Articles liés à True Story: A Comedy Novel
L'édition de cet ISBN n'est malheureusement plus disponible.
Afficher les exemplaires de cette édition ISBN
Book by Maher Bill
Les informations fournies dans la section « Synopsis » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.
Extrait :
Chapter One: The Act You're Not Good Enough to See
Five comedians sat on a train. They were Dick, Shit, Fat, Chink, and Buick, so pseudonymed for their specialities de fare: Dick, who did dick jokes; Shit, who did shit jokes; Fat, who did fat jokes; Chink, who made fun of the way Oriental people spoke; and Buick, the observationalist, whom everyone called Buck, and so he came to be called Buck.
"Hey, get down off there!" ejaculated the conductor, and the giggling colleagues dismounted and took their rightful places inside the gleaming trispangled Amtrak Minuteman, bound for Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., towns where comedy was king and the audience peasants.
Near the back of the train, the comedians found a suitable enclave where three could face two and sprawled inside it. Fat took up two seats alongside his mentor, Dick, while the Damon and Pythias of comedy, Shit and Buck, sandwiched their protégé, Chink, on the opposing bench. The boys were dressed in the casual attire of the day: sneakers, Sasson jeans, sweatshirts, button-downs, and almost-leather jackets or blue hooded parkas. Except for Buck, who enjoyed the distinction of always dressing in a sports jacket and tie. They could have passed for any other five young white men who were completely out of their minds.
After the train pulled out of Penn Station, Shit got up to use the bathroom and then returned to his seat completely naked. The other boys laughed at the sight of him, although certainly not as hard as they would have laughed if it was the first time they'd seen him do such a thing. It was the first time for the other passengers, however -- but since they were New Yorkers, they probably had seen naked people in public before, probably that day. What they didn't know was that Shit and his friends were not actually dangerous, just comedians -- young comedians at that -- and playing was simply their day job.
Amtrak conductors dreaded groups of young comedians. Sometimes comedians could cohabit for a while in an enclosed area, but more often than not, play-fighting would get out of hand or one of them would attempt to pick something off another's fur and cause a yelp, or drop a rock on his head, and pretty soon the conductor would have to come by and distract them with bananas. This quintet counted itself more mature than most young comics, which is a little like saying absolutely nothing at all.
It was difficult, in fact, even to measure maturity among comedians by any of the usual societal yardsticks; certainly, age was not a factor. Shit and Dick -- who, in fairness, had outgrown their nicknames, earned during those first few panicky months of stand-up, when mention of those subjects was the only way they knew to ensure the steady oxygen of laughter -- were the eldest, at twenty-nine and thirty-five. But Shit, as worldly as he was -- and he was -- just liked to get naked. He was especially fond of walking into the men's room of a nightclub when one of his friends was onstage, then emerging sans attire for a casual stroll back to the bar. Of course, the comic onstage would have to stop Shit to ask if he hadn't forgotten something, at which point Shit would feign embarrassment and hasten back to the loo, only to reemerge with a drink in his hand and a thanks for the reminder. Not that trains and nightclubs were the only places where Shit liked to get naked: bachelor parties, double dates, hotel rooms, Yankee Stadium -- any place where other comedians were around to appreciate it, and the chance for arrest minimal, would do.
The chance for arrest on the train was getting a little stronger as Shit remained nude in his seat, but Dick was in the middle of a story, so Shit's arrest, if it came, would have to wait. Especially since the story was about Shit and Dick and another comedian getting naked the week before at an all-girl Catholic school in upstate New York, where the trio had been hired to perform.
"You didn't tell me about that," Buck whined.
"Do I have to tell you every time it happens?" Shit joshed. Still, Buck was a little hurt.
"So we walk in," Dick continued, "and there's two nuns and another woman -- not a nun but, you know, nunlike -- and they were all real nervous that we were gonna say something improper or do something like, Christ, I don't know, get naked or something."
"Why did they book you in the first place?" Fat asked.
