CoffeeHouse Diary #12: The Funny Story

It's not easy to write a funny story, and even harder to write one that also has any substance. It's one of the reasons I enjoy farce, because you do it simply for the laughs and laughs are their own reward.

Plus women say that it's sexy in a man, and let's face it, a lot of us guys, writers, are not gonna win any beauty contests. Look at Hemingway, or even my Uncle Andre.

Not pretty men.

Overweight, bloated from alcohol and sitting behind a typewriter for months at a time...I mean my favorite picture of Hemingway is one where he is sprawled on the bed, his huge gut jutting up in the air looking like Shamu harpooned and beached. He's snoring and is holding a Harvey Wallbanger in one hand and Monolete's left ear in his right.

Anyway, my challenge a few days ago from good friend Sex (another story) was to write some fiction because I have been on a tear lately writing true stories or philosophical pieces .

Okay, so how do you write something "funny" (of course, she wanted me to do something really "sexy"...go figure).

It's easy to write sexy scenes, especially if you are a good writer and male because you probably write about seven or eight in your head everyday anyway (it's called fantasizing).

But there is nothing easy about writing comedy or farce. At the core is a "discrepancy" that you hold together no matter how disparate. The laugh is inbetween what is expected and what happens.

So as I was writing this piece of farce something strange happened. I wrote the Great American Novel instead.

Everyone says they will one day write a great novel, when in fact, most of them can barely pen a gift card on a birthday. Everyone has their "idea" for a novel or their screenplay. But they rarely ever write more than a few journal entries, or a grocery list. Some just sign for UPS or FedX packages.

So there I was. I set out to write a simple piece of farce and 689 pages later the novel was finished. I contacted my agent, The Colonel, who is only 5 degrees of separation away from Kevin Bacon, who is only three from the King of Finland, who is 4 away from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's fictitious character Ivan Denisovich, who has not suprisingly, not returned any of my calls.

The Colonel did return my call and I told him about the book and about Hemingway laying half naked on the bed like a beached whale and how awful it was to be a writer because you had no control really. You wake up and someone challenges you to write about sex and you want to write about humor instead (this is the only part that makes any sense, because one often leads to the other, if you get my drift), then write a huge epic that Paramount has already shown interest in.

In fact, by early the next morning word had gotten out faster than Paris Hilton can say "do me" and Warren Beatty had bid on the serial rights on eBay by noon. He and Annette argued furiously over the wisdom of this in a Yahoo chatroom, then later in an AIM chatroom, then they decided to simply turn to each other and speak.

In the meantime, Warren was outbid and was only able to purchase cereal rights to the film adaptation. So now Beatty has the cereal rights but will have to lobby the milk industry if he wants anything done with my screen adaptation.

I feel no sympathy. I didn't even want to write the damned thing. It just came out...a truly original novel. I just wanted some guffaws, not accolades and potential honorary degrees.

But by 10:30 a.m. that day I had received three honorary doctorates via Federal Express. Four more came UPS. Airbourne called and said another seven had been misrouted to Memphis the night before where a furious scanning battle had taken place between the main Federal Express tarmac and the few beleaguered Airbourne couriers.

The Airborne couriers escaped by wearing 3-D glasses and putting their hands over the "blue" side, rendering the FedX folks, and their scanners powerless to scan them.

But as I said, they were in the wrong city and so the degrees were nonetheless misdelivered to a local Piggly Wiggly the next morning and were given to the first seven customers in the express line who purchased the rotisserie chicken and a bucket of slaw.

By 2 p.m. the lucky recipients of the degrees, a faculty of seven, had formed the Maugham Malraux Graduate School of Literature in Buckhead. They had secured a campus, a groundskeeper, several grants and they celebrated over it all with rotisserie chicken, buckets of slaw and washed it down with 18 six-packs of Coca-Cola.

Of course, it is a little strange because every one of the new professors is named Maugham Malraux (imagine what that would do to your head everyday), but I hear they are thinking of color-coding themselves or using white-out to make some adjustments to the documents.

*******
I just wanted to write something funny...a farcical romp. Damn. Fucking Great American Novel. I was distracted now. And I was throughout the major middle sections of the novel. I kept wanting to crack jokes or have this powerful immigrant family suddenly kidnapped by terrorists and forced to do slave labor in a Krispy Kreme shop or a Big O Tires, or join a major religion like Wal-Mart.

But the dead seriousness was compelling. I tried antidotes that would derail me enough to get me back to farce. As I wrote I slapped in Pink Panther movies, I slapped in movies about watching Pink Panther movies.

I even tried watching Fox News.

Nothing worked. The numbers were climbing as I typed away. I tried pouring chablis on my keyboard. It simply burped and a Microsoft XP sent a pop-up, "Nice try..back to work asshole".

Life can be so unfair.

At page 600 I thought I had a plan. As the deep ironies piled on from brilliant after brilliant chapter (really going back to page one, which was truly breathtaking in it's iconographic pluralism) I saw a dream sequence coming. This was my way out. I could retro-fit all this deeply comic/tragic literature by savagely reversing field at page 604...kinda like Keir Dullea in 2001 A Space Odyssey going through the warp to the baby room, only the reverse. I would go from the baby room BACK through a massive arcade (circa 1983) and land in the board room of the newly formed graduate school named after me where I could address all the other Maugham Malraux's at once and actually steer this novel into the farcical romp it was intended to be in my own brain.

But it had already been sold on eBay and was completely out of my control. Sure, by then they had sent out a check for 5.8 million dollars, which I planned to promptly cashed at the local 7-11,but it was misrouted once again through Airbourne and promptly was used to raise a new medical facility in addition to the literature wing at the new college.

Faced with financial woes and a multi-city book tour with no agent (the Colonel had left the country by this time for Belize with the royalties from my Beatty cereal rights) or money I was forced to take a defensive posture which on limited funds consisted of hiring and hiding behind former all-Pro Bubba Paris and pretending I was J.D. Salinger.

I guess the moral is simple.

Just tell a funny story.