This is a work of fiction. All names, places, and characters are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Fred Van Lente
All rights reserved. Except as authorized under U.S. copyright law, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication
Number: 2016957102
ISBN 9781594749742
Ebook ISBN 9781594749759
Ebook design adapted from printed book design by Timothy O’Donnell
Production management by John J. McGurk
Quirk Books
215 Church Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
quirkbooks.com
v4.1
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For Mom
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Chapter Two
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Chapter Three
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Chapter Four
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Chapter Five
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Chapter Six
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Chapter Seven
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Chapter Eight
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Chapter Nine
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Chapter Ten
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Acknowledgments
About the Author
I
A bleep, a boop, a shudder, a swoosh, and there it was, on each of their phones:
Hey there Funny Person.
Steve Gordon didn’t see it at first.
He had a good excuse, though.
He was dying.
Steve had died before, of course. He knew how. At the Laugh Shack in Portland, Maine, in front of that bachelorette party. At that open mic in Des Moines, when he was first starting out. At his SNL audition, after his career was basically already over.
Dying on stage, in the middle of a set, was something every stand-up experienced. It was as inevitable and unavoidable as bad weather. The pros distinguished themselves from the wannabes by not buckling under the weight of the dead room, of the surly crowd, of their own (hopefully temporary) suckitude.
But tonight felt different.
Tonight Steve felt like he was running out of lives.
“Hey, thanks, everybody, for that great welcome. Are you ready to be the best Finance Department we can be?”
Bifocals, bad ties, and pantsuits peered at him from the audience of the Chicago Improv Underground. The theater used to be a strip club and still retained the vague air of being somewhat ashamed of itself, with its low ceiling and bad lighting and support beams blocking sight lines from a third of the seats. Like every other performer, Steve had to memorize the location of the ancient lump of blue putty covering the hole in the floor where the stripper pole had been sawed off to avoid tripping or stubbing his toe on it.
The tumbledown surroundings were part of the act—they helped draw herds of accountants from the Whatever Co. out of the glass tomb of their conference room, down the concrete staircase beneath the Aldi supermarket, for this quarter’s team-building seminar.
This ritualized descent into the underworld was all part of the initiation process. The staircase was flanked by black-and-white photos of the famous before they were famous, fresh-faced and poor, honing their skills on the Underground stage before their careers began to flourish on Saturday Night Live, Mad TV, and The Daily Show. By the time the audience arrived in the black box theater and took their broken-down seats, they understood they were ensconced in the loam of celebrity: the Improv Underground was the rich, dark soil from which impossible dreams were raised.
Or, in Steve’s case, the pure earth to which he had returned.
In the stairwell’s Before pictures, the audience had seen him twenty years younger. Now, as Steve faced them, one eye on the floor to avoid the ex-stripper-pole bump, they were looking at the After.
“All right, folks. For our first team-building exercise, I’m going to hunt you for sport, so if you could all line up against the far wall and get your panda costumes…What? No? C’mon, being hunted builds character! Man is the most dangerous game.
“No, you can tell I’m joshing. Tonight we’re gonna have fun improvising sketches, just like we used to do on What Just Happened? Teddy, could you come up here on stage? Teddy is the manager of Improv Underground. He’s a professional funnyman like me, which means he’s also an amateur degenerate.
“So we’ll make up a comedy scene right here in front of you. Now somebody give me a place. Any place. Doesn’t matter where. No wrong answers here. The one word you can’t use in improv is ‘no.’ ”
“Auschwitz!” blurted out a middle-aged CPA in the back row.
Steve blinked.
“Oooo…okay? Auschwitz. Sure! Now can somebody give me a profession?”
“Rodeo clown!” yelled the Executive Senior Vice President of Something in the front.
Steve swallowed.
“No,” he said.
“You said that was the one thing you couldn’t say!” the ESVPoS exclaimed with a near-audible harumph.
“No, I said that was the one thing you couldn’t say,” Steve said. And looking at Teddy’s face when he said it, and the face of the executive’s assistant sitting next to him when he said it, he knew instantly he shouldn’t have said it, because this guy hadn’t been told no by anybody still with a job since 1998.
At that moment Steve thought maybe he really was dying. The spark that had animated his existence since he was a kid was sputtering out, that desire to make people laugh, to book that next gig, to not punch an audience member in the face. What was it all for, the bad food and canceled flights? He could go back to law school like his mother always wanted. At his age, it wou
ld be a sitcom waiting to happen. Or he could flip burgers.
Flipping burgers was sounding better and better by the second.