"Who knows, shut up," Dick said quickly, but then smiled at his idolator. "Anyway, they didn't want us anywhere near the girls, so right away they hustle us down into this underground rec room with a lot of pictures of Jesus on the walls and a Ping-Pong table."
"Jesus loved Ping-Pong. He invented that Chinese grip," Buck offered.
"Although for some reason he's better known for other things," Shit added.
"They had Ping-Pong leagues back then -- the National and the Aramaic," Chink topped, with -- to no one's surprise -- the better joke.
"Anyway," Dick tracked, "they put us down there and tell us to stay put until it's time to do the show."
The boys were laughing already, because they knew the punchline.
"I had to." Shit smiled, and everyone nodded sympathetically, as one might for a more normal addiction, like gambling or defecating on glass coffee tables.
"But I didn't have to!" Dick shouted with a big laugh. "Except now I'm the only one with my clothes on, so -- "
"Peer pressure," Buck said.
"Exactly -- I mean, hey, what am I, not gonna get naked? No. So then the two nuns and the other chick come back, and these boneheads are playing Ping-Pong -- "
"Naked?" Fat asked.
"Have you been listening to the story?" Shit asked him.
"Yeah, naked," Dick scolded Fat. "Naked, okay? We were naked, this is a naked story. We're naked. And then the nuns come in -- the nuns were not naked, did I make that clear? -- and they see two guys playing Ping-Pong, and their dicks are flopping around, and I'm standing on a chair over the net like I'm judging!"
Everybody howled at that. Then Fat asked: "Who won?"
More howling. More big passenger-alarming howling, which made the conductor come by, and he was howling mad. But Shit had talked his way out of nakeder spots than this, and he toddled off to the bathroom to get dressed. When he returned, though, Shit was in a decidedly fouler mood than when he'd left, which may have been due to the restrictiveness of clothing or just because he liked descending into fouler moods.
"Mind if I eat while you smoke?" he snarled at Dick and Buck, who had lit up just as Shit removed the foil on his Amtrak-microwaved lunch.
"Easy, pal," said Buck. "God, you're as ornery as..."
"As a man stuck for a metaphor?" Shit countered.
"Boy, you're in a mood," the normally apolitical Chink interposed. "What's eatin' ya?"
"Comedy, boys. Comedy is eating me alive."
With that the others sang out in ridicule of Shit, condemning him for the negative attitude he was now imposing upon their jolly sojourn. They all liked to perpetuate the myth amongst themselves, and especially among civilians, that they were special members of society by virtue of their exemption from all accouterments of the rat race -- i.e., alarm clocks, regular hours, long days, bosses, offices, or the need to concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds. They wore the deadly sin of sloth like a badge of honor, and they relished the chance run-in with childhood friends who'd listen, mouth agape, to the description of a life comprised of recess.
But Shit wasn't buying it today. He bullishly pressed on with a discussion of reality.
"We're being exploited," he said. "They're filling that room every night of the week, getting a five-dollar cover and a two-drink minimum, and we're getting cab fare."
Shit was referring to The Club, the premier Manhattan showcase club on the Upper East Side, where the boys were among forty or so young comedians and comediennes presently getting their acts together. On this particular Friday afternoon, however, they were taking those acts on the road, and on the road -- well, the wages sucked there, too: $250 a weekend for the headliner, $150 for the middle act, $75 for the MC.
But at least now, in 1979, there was a road. Veterans like Dick and Shit, who'd already been at this game for four years, remembered when the only places for a young comic to get onstage were the handful of showcase clubs in New York and L.A. These hot spots, of which The Club was currently the hottest, presented a score of comedians every night, offering them exposure in the country's media capitals and a place to "work out" in exchange for their services, gratis. But as the decade drew to a close, a major new trend in the comedy boom was catching fire: the local comedy club. In cities all across the country, a new vaudeville was slouching to be born. Restaurant basements, hotel lounges, old coffeehouses -- even storefronts -- were being converted into clubs where two or three of these young comedians from New York or L.A. could be brought in each weekend to perform stand-up comedy. It was a trend that fed on itself: Encouraged by the expanding number of young comics available, clubs opened up by the score, and encouraged by all the places to work, hundreds of young men and women began to quit their day jobs.
