Category: Blog Post

This guy called me up yesterday and asked me to put together a list of what I thought were the funniest novels of all time. This is the sort of thing that’s usually a piece of cake for me, and I responded with enthusiasm to the idea. I figured I could come up with the list off the top of my head and knock off the project in an hour.

After I hung up the phone, though, I realized that I honestly had no clue. I pretty quickly tossed off a half dozen titles that were solid to tentative choices, but after that I was stumped. I read way too many books, and find more and more lately that I forget what I’ve read the instant I close the book.

The problem with something like this is that once the challenge is posed I can’t think of anything else and it drives me bananas until I’ve reached some satisfactory resolution –actually, there are never any satisfactory resolutions, but these days I can generally live with unsatisfactory resolutions.

I have no idea how many books I own, but it’s safe to say it’s many thousands, and I don’t suppose ten thousand would even be much of a stretch. I don’t, unfortunately, have a house where I could display even a fraction of the books I have in any sort of an orderly fashion, and even if I did I lack the discipline for orderly systems of any kind. As a result there are crowded bookshelves and books stacked in every room of my house, and there are a couple hundred boxes full of the damn things upstairs, in the basement, and out in the garage. Come by sometime; I’m not exaggerating. I spend more time digging frantically through boxes looking for a particular book than I spend on any other single pursuit, and that also is not an exaggeration.

What I’m saying is that while I’m sure there are innumerable gut-busting novels buried somewhere in my house, I’m unable to simply scan my bookshelves to jar my memory. And my memory, once one of my proudest possessions, is eroding by the month. Whatever the experts might tell you, I feel certain that the human mind only has space for so much memory, and mine has become a boggy compost pile full of all sorts of dodgy and useless material that I cannot even classify as information.

By now, though, after twelve hours of obsessing over this question, I’ve managed to come up with a rough list that feels hopelessly wrong, or at least hopelessly incomplete. I don’t necessarily question most of the choices, but I’m certain that I’m missing many of the funniest books I’ve ever read. And, as is so often the case when I get asked for book lists or recommendations, I’m appalled to discover that there’s not a single woman writer on the list.

I swear to God, though, I’m not one of those guys who only reads books by men. I love women writers. After years of struggling with this problem I’m sure that for many people who know me that smacks of the old Seriously, some of my best friends are Jews cop-out. But some of my favorite writers are women –Alice Munro, Jane Bowles, Djuna Barnes, Dawn Powell, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Parker– and there are many funny women writers; unfortunately most of them (Parker, Fran Lebowitz, Amy Hempl, Veronica Geng) didn’t or haven’t written novels. Wise Blood I guess is funny, and Dawn Powell’s novels are funny, but as much as I love those books not one of them jumps out at me as one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read.

You –someone– will help me, I’m sure. Help me out with some novels by women I’ve surely missed, but also help me make this list more definitive. Maybe this is cheating, but I frankly don’t give a rat’s ass. I’ll be haunted if I send this thing out there only to realize I’ve neglected some books that truly made me laugh.

At any rate, here’s where the deal stands at one a.m., and as I’ll no doubt be up mulling for some hours yet I may pop back in here if something else occurs to me. My mind is pretty shot, though, so I’ll probably spend the rest of the dark hours slumped on the floor staring at books of photographs or a 19th century book on noses I picked up the other day. Looking over the list right now it’s glaringly apparent that I have a serious weakness for fiction about losers, and I’ll allow you to draw from that whatever conclusions you want.

John Fergus Ryan, The Little Brothers of St. Mortimer

Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Samuel Beckett, Murphy

Randall Jarrell, Pictures From an Institution

Charles Portis, The Dog of the South

David Gates, Jernigan

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Ed McLanahan, The Natural Man

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

William Kotzwinkle, The Fan Man

This poor kid from the secondary division downstairs used to come up to my office all the time and ask me what it was all about. What the hell was I supposed to tell him?

He thought he was going places. He thought he was doing something; he thought we all were. So I was supposed to burst the greenhorn’s bubble? Come on, Jesus, I’d been in his shoes once upon a time. I’d been downstairs pushing paper around and scrutinizing nonsense that made no sense to me. I was going to tell him it didn’t make a lick of fucking sense to anyone else either? That if he hung around long enough and gained enough weight he’d eventually get bumped upstairs to sit on his ass behind a desk staring at a painting of some vaguely European street scene and trying to fashion handlebar mustaches out of paper clips?

