The Comedy is Finished
Read The Comedy is Finished Online
Authors: Donald E. Westlake
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COMEDY
Is
FINISHED
by
Donald E. Westlake
A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
(HCC-105)
First Hard Case Crime edition: February 2012
Published by
Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street
London
SE1 0UP
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by the Estate of Donald E. Westlake
Cover painting copyright © 2012 by Gregory Manchess
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Print Edition ISBN 978-0-85768-408-0
E-book ISBN 978-0-85768-409-7
Design direction by Max Phillips
Typeset by Swordsmith Productions
The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo
are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are
selected and edited by Charles Ardai.
Printed in the United States of America
Visit us on the web at
www.HardCaseCrime.com
Donald Westlake began writing this book in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, he sent a carbon copy of the finished manuscript to fellow crime writer Max Allan Collins, with whom he’d been corresponding for more than ten years. Shortly afterwards, Don decided not to publish the book, in part because Martin Scorsese had just released the movie
The King of Comedy
and Don thought some readers might feel the movie’s premise and the book’s were too similar. Max packed the manuscript away in a box in his basement, where it sat for the better part of the next three decades.
When Hard Case Crime published
Memory
in 2010, describing it as “Donald Westlake’s final unpublished novel,” Max informed us of this one’s existence, unearthed the faded typescript, and sent it to us in the hope that the book would finally see print.
That it has is thanks to Abby Westlake and to Larry Kirshbaum, agent for the Westlake Estate, who agreed to let us publish it—but all three of us owe special thanks to Max Allan Collins, without whom
The Comedy Is Finished
might never again have seen the light of day.
This is for Brian Garfield, who knows what I’m doing better than I do.
Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America is the only idealistic nation in the world.
P
RESIDENT
W
OODROW
W
ILSON
S
IOUX
F
ALLS
, S
OUTH
D
AKOTA
S
EPTEMBER
8, 1919
The
COMEDY
Is
FINISHED
1
“Welcome to television, folks. If you’re very very good, we’ll renew ya for next week.”
Koo Davis is onstage, hand mike negligently held just below his round pink chin. He looks like that portrait of him done by Norman Rockwell over twenty years ago;
everybody
has that same warm pink latex face in Norman Rockwell portraits, but Koo Davis has it in real life. He’s the ultimate justification for the Norman Rockwell palette: “See? It
is
realistic!”
“This thing here,” Koo Davis is telling his studio audience, “is called a camera, and that thing there is called a cameraman. If he’s a union cameraman he’s called ‘sir’.”
The place is a television studio, with a wide shallow bleacher along one wall, on which sits a studio audience of two hundred fifty people. There isn’t any actual stage, simply the black-composition-floored work area, made into cubicles by muslin-walled sets, with three cameras in position: left, right, center. The center camera operates in a central break in the bleachers, so it isn’t in anybody’s view. The floor is here and there covered with neutral gray carpet, and everywhere strewn with cables, like strings of black and silver spaghetti. Three television sets hang from the ceiling, facing the audience; they are dark now, but during the taping they’ll show the progress to the audience as it’s being put together. Sitting on the rows of folding chairs on the bleachers are the first two hundred fifty people from the line that formed earlier this afternoon
outside the studio. They all came in for free, and they’re looking forward to a good time.
“Now,” Koo tells them, “we’re gonna be together the next hour or so, while we put this show on tape, and if you’re a student of television and you wanna just sit there and watch the camera angles, that’s okay. And if you wanna laugh so hard you get a stitch in your side and fall down on the floor and roll around helpless with laughter, that’s okay, too. And we’ll be watching you all with monitors, and after the show we’ll tell you which of you can go home.”
Koo Davis does his own warm-ups. There are lesser comics who wait in their dressing rooms, talking with their agents and their accountants, while warm-up specialists (jolly-faced fiftyish failures with memorized repertoires) pep up the audience with semi-dirty jokes, get the audience already chuckling away, comfortable in its seats and ready to roar. But that isn’t Koo Davis’ style; his style is to find them where they are, grab them by the lapel, hit ’em with some yocks, hit ’em with some more yocks, and between times grin at ’em and walk around. He does
confidence
, that’s what Koo Davis does, because an audience digs confidence.
“We’re gonna have a couple special guests here on the show,” Koo Davis tells the people. “They’re actors, but you ought be nice to them anyway. I wanna tell ya, I’m always nice to actors. I learned my lesson. Last time I fired an actor, he got a job as Governor.” Little pause, grin at them while they laugh. “He wasn’t a very good actor, either.”
This is a new line of territory for Koo, a new kind of politics in the jokes, and he’s easing into it very cautiously, like into a tub of too-hot water. Behind the confident grin, the faintly swaggering walk, he’s watching how that Governor gag goes down, he’s waiting to see if they’ll accept it. That is, if they’ll accept it from
Koo Davis
.
He’s got some fence-mending to do, and he’s not exactly sure how to go about it.
The trouble began with the goddamn Vietnam thing. That goddamn war cut the country in half, it put the white male middle class over on this side and every damn body else over on that side, and when it finally ended, for some damn reason Koo couldn’t let go. Others could, Duke Wayne and Shirley MacLaine right away kidding each other at the Academy Awards, but for Koo it was as though to admit the last step had been wrong meant admitting everything before it had also been wrong, and that he just couldn’t do.
The bitch of it is, Koo always stayed
out
of politics. He started on radio back in ’39, and it was the normal road then to follow the Will Rogers recipe; a couple jokes about Congress not doing anything, some jokes about Roosevelt’s alphabet soup, every comic in the business was doing it. But not Koo. He had an instinct, it said times change, it said people don’t really want to laugh at their leaders, it said leave the messages to Western Union. So Koo told jokes about the railroads, about the army, about automobiles and radio and California weather. And when World War Two came along he told jokes about nylons and chocolates and V-girls and let the other comics tell their jokes about the Nips. (Nobody told jokes about the Nazis; they weren’t funny enough.)
You always knew what year it was from Koo’s material, but never what the issues were. Housing shortage. Vets in college. Fins on cars. Men in space. Let Mort Sahl come onstage with a newspaper, Koo Davis walked on with a golf club. But then came the goddamn Vietnam thing, and the country was divided as it had never been before, and Koo just couldn’t help himself. Like everybody else, he had to come down on one side or the other:
“I didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl, and it turned out to be a sheepdog.”
“Of course, Canada’s a fine place for people with cold feet.”
Nobody needs a majority more than a comic. You’re standing there in front of all those faces and you say your line, and you don’t want six jerks in the corner with a tee-hee, you want every face split open. If you don’t have the instinct for the majority, you don’t make it as a comic. Koo went over to politics because the audience wanted it. Inside himself he had two conflicting instincts—give them what they want; stay out of politics—and he had to choose.
“Also with us tonight, a wonderful actress from Sweden, Birgit Söderman—that’s the way you pronounce it, folks. I said it wrong in a smorgasbord restaurant the other night and got pig’s knuckles. I used to make the same mistake with Juanita Izquerta, but then I got
her
knuckles.”