So what wasn't to like?
To Buck, the recent comedy boom was the ultimate in bad luck. Because he was not part of a trend! He was one of the ones who was born to do it! He would have been a comedian in any era, and curse the luck that he came of age just as every asshole in America who had ever gotten a laugh at a fraternity party was now crowding the field. For decades, to be a comedian had meant you were literally one in a million, as there were certainly no more than two hundred professional comedians in the whole country. But now, just as he was ready to fulfill his lifelong dream, comedians were positively pullulating, breeding like mosquitoes after a wet spring in these stagnant pools they called comedy clubs. Buck laughed every time Johnny Carson brought a new comedian on The Tonight Show with the standard comedy-is-the-hardest-commodity-in-our-business-to-find introduction.
Hardest commodity to find? You could barely swing a dead cat nowadays without hitting some dickhead who called himself a comedian!
And the more comedians there were, the more the bargaining power of each descended.
"How many seats in the Washington club?" Shit continued, still on his high horse, "Three hundred? Same with Philly. And they're collecting five or six at the door, plus drinks, times four shows. You figure it out."
"You're just pissed because you're middling for me," Buck kidded, with a mischievous glint in his eye.
"Blow me," Shit responded, with absolutely no glint.
Shit, Buck, and Dick, you see, were on a mission of mercy this weekend, helping the novice members of the group, Chink and Fat, secure their very first out-of-town gigs, as MCs in Baltimore and Wilmington, respectively. Unlike at The Club, the MC job in an out-of-town club was the least important, consisting mainly of warming up the crowd for fifteen minutes, then introducing the middle act and the headliner, who performed the bulk of the real comedy for the evening. Thus the task of local MC was normally handled by someone local -- even, at times, by a noncomedian, like the owner of the club or a hostess or Gallagher. But Buck and Shit had persuaded the owner of Shennanagins, the Baltimore club, to let Chink get his feet wet on the road in this manner, and in return for this favor, they had agreed to co-headline, thereby ensuring that the show would at least have two veteran acts should Chink prove to be a disaster. Dick, being perhaps the strongest and most in-demand performer currently working in the New York comedy pool, was not asked to make a similar concession -- not that Buck and Shit should have been asked to, either. But if the owner of Shennanagins, Harvey Karrakarrass, had given a comedian something for nothing, he would have faced possible disciplinary action from the Schmucks' Association, to which all club owners belonged.
And, in truth, Buck and Shit were happy to do it: They loved Chink and believed in him. Moreover, they enjoyed doing good, almost as much as they enjoyed the idea that they were doing good. Children of the sixties, Shit and Buck held forth on the train about the new humanity alive at The Club -- how different it was from the bad old days there! Why, in days gone by, the senior acts barely spoke to the rookies, and certainly never gave them a helping hand. But then a revolution of kindness swept over the comic landscape behind its charismatic leader, Shit. Upon gaining his own stature at The Club, Shit reached out to the tyros who came along after him. One of them was Buck, who'd arrived on the scene only a year and a half ago -- not that you'd know it by the way he carried himself. Buck was the kind of guy who could have headlined only twice before in his life and make it sound for all the world as if he was a grizzled veteran. And since he had only headlined twice before, this talent came in handy.
Now, if he only had an act.
An act would have really been helpful a few months earlier, when Buck did his second headlining gig, in Montreal. The owner there wanted an hour from the headliner, and Buck assured him an hour would be no problem. But in truth, an hour was quite a problem, because Buck did not have an hour of material. He did not have a half hour of material, but with a liberal sprinkling of "Where you from?"s with an uncommonly receptive audience, he had been able to clock in close enough to the usual forty-five-minute headliner finish line to pass muster on his first headlining gig, at Shennanagins.
So Buck went to Montreal feeling pretty cocky -- quite a feat for a comedian who was 90 percent attitude and 10 percent act. Of course, a formula like that was right at home in the Big Apple: One colleague had already suggested that Buck bill himself as "the act you're not good enough to see." Buck enjoyed that. He liked having a reputation, even if it was a bad one.
