The Funny Man

by John Warner

  The hurdles are high, but for the first time since my arrest and the start of my trial I have something I have lacked for quite some time, a sense of purpose.

  12

  THE FUNNY MAN sits in the manager’s office, splayed along a couch across from his manager and his agent, who share a different couch. His agent and manager are both dressed in suits, but the funny man no longer bothers shaving or dressing for these occasions. His pants could even be mistaken for very elaborate pajamas, though they are not because they cost better than two thousand dollars and were fashioned from the beards of billy goats. The funny man is still not entirely sure why he needs both an agent and a manager or what their respective duties are, though he is most assuredly aware that certain percentages leak off of his total into their pockets. The total is large enough that these sums do not particularly matter to the funny man, they are not missed, but he also knows that the sums are large enough that he matters very much to his agent and manager. For that reason he knows that he can wear these pants that look like pajamas and not sit up straight and absently scratch at the three days’ growth that sprouts in patches across his face.

  His career has become stagnant, recursive, endlessly looping back on itself and what was once fun now looks and feels suspiciously like work. Fewer people come to see him than in the past and recently, prior to a gig, he walked the streets of the city and asked a hundred people, “Do you know who I am?” and only fifteen of them said yes. Of those fifteen, the funny man then asked, “Who am I?” and only twelve of them were correct. The funny man wants to get to the next level before he slips from his present one. He has come to recognize that celebrity has its privileges, that he can do things like drink for free or pay cash for expensive luxury items. The funny man has insisted that they install a commercial-grade deep fat fryer in the new new home and he recently spent most of a day making and eating doughnuts. His wife (mostly jokingly) accused him of having a second childhood and the funny man scowled and said, “What’s wrong with that?” Still, even as he has grown more and more famous, he senses himself devolving. Tasks that previously seemed inconsequential, easy, like say, swishing the cleaner around the toilet and scrubbing the ring of mung, now look Herculean and he wonders how this nanny-housekeeper can bear to do it. He has come to see his agent and manager because it is time to shake things up.

  “We have some offers,” the agent says.

  “Offers with an s?” the funny man replies.

  “A commercial, for one,” the manager says.

  “Voice-over?” The funny man arches a hopeful brow. Voice-over is cherry. Voice-over is big-time. Stars do voice-over. Voice-over is an afternoon’s worth of work for a lifetime of checks.

  “Acting,” the agent says. The funny man’s brow deflates.

  “Doing what?”

  “You play a guy trying to rent a car. You’re at the airport trying to rent a car and you go from counter to counter but they can’t understand what you’re saying, can’t fulfill your car rental needs until you get to the client’s counter and they know just what you want and you’re off on your way, happy as anything. Totally fulfilled. Job well done,” the manager says.

  “Why can’t they understand what I’m saying?” the funny man asks.

  The manager and agent look at each other, each nodding for the other to spill the beans in more and more exaggerated ways until finally the agent is forced to speak up, because, after all, he earns 2 percent more of the funny man’s money than the manager.

  “You’ve got your hand shoved inside your mouth,” he says.

  The funny man slips deeper into the couch, burying his head under one of the throw pillows. He screams into it, feeling the mist of his breath bound back into his face. He would like to scream at these two that they’re a couple of fucking assholes with this shit, but the funny man is not the sort (not yet, anyway) who calls his people fucking assholes, even when they are clearly behaving like fucking assholes.

  It’s not that he’s tired of the thing, not at all. The thing is great, and every time he performs it, it kills. No matter which celebrity he does with his hand in his mouth (and he’s now done them all, trying new ones all the time), the people laugh and laugh and laugh. The thing is the nuclear fission of comedy, self-renewing, inexhaustible.

  Except that it exhausts him. It really does. He hasn’t tried to get away with not doing it again because the first owner-promoter has apparently spread the word about his bout of recalcitrance and the funny man is routinely pre-threatened before he even hits the stage. Recently, at a show in Pittsburgh or Portland, he’s not sure which, while doing the thing the funny man contemplated shoving his hand down into his windpipe, even knowing as he contemplated it what the likely outcome would be. Would he be dead before the audience realized it wasn’t part of the joke? Like all creative people, the funny man’s politics are liberal so he doesn’t throw these words around lightly, but he feels it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that he is “enslaved” by the thing. It has gone from blessing, to blessing and curse, to just curse.

  After awhile, from underneath the pillow because he thinks that if he looks these two in the face he might leap and try to poke their eyes out, the funny man says, “What’s the other one?”

  “Movie,” the manager says.

  The funny man removes the pillow from his face. “Movie?” he says. “Or film?”

  “Movie. Road comedy, a bunch of high school friends accidentally rob a bank and go on the lam. Hijinks ensue,” the agent says. “You know the drill. The kid with the music videos is attached to direct.”

  “Role?”

  “Buddy number three out of five.”

  “My own subplot?”

  “Mostly comedic, with a pinch of romance,” the agent says.

