Ted Heller's début novel, Slab Rats, dissected the dirty world of journalism to sharp, comedic effect; his follow-up tackles America's entertainment circuit of the 1940s and 1950s, where Martini glasses clinked to the sound of a big band, and going to a nightclub meant dressing up in tux or evening dress, having your Bonneville valet-parked, and getting dinner and drinks during the show.
Funnymen tells the story of Vic Fountain and Ziggy Bliss, the most celebrated comedy duo of their time. Separately, Victor Fontana and Sigmund Blissman aren't much to write home about; when they go onstage together, the pair deliver so many laughs, you can hear blood vessels bursting like balloons in the audience.
Fountain is a lugubrious, dark-haired Italian crooner with a voice like Nytol; Bliss is a big, redhaired Jewish clown whose head resembles "a medicine ball with carrots sprouting out if it". Before the pair meet, Fountain is slurring soporifically with various B-grade combos, and seducing everybody's wife, girlfriend, sister and mother on the side. Bliss is part of a triple act with his hapless, talentless parents, both of whom nervously play straight-man to their unruly son's unpredictable stage antics. One night, while Fountain is doing his usual impression of a catatonic Bing Crosby, Bliss interrupts his stage act, and sparks fly so fast, it's like a showdown in a steel mill.
For the next 20 years, Fountain and Bliss cut a swathe through the world of entertainment, swaggering their way to the top of the heap, and then sliding back down, thanks to their explosive combination of cruelty, selfishness, greed and raging jealousy. Onstage, it's all buddy-buddy; off stage, however, the mud flies faster than anti-aircraft fire, and the one-upmanship escalates to often dangerous levels. The fallout from the pair's mutual hatred leaves more casualties than a John Wayne war movie, and the victims are only too happy to tell their side of the story to the author. The result is, as one 1950s reviewer might have put it, a laff-riot from start to inevitable split-up.
This, if you will, yuk-umentary, is told through various eye-witness accounts, and the novel's colourful cast of characters paints a garish picture of excess, avarice, infidelity, ignorance, irresponsibility, and impeccable comic timing. The main narrators are Arnie Latchkey, co-manager of Fountain and Bliss; Sally Klein, Bliss's long-suffering cousin; no-luck comedian Snuffy Dubin; put-upon gag-writer Danny McGlue; and Fountain's blindly loyal buddy, Guy Puglia. Others willing to open up to Heller (some of them even address him as Teddy) are gay songwriter Ernie Beasley; Ziggy's kleptomaniac wife, Jane White; embittered radio host, Lenny Pearl; and straight-laced head of security, Reynolds Catledge IV. If it wasn't for the surfeit of gags on every page, you could almost forget that these people weren't real.
As the story unfolds through these often conflicting accounts, we meet a supporting cast bigger than Ben Hur, and funnier than Duck Soup. You can call Heller either brave or foolish to attempt a comic novel about comics, but he pulls it off with style, pizzazz and fine timing of his own. He also recreates the golden era of lounge with just the right cocktail of cliché and comic invention, moving deftly from the Catskills circuit to Las Vegas to Hollywood, and effortlessly evoking the world of Sinatra, Rita Hayworth and Henny Youngman.
At its centre lurch the two towering, monstrous central characters, each one trying vainly to topple the other through deceit, dirty tricks and downright sabotage.
In Catch-22, Ted Heller's father, Joseph Heller, satirised war with a dark, surreal eye for disturbing detail. Heller Jr., in contrast, looks at post-war America through the distorting bubbles of a neon-lit cocktail glass. The satire may be lighter, but it's no less effervescent.
Kevin Courtney is a rock critic