And he didn't want to lose it. So when he got back to New York and everyone asked how things had gone up in Canada, he said they had gone well -- referring, apparently, to timely air service, pleasant hotel accommodations, and delightful sightseeing in the day.
As for the shows, he had suffered only a bit less horribly than the crowds who had had to watch him that weekend -- watch him die four slow, painful deaths. Nothing in his past experience as a comedian -- and almost all of it to that point had been pretty tough -- had prepared him for that. At The Club, yes, the first year had been a nightmare onstage, but every comedian's first year is a nightmare: going on for three drunks at two in the morning, desperately trying to find a distinctive voice, and being rudely awakened to the fact that having been a funny guy all your life is a world apart from being a professional comedian. But at least at The Club you were just one comic in a nightly parade, and the worst beating never lasted more than twenty minutes. But in Montreal, there he was, fifteen minutes into an hour show, and pretty much wad-shot of material.
And no closing bit! The Jordache jeans commercial -- which he "parodied" by sticking his ass out -- did not run in Canada. The biggest laugh Buck got in Montreal that weekend came from his unintentionally mispronouncing the name of the renegade Quebecois prime minister, René Levesque.
Onstage those nights, Buck thought about stealing from his friends -- who would know, it's Canada -- but he had too much pride for that. He even had too much pride to get off at forty-five or fifty or fifty-five, for crying out loud! H...
Revue de presse :
Five comedians sat on a train. They were Dick, Shit, Fat, Chink, and Buick, so pseudonymed for their specialities de fare: Dick, who did dick jokes; Shit, who did shit jokes; Fat, who did fat jokes; Chink, who made fun of the way Oriental people spoke; and Buick, the observationalist, whom everyone called Buck, and so he came to be called Buck.
"Hey, get down off there!" ejaculated the conductor, and the giggling colleagues dismounted and took their rightful places inside the gleaming trispangled Amtrak Minuteman, bound for Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., towns where comedy was king and the audience peasants.
Near the back of the train, the comedians found a suitable enclave where three could face two and sprawled inside it. Fat took up two seats alongside his mentor, Dick, while the Damon and Pythias of comedy, Shit and Buck, sandwiched their protégé, Chink, on the opposing bench. The boys were dressed in the casual attire of the day: sneakers, Sasson jeans, sweatshirts, button-downs, and almost-leather jackets or blue hooded parkas. Except for Buck, who enjoyed the distinction of always dressing in a sports jacket and tie. They could have passed for any other five young white men who were completely out of their minds.
After the train pulled out of Penn Station, Shit got up to use the bathroom and then returned to his seat completely naked. The other boys laughed at the sight of him, although certainly not as hard as they would have laughed if it was the first time they'd seen him do such a thing. It was the first time for the other passengers, however -- but since they were New Yorkers, they probably had seen naked people in public before, probably that day. What they didn't know was that Shit and his friends were not actually dangerous, just comedians -- young comedians at that -- and playing was simply their day job.
Amtrak conductors dreaded groups of young comedians. Sometimes comedians could cohabit for a while in an enclosed area, but more often than not, play-fighting would get out of hand or one of them would attempt to pick something off another's fur and cause a yelp, or drop a rock on his head, and pretty soon the conductor would have to come by and distract them with bananas. This quintet counted itself more mature than most young comics, which is a little like saying absolutely nothing at all.
It was difficult, in fact, even to measure maturity among comedians by any of the usual societal yardsticks; certainly, age was not a factor. Shit and Dick -- who, in fairness, had outgrown their nicknames, earned during those first few panicky months of stand-up, when mention of those subjects was the only way they knew to ensure the steady oxygen of laughter -- were the eldest, at twenty-nine and thirty-five. But Shit, as worldly as he was -- and he was -- just liked to get naked. He was especially fond of walking into the men's room of a nightclub when one of his friends was onstage, then emerging sans attire for a casual stroll back to the bar. Of course, the comic onstage would have to stop Shit to ask if he hadn't forgotten something, at which point Shit would feign embarrassment and hasten back to the loo, only to reemerge with a drink in his hand and a thanks for the reminder. Not that trains and nightclubs were the only places where Shit liked to get naked: bachelor parties, double dates, hotel rooms, Yankee Stadium -- any place where other comedians were around to appreciate it, and the chance for arrest minimal, would do.