  This is an interesting proposition for the funny man. It is the next logical step for a person with his career profile. Actually, television is the next logical step, which means he is actually skipping a step. It will mean three months or more on a movie set, grueling days of sitting around and doing nothing while being away from his wife and child whom he loves dearly, of course, but who will be increasingly well-provided for, thanks to his sacrifice.

  “What’s the catch?” the funny man asks, putting the pillow aside and sitting upright, elbows on thighs.

  “Catch?” the manager says, moving a piece of paper across the table toward the funny man.

  The funny man leans a bit more forward and looks at the paper, which has a number with lots of zeros on it. He’s never been good at math, so he counts them, with his finger, just to make sure.

  THE DIRECTOR YELLS, “Cut, take five!” and the funny man removes his entire hand from his own mouth and walks over to the chair with his name stenciled on the back. He assumed such chairs were a myth, but no, just like grade school, chairs on a movie set are indeed assigned. He figured that other things about making movies were a myth as well, for example, the director saying “take five,” but no, he really says it, says it rather often, though “five” (minutes) is usually closer to forty-five minutes and once extended to three days.

  They are somewhere in the Midwest, not Midwest like Chicago or even St. Louis, Midwest like Kansas or Nebraska, the parts where no one goes and hardly anyone lives. They are driving through flyover country, but are presently parked in front of an abandoned drive-in restaurant whose exterior has been made up to look brand new, while on the inside a massive colony of rats basically runs the place. The cinematographer has noted that occasionally, when they are shooting toward the restaurant, rats perch in the window, visible in frame and may have to be removed digitally.

  The funny man will spend 85 percent of his screen time in the film with his hand in his mouth, something his agent and manager (the fucking assholes) neglected to tell him before he signed the contract. But that number. The funny man knows that as long as he lives like a semi-reasonable human being he will never have to work again, that the number represents a figure more than he
had earned up to that point and his earnings up to that point were nothing to sneeze at in the grand scheme of things.

  The funny man’s movie love interest sits next to him doing word searches to pass the time. She is ungodly beautiful and yet only the third most beautiful woman on the set. In between takes she drops to the ground and pumps out twenty Marine-precise push-ups. When the funny man asked her about this she raised her arms, Christ-style, palms up, and waved them forward and back. “When they start to flap,” she said, gesturing to her triceps, “you’re playing someone’s grandmother.”

  She is also crushingly stupid and dull and the funny man long ago gave up trying to talk to her beyond the barest pleasantries. She is so dull he can’t even muster any sexual interest in her, not that he would cheat because he promised that he wouldn’t, not only on his wedding day, but before he left for his shoot when his wife dropped him at the airport, kissed him on the cheek and said, “Don’t stick your dick in anyone else,” which she meant as a joke, but in a serious way.

  Once, when the funny man’s movie love interest got up to do a scene, the funny man looked at her word search and noticed that most of the circled strings were not even words, or at least not the kind of words that utilized vowels.

  The love interest looks up from the word search and the funny man realizes he’s been staring.

  “What?” she says.

  The funny man turns away and looks back at the director, who is being talked to by the cinematographer. The director is nodding his head, which the funny man has come to know is a bad sign, a sign that they’re going to try something different, something not found in the script.

  When the funny man first met the director, the director described his style as “freewheeling,” which the funny man has come to understand means “making shit up as you go along because you don’t know what you’re doing.” The director is as malleable as one of the funny man’s college buddies whose nickname was “Dummy,” as in “Dummy, go up and tell that girl that you love her,” or “Dummy, fill this cup with your urine so I can pass this drug test,” or “Dummy, spank that cop and see what happens.”

  Some things have surprised the funny man about making a movie. The first thing was that the movie is not shot in order. In fact, it’s not shot in anything close to the right order. In one of the funny man’s very first scenes, just about his first moment of acting in front of a camera, he was told to face his love interest, look into her eyes with a passionate fervor and kiss her as ardently as he could muster. He had been led from his trailer by a walkie-talkie-wielding assistant who said they were “on route” into the mouthpiece as the funny man closed the trailer door behind him. Thirty-five seconds later they were there, the set, a small clearing that overlooked the Grand Canyon, the backdrop for the big scene. The funny man had visited it as a child, bumping down to the bottom on the back of a burro, wondering why vacation always had to be so boring.

  In the movie the characters are traveling east to west, but the production is doing pretty much the opposite, leaving from their Los Angeles headquarters as a money-saving measure. His love interest stood next to a bit of tumbleweed, brought in by the prop master to give the foreground some perspective. A rubber snake sat off to the side of the tumbleweed, coiled as if to strike.

  The funny man had met his love interest once before, briefly, at a read-through of the script where they sat around a table and recited their parts in turn. The director brayed like a llama at every alleged punch line, but the funny man got the biggest laughs of everyone because of course his hand was always in his mouth and that shit’s just funny.

  The arc of the funny man’s story in the movie is this:

  1. While pulling the robbery, the funny man is pressed into service to boost one of his compatriots up through a hole drilled in the bottom of the vault. In order to keep from yelping at the pain as his buddy steps and then jumps up and down on his head as he tries to get all of the way into the vault, the funny man shoves his hand in his mouth to stifle any noise.