His phone vibrated again. Steve ignored Teddy’s look, a look that said “Oh no you will not check your damn phone while you’re in the middle of a gig, you pitiful sketch-show has-been” and turned his back on the audience.
“Just a second,” Steve said. “I’ll be right back.”
He pulled out the phone out and read:
II
You don’t know who I am, but you MIGHT know who I work for.
“Do you need to take that?” the middle-aged reporter from the Christian Science Monitor asked Zoe Schwartz when her phone made another sad trombone wah-wah sound.
“Nah,” Zoe said, ignoring the notification. “What was the question again?”
The reporter checked her pad and said:
“Will you ever stop making jokes about your vagina?”
Without missing a beat, Zoe said, “Why would I want to stop making jokes about my vagina? It’s literally my funniest body part.” She stood and reached down to hike up her skirt. “You wanna see?”
“No, uh, that’s all right—”
“No, seriously, it’s a scream.” She pulled the hem almost but not quite to her panty line. “You want to get your camera ready? I’m a blonde, and let me tell you, the curtains do match the drapes.”
“No! Thank you, Zoe! I think I’ve got all we need!”
The reporter leapt up and fled from the ballroom press junket in the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott. Zoe had spent close to six hours sitting in a canvas director’s chair in front of a large cardboard standee of herself as a parade of reporters, bloggers, and TV crews filed in to ask the same five questions about her upcoming Netflix special over and over again while a bored publicist giggled at her phone in the corner. Zoe was cranky and bored. Judging from the chipper beats of ’80s pop throbbing from the wall behind her, it seemed pretty obvious that everyone at the wedding reception in the ballroom next door was having a way better time than she was.
Her next victims were a camera crew from Spectrum News NY1. Zoe’s bedraggled, salt-and-pepper terrier mix, who had laid dutifully at her feet throughout the whole junket, barked protectively at the sound guy as he clipped a lavalier mic to the shoulder strap of her dress.
“Quiet, Asshole,” she said to the tiny mutt. She smiled at NY1’s painfully handsome entertainment reporter, what’s-his-name, Square-Jaw. “Not you. Him.”
“I know, I watched the early screener of your special. He used to be named Bandit…”
“…then I got to know him better, yeah.”
“Are we ready? Great. Zoe, can you start? Even greater. So, we’re here with funny lady Zoe Schwartz. Zoe, it’s great to see you. Your second Netflix special is called Laughs Like a Girl. Do you have a theory as to why some people don’t think girls are funny?”
Zoe struggled to maintain her smile. By her count this was the seventh time she had been asked that question in one day. Often while riding the Carousel of Interviews she was tempted to give the exact same answers to the same questions to see if anyone would notice, but professional pride kept her in check. A lot of people had sunk money and work into her Netflix special, and she was terrified of letting them down. This mixture of duty and fear cleaved through her exhaustion and hunger and cleared the way for an original response to the what’s-your-theory-girls-no-funny question:
“Is stupidity a theory? Because usually it’s the right one.”
“Do you want to hear my theory?” Before she had a chance to respond, Square-Jaw said, “You know how so many of the metaphors of comedy are about violence? If you do really well in a set, you killed. You slaughtered the audience. If you do really badly on stage, you bombed. So much of it is wrapped up in this macho B.S. I can see how women would feel shut out.”
“I don’t know, it’s been my experience that a pretty girl cracking dirty jokes is a turn-on for most guys.”
“It seems to work for you.”
“You think I’m pretty? Aww.”
Apparently, Square-Jaw had predetermined his hard-hitting line of questioning, and now he refused to deviate from the script: “But you’ve never felt excluded around male comedians, backstage or anywhere else?”
Zoe barely repressed a sigh. Did Chris Rock or Louis C.K. or, God help us, TJ Martinez ever have to answer questions like, What is it like to be a Boy Comedian? Why are there no Men-in-Stand-Up roundtable interviews and think pieces like “Penises: What’s Their Deal, Really?”
She thought of bringing up one particular incident, in one network dressing room not so long ago, but she also knew that if she did, it would become all this interview was about, all the next three hundred interviews of her life would be about.
Her stomach growled loudly in the silence. Asshole looked up, startled, to see if there was another dog around. Zoe hadn’t eaten since the early morning, when she grabbed a chocolate croissant from the continental breakfast as she ran out of the hotel lobby.
The stuttering beats of the A-ha classic “Take On Me” pulsated from the adjacent wall, reminding her that there was still joy to be found in this world.