The chance for arrest on the train was getting a little stronger as Shit remained nude in his seat, but Dick was in the middle of a story, so Shit's arrest, if it came, would have to wait. Especially since the story was about Shit and Dick and another comedian getting naked the week before at an all-girl Catholic school in upstate New York, where the trio had been hired to perform.
"You didn't tell me about that," Buck whined.
"Do I have to tell you every time it happens?" Shit joshed. Still, Buck was a little hurt.
"So we walk in," Dick continued, "and there's two nuns and another woman -- not a nun but, you know, nunlike -- and they were all real nervous that we were gonna say something improper or do something like, Christ, I don't know, get naked or something."
"Why did they book you in the first place?" Fat asked.
"Who knows, shut up," Dick said quickly, but then smiled at his idolator. "Anyway, they didn't want us anywhere near the girls, so right away they hustle us down into this underground rec room with a lot of pictures of Jesus on the walls and a Ping-Pong table."
"Jesus loved Ping-Pong. He invented that Chinese grip," Buck offered.
"Although for some reason he's better known for other things," Shit added.
"They had Ping-Pong leagues back then -- the National and the Aramaic," Chink topped, with -- to no one's surprise -- the better joke.
"Anyway," Dick tracked, "they put us down there and tell us to stay put until it's time to do the show."
The boys were laughing already, because they knew the punchline.
"I had to." Shit smiled, and everyone nodded sympathetically, as one might for a more normal addiction, like gambling or defecating on glass coffee tables.
"But I didn't have to!" Dick shouted with a big laugh. "Except now I'm the only one with my clothes on, so -- "
"Peer pressure," Buck said.
"Exactly -- I mean, hey, what am I, not gonna get naked? No. So then the two nuns and the other chick come back, and these boneheads are playing Ping-Pong -- "
"Naked?" Fat asked.
"Have you been listening to the story?" Shit asked him.
"Yeah, naked," Dick scolded Fat. "Naked, okay? We were naked, this is a naked story. We're naked. And then the nuns come in -- the nuns were not naked, did I make that clear? -- and they see two guys playing Ping-Pong, and their dicks are flopping around, and I'm standing on a chair over the net like I'm judging!"
Everybody howled at that. Then Fat asked: "Who won?"
More howling. More big passenger-alarming howling, which made the conductor come by, and he was howling mad. But Shit had talked his way out of nakeder spots than this, and he toddled off to the bathroom to get dressed. When he returned, though, Shit was in a decidedly fouler mood than when he'd left, which may have been due to the restrictiveness of clothing or just because he liked descending into fouler moods.
"Mind if I eat while you smoke?" he snarled at Dick and Buck, who had lit up just as Shit removed the foil on his Amtrak-microwaved lunch.
"Easy, pal," said Buck. "God, you're as ornery as..."
"As a man stuck for a metaphor?" Shit countered.
"Boy, you're in a mood," the normally apolitical Chink interposed. "What's eatin' ya?"
"Comedy, boys. Comedy is eating me alive."
With that the others sang out in ridicule of Shit, condemning him for the negative attitude he was now imposing upon their jolly sojourn. They all liked to perpetuate the myth amongst themselves, and especially among civilians, that they were special members of society by virtue of their exemption from all accouterments of the rat race -- i.e., alarm clocks, regular hours, long days, bosses, offices, or the need to concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds. They wore the deadly sin of sloth like a badge of honor, and they relished the chance run-in with childhood friends who'd listen, mouth agape, to the description of a life comprised of recess.
But Shit wasn't buying it today. He bullishly pressed on with a discussion of reality.
"We're being exploited," he said. "They're filling that room every night of the week, getting a five-dollar cover and a two-drink minimum, and we're getting cab fare."
