my life.

  What it’s like in the Chair. My friends at school. Watching TV commercials. Slot machines in the handicapped stalls.

  It’s everything I’ve observed or imagined. Only funnier.

  You know what? I think I nailed it. I really do.

  Win or lose, at least I know I gave it my all.

  Was my killer performance good enough to win? Was I better than little Rodney Dangerfield, who was absolutely incredible?

  We still don’t know.

  Ray Romano pulls a Ryan Seacrest and says the winner is… going to be announced… right aft
er the break.

  And so we watch a commercial.

  It’s those dumb bears with their toilet paper again.

  Finally, at long last, Ray Romano is about to rip open the envelope telling us who is moving on to the finals in Hollywood.

  But before he can, our hotel door flies open.

  Three guys toting a TV camera, a boom microphone, and a very bright spotlight race across the room and surround me so they can jab their gear in my face.

  Yep.

  I won!

  Chapter 71

  HOMECOMING KING

  I’ve never been to Hollywood (well, not yet, anyway), but my welcome home was bigger and better than any red-carpet movie premiere.

  It feels like everybody is here, including folks I’m pretty sure aren’t, like the president of the United States and the Black Eyed Peas.

  After I shake a bajillion hands and eat a ton of cake, Cool Girl comes running up to my chair to give me a big hug.

  Two seconds after she lets go, Gilda Gold pushes her way through the crowd and gives me an even bigger hug.

  “I knew you could do it, Jamie!” she says. “You funny!”

  I smile. But I see the look in her eye.

  We need to talk.

  Chapter 72

  GIRL FRIEND OR GIRLFRIEND?

  Gilda and I sneak away from the crowd and head down to the boardwalk.

  “First off,” I say, “I really need to thank you. If it weren’t for you, I don’t think any of this would’ve happened.”

  Gilda shrugs, which makes the curly hair under her BoSox baseball cap bob and bounce.

  “I just did what any good friend would do.”

  “That’s just it,” I say. “I want us to always be friends, Gilda. Good friends.”

  “Relax, Jamie,” Gilda says with a laugh—the same incredibly unique laugh I can always hear, no matter how many other laughs are bubbling up around it. “We’ll always be good, good friends. The best.”

  “Awesome,” I say, breathing a sigh of relief. “Because I think hugging and kissing and junk can totally ruin a friendship.”

  “Yep,” says Gilda. “It sure can.”

  And then she kisses me.

  On the lips.

  It’s very soft and very sweet—with a hint of strawberry.

  I kind of like it.

  Was it better than my first kiss with Cool Girl?

  Not totally sure. Check back with me on that.

  This whole friends-who-are-more-than-friends dealio is confusing. I need to think it over.

  So I kiss Gilda back.

  Just to make sure I’ve done enough research for all that thinking I need to do.

  Chapter 73

  IF I HAD $110,000…

  Oh, in case I forgot to mention it—which I probably did, because I’ve been kind of busy being excited about winning and confused about girls—when I won the wild card contest out in Las Vegas, I also won a trophy and a check for ten thousand dollars.

  It was one of those jumbo, Publishers Clearing House–sized cardboard checks. Very hard to stow in the overhead bins on the airplane trip home. Definitely wouldn’t fit in my wallet. I had to sign it on the back with a paintbrush.

  Uncle Frankie says the money needs to go into a savings account to help pay for my college education.

  The Smileys agree.

  Well, all of them except Stevie, who instantly sees me as his biggest shakedown target ever. If he can force me into forking over my ten-thousand-dollar prize, it will set some kind of new middle school indoor bullying record.

  Sorry, Stevie.

  For now, the money is safely deposited in my brand-new bank account, where it will wait, hoping to be joined by the hundred thousand dollars the first-place winner of the Planet’s Funniest Kid Comic competition will take home from Hollywood.

  That’s right. If I can win one more stand-up comedy contest (without ever standing up), I will have one hundred and ten thousand dollars in the bank.

  That might be enough money to pay for the experimental surgery that could help me walk again.

  Or it could pay for college.

  Or I could buy the world’s first hover wheelchair. With a jet pack of booster rockets strapped on the back so I could float above the crowded sidewalks and zip my way through traffic.

  Wait a second. Forget high-tech, space-age wheelchairs. With a hundred and ten thousand dollars, maybe I could hire the front line of the Green Bay Packers to carry me wherever I wanted to go.