Her phone made the wah-wah noise, indicating another text had arrived, and the little mutt jumped up to all fours and started barking. Zoe rolled her eyes apologetically. “Uh-oh, I’m afraid someone needs to do his dirty doggie business.”
Square-Jaw furrowed his neatly plucked brow. “Oh—I mean, we’re almost done. Maybe we could ask the publicist—”
“This will only take a second, I’m sorry. I can’t let Asshole out of my sight. He’s a support dog. Whenever I have the urge to drunk-dial my ex, he bites me.”
She took Asshole’s leash and let him lead her out to the hallway. They crossed into the next ballroom, where many lumpy humans in tuxedoes and gowns were doing the Electric Slide. Head held high, Zoe Schwartz marched across the dance floor to the row of steam trays for the Bernstein–Kaufman wedding and helped herself to some rice pilaf, broccolini, and black cod.
When the father of the bride looked cockeyed at her, she lied, “I’m the comedian, I’m on after cake.”
Zoe was having so much fun picking up Asshole and dancing to “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” with the eight-year-old flower girls, she forgot to look at her new texts until the song ended:
III
Ha ha, jk. You know exactly who I work for: Dustin Walker.
Dante Dupree propped himself up on his elbows on his hotel bed and squinted at his phone. A large tribal drummer had taken up residence inside his skull and was pounding out the infectious jungle rhythms one usually associated with sacrifices to Kong. Between these throbbing beats, what remained of his mind parsed the meaning of the name “Dustin Walker,” right after the meaning of “jk,” “exactly,” “work,” and “ha.”
Dustin Walker. Dustin Walker is texting me? The Dustin Walker?
He’s still alive?
Had he even met Dustin Walker? Dante felt certain he would have remembered that. But on the other hand, he couldn’t remember a lot of things. That must have been quite a night at the club. The club club, that is, where he went with the honeys who hung around after his set at the tiny comedy club in Rochester, New York, named, in a stunning burst of creativity, the Comedy Club.
He sort of remembered that he had tied one on not three days ago, so he swore he was going to take it easy on the tasty beverages for the foreseeable future.
Tell that to his eyes, which were now so stinging and shrunken as to tumble out of their sockets. Or his mouth, which tasted like he had sucked off a glue gun.
He tried to swallow, found that he was unable to, and looked around in the predawn gloom. The usual anonymous limbo of a hotel room sharpened into focus: door, latch, peephole, laminated evacuation instructions, flat-screen, bureau, table, lamp, armchair.
He had a bad case of “the fuzzies,” as the grandmother who had raised him used to call them. You spent y
our whole life trying to tame the fuzzies by clarifying them. So you were a fool if you went out of your way to make things fuzzier than they already were.
Something else in the bed moved along with him, bringing the fuzzies into, immediate clarity.
He held his breath and pulled back the bedspread. Lying by his side was a woman—wait, no, women, one black-haired and white, the other blonde-haired and black. They were not the women he had gone to the club with.
Goddamn. What was the point of doing all this awesome freaky shit if you could never remember it well enough to get a good story out of it? Or at least work it into a tight five minutes on Conan or 2nite?
A shouted conversation blundered into his memory:
“Do you screw as fast as you talk?”
“Girl, my mouth don’t stop moving for an hour and a half. Just like my act.”
But did that actually happen at the club last night, or was it just a bit he made up in his head? With guys like him, you never could be sure what was real and what was a fuzzy.
Dante looked around the hotel room again, which, after a few minutes of careful study, he realized was not his own.
He got up, naked, and walked over to the window, inspired to investigate something he had noticed before but had subconsciously tried to ignore: a Tim Hortons sign blazed on a donut place across the highway. Atop the flagpole in the parking lot flapped a red maple leaf on a white field.
“Am I in Canada?” he asked.
The white girl turned away from him and muttered, “Shut the hell up, eh?”
IV
Dustin asked me to contact you about doing a project with him.
The headset-wearing stage manager had to cue Oliver Rees again because he was looking right through her. Goosebumps covered his entire nearly naked hairless body.
A PA snatched the phone out of his hand and replaced it with an oversized mallet before he could stop her. He looked again at his lock screen and made sure he hadn’t imagined what he’d just read.
Just beyond the wings, his warm-up man, Kenny Kinny, was onstage gearing up for his closer, the one about getting his car stuck at the airport, thereby combining two great comedy subjects into one perfect joke. It was so hard to find an opening act that wasn’t blue, eff this and g-d that and I want to ess in your mouth.
Ten Dead Comedians Page 1