I was supposed to tell the kid it wasn’t about anything, that none of it added up to nothing, and that the business of America was business and we were in that business? That after thirty-five years I still couldn’t drag my ass home at night and give my kids any kind of straight answer about what I did for a living? That every day I rode upstairs in the elevator with the same glum, vaguely familiar faces I’d been seeing around that place forever, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what any of them did for a living either?

We work for someone; I suppose I could have told the kid that, and I suppose it would have been some version of the truth. I didn’t have the heart to tell the kid any of that, though. Whatever the hell they were paying me to do, I knew for damn sure they weren’t paying me to tell the kid the truth.

Early in my adolescence I played baseball one summer on a traveling team with this fat kid from a smaller town fifteen miles from the place where I grew up. I swear, this guy was the funniest, most bitterly cynical fourteen-year-old on the planet. He was also the best hitter I ever played with or against, just a monster who could spray the ball all over the field and hit homeruns with ease in every tiny youth league park around southern Minnesota. He couldn’t run for shit, of course, and wasn’t much in the field, but he played a serviceable first base for our team and more than made up for any defensive lapses with his bat. If I remember correctly this kid drove in something like seventy percent of our runs that summer, and hit more homeruns than the rest of the team combined.

He ended up playing high school ball in his tiny hometown of Blooming Void, and had a career that was the stuff of local legend. I suppose because he was fat and not much of a student he apparently didn’t get any scholarship offers to four-year colleges, and ended up playing two years for a junior college in Kansas. That JC had a reputation of being a sort of farm club for major college programs, and he easily led his team in every major offensive category in both his seasons in Kansas. A half dozen guys from his team went on to play Division One baseball, but that was the end of the line for him.

He went back to Blooming Void and worked at his old man’s hardware store. I’d always followed his career with interest, and would regularly hear about his exploits through the grapevine or in the pages of the local newspaper, but once he hung it up I pretty much lost track of him.

Five years later, though, I bumped into him at a Twins game at the Dome, and we started hanging out a bit and eventually ended up working together in a downtown parking ramp, where we had many a ferocious Whiffle Ball battle on the top level after hours.

By that point he had been transformed into Uncle Jumbo, a name that had allegedly been conferred upon him by his nephews. As the story went, when one of the nephews was a tot he’d misunderstood Jimbo as Jumbo, and the name stuck. It didn’t seem to bother Jumbo in the least, and he adopted it with enthusiasm.

Jumbo was the worst person in the world to watch a baseball game with. He was a perfectionist, naturally belligerent, and a prodigious beer drinker, which was a terrible and combustible combination for a fan of any sport, but particularly dangerous for a baseball fan. He couldn’t accept the fact that even the best teams would lose fifty or sixty games in a season; this seemed to him a wholly unreasonable definition of success, and thus he found the game brutal and punishing. Every single loss, and an overwhelming majority of the victories, left him bitter and preoccupied.

Jumbo was nonetheless a glutton for punishment, and a perfect specimen of a baseball masochist. He allowed the sport to ruin his prospects in life, refusing to consider any job that would not allow him to absorb every inning of every game of every season, whether in person, on the television, or via the radio. This flexibility was his sole criteria for suitable employment, and thus he was limited to a series of stationary, dead-ass jobs, mostly in parking ramp booths or security desks. When I again lost track of him he had allowed his phone to be disconnected and was washing dishes in the kitchen of a dive bar in south Minneapolis.

Then, unexpectedly in the late-nineties I started seeing Jumbo’s byline in a weekly publication called Minnesota SportsPage, where he documented with often appalling candor the extent to which baseball was ruining his life. Those were very dark years for Twins fans, and Jumbo’s ruminations were frequently apoplectic, virtually always irrational, and often painful to read. They were also somehow grimly entertaining, perhaps because I knew the man and understood on some level the extent of his dark obsession.

Eventually Jumbo got the gate at Sportspage, and settled back into the life of the anonymous and unhappy fan. I found him again recently, working the night security desk at the office building where my wife is employed, and we’ve been going back and forth for a couple months trying to reach an agreement that would have him contributing a column here at Warning Track Power once a week.

I’m happy to say that the deal has finally been struck: an official Spalding stickball bat, a well-worn Boog Powell Rawlings Trapper first baseman’s mitt, a signed copy of Tony Oliva’s autobiography, a roll of Copenhagen, and a sealed DVD of Tawny Kitaen’s The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik Yak, in exchange for one season’s worth of Jumbo columns.