Shit was referring to The Club, the premier Manhattan showcase club on the Upper East Side, where the boys were among forty or so young comedians and comediennes presently getting their acts together. On this particular Friday afternoon, however, they were taking those acts on the road, and on the road -- well, the wages sucked there, too: $250 a weekend for the headliner, $150 for the middle act, $75 for the MC.
But at least now, in 1979, there was a road. Veterans like Dick and Shit, who'd already been at this game for four years, remembered when the only places for a young comic to get onstage were the handful of showcase clubs in New York and L.A. These hot spots, of which The Club was currently the hottest, presented a score of comedians every night, offering them exposure in the country's media capitals and a place to "work out" in exchange for their services, gratis. But as the decade drew to a close, a major new trend in the comedy boom was catching fire: the local comedy club. In cities all across the country, a new vaudeville was slouching to be born. Restaurant basements, hotel lounges, old coffeehouses -- even storefronts -- were being converted into clubs where two or three of these young comedians from New York or L.A. could be brought in each weekend to perform stand-up comedy. It was a trend that fed on itself: Encouraged by the expanding number of young comics available, clubs opened up by the score, and encouraged by all the places to work, hundreds of young men and women began to quit their day jobs.
So what wasn't to like?
To Buck, the recent comedy boom was the ultimate in bad luck. Because he was not part of a trend! He was one of the ones who was born to do it! He would have been a comedian in any era, and curse the luck that he came of age just as every asshole in America who had ever gotten a laugh at a fraternity party was now crowding the field. For decades, to be a comedian had meant you were literally one in a million, as there were certainly no more than two hundred professional comedians in the whole country. But now, just as he was ready to fulfill his lifelong dream, comedians were positively pullulating, breeding like mosquitoes after a wet spring in these stagnant pools they called comedy clubs. Buck laughed every time Johnny Carson brought a new comedian on The Tonight Show with the standard comedy-is-the-hardest-commodity-in-our-business-to-find introduction.
Hardest commodity to find? You could barely swing a dead cat nowadays without hitting some dickhead who called himself a comedian!
And the more comedians there were, the more the bargaining power of each descended.
"How many seats in the Washington club?" Shit continued, still on his high horse, "Three hundred? Same with Philly. And they're collecting five or six at the door, plus drinks, times four shows. You figure it out."
"You're just pissed because you're middling for me," Buck kidded, with a mischievous glint in his eye.
"Blow me," Shit responded, with absolutely no glint.
Shit, Buck, and Dick, you see, were on a mission of mercy this weekend, helping the novice members of the group, Chink and Fat, secure their very first out-of-town gigs, as MCs in Baltimore and Wilmington, respectively. Unlike at The Club, the MC job in an out-of-town club was the least important, consisting mainly of warming up the crowd for fifteen minutes, then introducing the middle act and the headliner, who performed the bulk of the real comedy for the evening. Thus the task of local MC was normally handled by someone local -- even, at times, by a noncomedian, like the owner of the club or a hostess or Gallagher. But Buck and Shit had persuaded the owner of Shennanagins, the Baltimore club, to let Chink get his feet wet on the road in this manner, and in return for this favor, they had agreed to co-headline, thereby ensuring that the show would at least have two veteran acts should Chink prove to be a disaster. Dick, being perhaps the strongest and most in-demand performer currently working in the New York comedy pool, was not asked to make a similar concession -- not that Buck and Shit should have been asked to, either. But if the owner of Shennanagins, Harvey Karrakarrass, had given a comedian something for nothing, he would have faced possible disciplinary action from the Schmucks' Association, to which all club owners belonged.
And, in truth, Buck and Shit were happy to do it: They loved Chink and believed in him. Moreover, they enjoyed doing good, almost as much as they enjoyed the idea that they were doing good. Children of the sixties, Shit and Buck held forth on the train about the new humanity alive at The Club -- how different it was from the bad old days there! Why, in days gone by, the senior acts barely spoke to the rookies, and certainly never gave them a helping hand. But then a revolution of kindness swept over the comic landscape behind its charismatic leader, Shit. Upon gaining his own stature at The Club, Shit reached out to the tyros who came along after him. One of them was Buck, who'd arrived on the scene only a year and a half ago -- not that you'd know it by the way he carried himself. Buck was the kind of guy who could have headlined only twice before in his life and make it sound for all the world as if he was a grizzled veteran. And since he had only headlined twice before, this talent came in handy.
