The Funny Man Read Online Free

up, and the child funny man holds the microphone to his mouth, and even though he doesn’t even really know what it means and is simply saying it because it is the answer his parents gave when he asked them whose job it is to make people laugh, he says, loudly and clearly, “a comedian.”
    The funny man next thinks of the off-Broadway play that he will one day write and perhaps produce as well after he is already a famous funny man. The play will have a “laugh out loud” opening, but the second half will contain an unexpected act of violence that will cause the critics to call the play “important” and “intriguing” and “unexpected.” There may be brief nudity as well. The funny man may even star in it with an actress most known for her sitcom work who is trying to stretch creatively. The play will cause people to expand their estimation of the funny man. No longer will he just be the funny man, but the funny man who wrote an off-Broadway play that filled every single one of its folding chairs.
    The funny man rolls the child onto its back and tickles its belly. The funny man notices that the skin at the child’s joints is wrinkled like the back of the talent agent’s neck.
    “Laugh,” he says to the child, and the child does. Kicks the air too.
    The funny man’s wife supports this habit of going to the club at night and trying to induce drunk strangers to laugh by waiting tables because her degree in Spanish does not translate into a higher paying job and the funny man pledged to take care of the child, “as if he were my own,” which got quite a good laugh from the funny man’s wife since they both knew full well where the child came from. The funny man remembers the moment like it was just a year and a half ago, which it was. Money is tight and the best meals are ones his wife carts home cold from her work, but the funny man, despite his visions of future grandeur, cannot imagine wanting anything more than this apartment in this, the best city in the world, this woman, this child, which is of course why he can put so much focus into making all these impossibly large dreams happening.
    On the future televised biography of the funny man’s life, they will interview a host of lesser funny men to talk about the career of the funny man. The funny man vows that he will never appear in one of these televised biographies about someone else, because only people less famous than the subject at hand agree to be interviewed for them. It is like volunteering for the junior varsity.
    The funny man imagines one of these lesser funny men being filmed in his Coral Gables living room while sitting in an ugly, floral-print easy chair. “Who shot the curtains, right?” this lesser funny man will say to the camera operator as the lighting is adjusted. “But what are you going to do? It’s the wife’s taste and you’ve got to keep her happy.” The camera operator will smile wanly and ask this lesser funny man if he’s ready.
    “Does the pope shit in his hat?”
    On camera, the lesser funny man will gesture with his hands, and talking about the funny man say something like, “You’ve got to understand that the best humor comes from a dark place, and if you spend a lot of time in that place, your head’s going to wind up being a little farchadat .”
    The funny man has heard this often, mostly backstage at the club where there is a kind of competition for who is the most fucked-up, who is darkest, who is most despairing, who has the worst tales of early abuse that have marked them for the self-flagellation that is professional comedy. Early on, the funny man tried playing these reindeer games, but he was making stuff up, stories borrowed from characters in the soap operas he would watch instead of going to class and deep down he knows that his mind is not even partly cloudy, let alone black and stormy. This is one of his biggest concerns, actually, that he is not screwed up enough to have anything interesting to