Jumbo has assured me that he’ll be good to go by next Friday, and in the meantime I’ll post one of his original, early columns (from opening day, 1996) by way of an introduction. I’ll also have my own season preview sometime tomorrow.

Uncomfortable admissions have long been one of my specialties, so here’s a whopper: I once wore a toga emblazoned with Lenny Faedo’s number to a Twins opener. I’m not sure what I was thinking, but in those days I was convinced that my one real shot at acquiring self-esteem and some kind of identity was to become a ballpark character, one of those guys –and they are almost always fat –who leads cheers from the top of the dugout. I had a little bit of nerve in those days, coupled with a pretty serious drinking problem.

The first time I got hit with a well thrown Frosty Malt though, my nerve evaporated and I assumed my place in the rolls of the large and anonymous. In Minnesota, of course, any show of public enthusiasm is grounds enough for a drunk and disorderly citation.

It still chaps my ass that the symbol of the rapturous Minnesotan will forever be that ridiculous Homer Hanky. That whole phenomenon really bothered me. It struck me as so –and I’m going to use a potentially objectionable old junior high school adjective here– femmy. You know? 50,000 people bouncing up and down on the edge of their seats and waving handkerchiefs, for chrissakes. If Western movies taught me anything it was that waving handkerchiefs was how gals said goodbye when their men rode out of Dodge or went off to war or just plain got the hell out of town. It was, like, a school marm thing.

I wasn’t gonna get caught dead waving a handkerchief. But I did, of course; I waved the hanky, along with all the rest of the idiots. And to this day that’s the only thing about that entire season that I feel really lousy about. Well, that, actually, and the fact that I got so stinking drunk on 3.2 beer during the first game of the playoffs that I threw up in a Metrodome concourse, something I swear to God will never happen again.

Remember Lombo, though? Remember that scrawny little bastard running around and waving that towel? That also chapped my ass. Another obvious lesson from the Westerns, right? Waving the white towel is the universally accepted form of surrender. I mean, come on, moron, you just won the World Series; is it too much too ask that you comport yourself in an appropriately masculine manner?

I’M NOT A BIG FAN of life’s great moments. Birthday’s are right up there with stepping on the scale for me, and I would skip my own wedding if I could somehow pull it off. A wedding, I mean, you know, finding someone who would marry me. Nonetheless, opening day is the only calendar occasion I still observe with anything resembling religious devotion. I never miss opening day. I once quit a job so that I could be in attendance on opening day – granted, it was a job at Arby’s, but still. For years I would sit at home and drink like crazy before the opener, but I’ve mellowed quite a bit with age, and the last few years I’ve had a few beers at home and then gone to Baker’s Square for a pie. It’s not much as far as traditions go, but what the hell? It works for me.

—Dan Corrigan, “Eddie Potomac,” from the Ballroom Portraits, Rhinelander, Wisconsin. 1978.

I worked side-by-side with this guy for seven years. Shooter Devaney. He’d been a hotshot basketball player back in high school, but something went wrong somewhere along the line, just like something went wrong for so many of the guys I grew up with, myself included.

Shooter was always flinching. Looking through our old high school yearbook not long ago I noticed that he was even flinching in his class picture, so the seeds of the thing were apparently there all along. It was like the camera was a blow, like he couldn’t handle posterity or whatever it was.

I’ve survived a few things, he’d say to me. Don’t think I haven’t. You know my wife? She’s likely at home right this moment dancing alone to records in our living room. When people ask her what she does she can’t just say she’s a housewife. No, she claims she’s a retired cheerleader. What woman in this town isn’t?

Some people I’ve learned don’t need some anonymous tragedy to put a spook in their blood; they’re just born with some creeping thing that won’t leave them alone.

My teeth are giving me fits, Scooter would say. My whole life I’ve never had a comfortable mouth. Or: I have no intention of ever getting on an airplane. That just ain’t my place, the sky.

Scooter couldn’t sleep. He’d talk about that. He once asked me, Do you remember that big cage ball they used to bring out in gym class to roll right over everyone? That just did not seem like the correct proportions for any kind of a ball. I used to have nightmares about that thing.

We were taking apart animals for a living back in those days, breaking them down into meat. There were billboards around our town that read, “Meat is Community.” It was bloody, stinking work, but the damn thing about it was you wouldn’t find a single vegetarian in the entire plant.

I don’t know why this should occur to me just now. I suppose because it was such a long time ago, and seems even longer than it could conceivably have been, like I’ve been transported to where I am now from another planet. Sometimes when my head gets tangled up I can actually convince myself that such a thing is possible.