  2. Following the heist, where the semi-hapless gang gets away with the loot, but not without triggering an alarm and pursuit by the authorities, the funny man finds he cannot remove his hand from his mouth.

  3. Hijinks ensue as each member of the gang in turn tries unsuccessfully to pull the funny man’s hand from his mouth while they flee in a conversion van, weaving this way and that to avoid the SWAT-team bullets. At one point, the funny man’s arm is (thanks to special effects involving prosthetics and camera angles) shoved into his mouth up to his elbow.

  4. They eventually get away from the hottest pursuit, and as they travel across the country, heading toward Mexico, and presumably freedom to spend their stolen wealth, more hijinks as the funny man looks longingly at his buddies every time they eat or drink and he tries to cram a road cheeseburger past his knuckles into his mouth.

  5. At some point, he drinks a Coke through his nose.

  6. Ultimately, the van breaks down and the boys are forced to hole up for a few days in the canyon, waiting for repairs, where the funny man falls for the beautiful Mexican maid who cleans their cabin. She expresses sympathy and worry over the funny man and they talk for hours, sort of, since she speaks mostly Spanish and the funny man can only scribble notes on a pad.

  7. Finally, the funny man approaches her at the canyon edge as she looks wistfully across the divide, a symbol for her separation from her family, and she thinks about how much she’d like to go home, back to Mexico, but only once she can earn enough money to support her and her eleven brothers and sisters. Desperate to finally speak to her, in a heroic act, the funny man yanks his hand from his mouth and declares, “I love you, Graziella, and I have three million dollars in the van,” after which they kiss passionately and weep tears of joy.

  8. After which the rattlesnake uncoils and bites the funny man in the junk.

  9. Because the movie is PG-13, they will only imply that, thinking quickly, Graziella sucks the poison from the wound.

  10. With her mouth.

  11. Near his penis. (Get it?)

  12. The rest of the movie, they periodically cut to shots of the funny man and Graziella in the back of the van, she holding a bag of ice over his comically swollen crotch as she leans in to kiss him on the cheek.

  She was beautiful, and her mouth was eminently kissable, but he still could not manage to do the act with anything approaching passionate fervor no matter how many times he tried, which was many. He even imagined he was kissing his wife, which did not help. Ultimately, the director gave up trying to get a convincing kiss and ordered a take where the special effects guy triggered the snake into the funny man’s crotch before the kiss could be consummated, which everyone agreed was funnier anyway.

  And so the production lurched eastward, each state line confirming what the funny man suspected from the initial table read, that the movie was terrible, that his first filmed role would be in a terrible, terrible movie, the kind of movie where everyone wonders how such a movie was conceived, let alone completed and then released. In his previous civilian life, the funny man would go to these sorts of movies and wonder this very thing: “How could this happen? How could they have turned out such a steaming heap of shit?” And now he knew, except there was still no explanation for it. It was just one of those things that happens.

  The latest scene in front of the rat-infested drive-in has ceased to make any sense to the funny man. If the love interest is present, it must belong close to the end, but it is not in any script that he’s seen. He has no idea where it fits in the movie and is pretty sure it doesn’t matter anyway. The director shouts the dialogue to him off camera bit by bit, different words each take, and the funny man has found it harder and harder to stay conscious, and after a take where the funny man stands and stares blankly for a full forty-five seconds the director shouts, “Cut, we can use that!” and walks off, clapping his hands together like a cheerleader trying to psych up the team. The love interest wanders back to
her chair and recommences her word search.

  The funny man had recently called his agent and manager and spent a lot of long-distance roaming minutes telling them how absolutely terrible the movie is. They tried to convince him that sometimes there are miracles in the cutting room, that a skilled editor can weave something passable out of just about anything, but the funny man told them that no one can make a fine tapestry out of rotting garbage, out of entrails, out of fetid, worthless crap. The funny man tried to express to his agent and manager that he thought he was probably not going to make it through the entire shoot, that he was willing to do something crazy to get booted off the film if necessary.

  This is when the funny man’s manager explained some parts of the contract to him that the funny man hadn’t bothered reading, things like he was not only obligated to finish the movie or risk his salary plus unspecified “penalties,” but he was also to be available for up to three weeks of promotional responsibilities, one of which may be outside of the continental United States, at times and places to be determined by the producers.

  “What you’re saying,” the funny man said, “is that not only do I have to finish this movie, I have to go talk about how good it is afterwards?”

  “Yes,” the funny man’s manager replied.

  “You’re fired.”

  SINCE HE DISCOVERED there’s no escape, all the funny man can think about is escaping. He must disappear like people in the witness protection program. If they can’t find him, they can’t make him do these things. He will go somewhere and send for his family, and they will live quietly on the considerable money he has already earned. He will take a job with parks and recreation where his job is to drive a modified golf cart going from trash can to trash can, changing out the bags. He will wear heavy work gloves and a small circular name patch on his uniform. Sometimes the bags will leak and spill on the funny man’s overalls, but he will accept this as simply part of the deal, his small sacrifice for keeping the public spaces clean. It is a life of sacrifice he envisions for himself, a life of service.