  Or I could just buy everybody at Uncle Frankie’s diner (except, of course, Uncle Frankie) a year’s supply of chocolate milk shakes and French fries.

  Okay. This is good. I need to jot this stuff down in a notebook. Could be a new bit for Hollywood.

  Which is only a month away!

  Epilogue

  COMING SOON: JAMIE’S HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER!

  Okay, here it is: my very own “coming attractions” trailer for what happens next!

  Cue the cool movie soundtrack music.

  I fly out to Hollywood and meet all sorts of movie stars, including C-3PO and R2-D2, who fall into a swimming pool and rust.

  Instead of handprints in wet cement outside TCL Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, I do tire treads.

  Uncle Frankie comes with me and is immediately cast as the male lead in the kung fu action flick Yo-Yo-Pow! He uses his yo-yos like nunchakus.

  Stevie Kosgrov finds work as a Hollywood stunt man. He’s very good at knocking things over or blowing them up.

  Reality TV show cameras follow me and the other finalists all over Hollywood. They catch me riding the sweet waves in the warm Pacific.

  Friendly comic Judy is now my main rival for the crown.

  Do we kiss? What about Gilda and Cool Girl? Do I spend all my prize money on ChapStick and breath mints?

  Beavis and Butt-Head become my close personal friends, even though, you know, they’re cartoons. Hey, it’s Hollywood. If you can dream it, it can happen! Or they can at least fake it.

  Postscripterino: I don’t know if any of this stuff will actually happen.

  I’m not exactly a psychic. I’m just a kid trying to be funny and enjoy this wild and crazy ride.

  I find it helps if you never take anything, including yourself, too seriously.

  I’m Jamie Grimm. And you guys have been a great audience! See you in Hollywood!

  For more great reads and free sampleres, visit

  LBYRDigitalDeals.com

  P.S. FROM JAMIE

  If you like making people laugh as much as I do, you know you need a whole lot of funny jokes and one-liners. The Web is full of sites that’ll help you build your own comedy routine. Maybe you and a friend can even act out Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s on First?” skit. You can find the full script here: psu.edu/dept/inart10_110/inart10/whos.html

  For other jokes, you might want to check out some of my favorite websites:

  ahajokes.com/kids_jokes.html

  jokesbykids.com

  greatcleanjokes.com/jokes/kids-jokes

  ducksters.com/jokesforkids

  101kidz.com/jokes

  BOOKS BY JAMES PATTERSON

  for Young Readers

  The Middle School Novels

  Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life (with Chris Tebbetts, illustrated by Laura Park)

  Middle School: Get Me out of Here! (with Chris Tebbetts, illustrated by Laura Park)

  Middle School: My Brother Is a Big, Fat Liar (with Lisa Papademetriou, illustrated by Neil Swaab)

  Middle School: How I Survived Bullies, Broccoli, and Snake Hill (with Chris Tebbetts, illustrated by Laura Park)

  The I Funny Novels

  I Funny (with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Laura Park)

  I Even Funnier (with Chris Grabenstein, illustrated by Laura Park)

  The Daniel X Novels

  The Dangerous Days of Daniel X (with Michael Ledwidge)

  Watch the Skies (with Ned Rust)

  Demons
and Druids (with Adam Sadler)

  Game Over (with Ned Rust)

  Armageddon (with Chris Grabenstein)

  Other Illustrated Novels

  Treasure Hunters (with Chris Grabenstein and Mark Shulman, illustrated by Juliana Neufeld)

  Daniel X: Alien Hunter (graphic novel; with Leopoldo Gout)

  Daniel X: The Manga, Vols. 1–3 (with SeungHui Kye)

  For previews of upcoming books in these series and other information, visit middleschoolbooks.com, ifunnybooks.com, treasurehuntersbooks.com, and daniel-x.com.

  For more information about the author, visit jamespatterson.com.

  HIGH ADVENTURE ON THE HIGH SEAS!

  TREASURE HUNTERS

  Turn the page for a sneak peek at James Patterson’s new series.

  AVAILABLE NOW

  1

  Let me tell you about the last time I saw my dad.

  We were up on deck, rigging our ship to ride out what looked like a perfect storm.

  Well, it was perfect if you were the storm. Not so much if you were the people being tossed around the deck like wet gym socks in a washing machine.

  We had just finished taking down and tying off the sails so we could run on bare poles.

  “Lash off the wheel!” my dad barked to my big brother, Tailspin Tommy. “Steer her leeward and lock it down!”