Now, if he only had an act.
An act would have really been helpful a few months earlier, when Buck did his second headlining gig, in Montreal. The owner there wanted an hour from the headliner, and Buck assured him an hour would be no problem. But in truth, an hour was quite a problem, because Buck did not have an hour of material. He did not have a half hour of material, but with a liberal sprinkling of "Where you from?"s with an uncommonly receptive audience, he had been able to clock in close enough to the usual forty-five-minute headliner finish line to pass muster on his first headlining gig, at Shennanagins.
So Buck went to Montreal feeling pretty cocky -- quite a feat for a comedian who was 90 percent attitude and 10 percent act. Of course, a formula like that was right at home in the Big Apple: One colleague had already suggested that Buck bill himself as "the act you're not good enough to see." Buck enjoyed that. He liked having a reputation, even if it was a bad one.
And he didn't want to lose it. So when he got back to New York and everyone asked how things had gone up in Canada, he said they had gone well -- referring, apparently, to timely air service, pleasant hotel accommodations, and delightful sightseeing in the day.
As for the shows, he had suffered only a bit less horribly than the crowds who had had to watch him that weekend -- watch him die four slow, painful deaths. Nothing in his past experience as a comedian -- and almost all of it to that point had been pretty tough -- had prepared him for that. At The Club, yes, the first year had been a nightmare onstage, but every comedian's first year is a nightmare: going on for three drunks at two in the morning, desperately trying to find a distinctive voice, and being rudely awakened to the fact that having been a funny guy all your life is a world apart from being a professional comedian. But at least at The Club you were just one comic in a nightly parade, and the worst beating never lasted more than twenty minutes. But in Montreal, there he was, fifteen minutes into an hour show, and pretty much wad-shot of material.
And no closing bit! The Jordache jeans commercial -- which he "parodied" by sticking his ass out -- did not run in Canada. The biggest laugh Buck got in Montreal that weekend came from his unintentionally mispronouncing the name of the renegade Quebecois prime minister, René Levesque.
Onstage those nights, Buck thought about stealing from his friends -- who would know, it's Canada -- but he had too much pride for that. He even had too much pride to get off at forty-five or fifty or fifty-five, for crying out loud! H...
"Anyone considering a career in stand-up comedy should read this book, then consider something else, because all this great stuff is over."
-- Jerry Seinfeld
"One of the funniest novels since John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces."
-- Library Journal
"Crisp, funny, bitter and wise....Bill Maher really knows stand-up comedy."
-- Steve Allen
"This is the novel I would have written about stand-up comedy if I was a sick egghead like Bill Maher."
-- Roseanne
-- Jerry Seinfeld
"One of the funniest novels since John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces."
-- Library Journal
"Crisp, funny, bitter and wise....Bill Maher really knows stand-up comedy."
-- Steve Allen
"This is the novel I would have written about stand-up comedy if I was a sick egghead like Bill Maher."
-- Roseanne
Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.
- ÉditeurRandom House Inc
- Date d'édition1994
- ISBN 10 0679753370
- ISBN 13 9780679753377
- ReliureBroché
- Evaluation vendeur
Acheter neuf
En savoir plus sur cette édition
EUR 55,77
Frais de port :
EUR 3,86
Vers Etats-Unis
Autres éditions populaires du même titre
Meilleurs résultats de recherche sur AbeBooks
Image d'archives
TRUE STORY: A COMEDY NOVEL
Edité par
Random House
(1994)
ISBN 10 : 0679753370
ISBN 13 : 9780679753377
Neuf
Couverture souple
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Etat : New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 0.85. N° de réf. du vendeur Q-0679753370
Acheter neuf
EUR 55,77
Autre devise