J. Lennon - The Funnies

“What’s up?”

“We’ll be doing something different today. You mind driving? I don’t drive.”

“Oh, no, that’s all right.” In fact, I had been, for perhaps the first time, actually looking forward to our session. I’d been working on a portfolio of the characters, one drawing of each of them doing ten different things, and I thought it was going extremely well. I was beginning, in fact, to believe I could start doing full strips.

“Good,” he said. “Put your work away. We won’t be talking about drawing today.” He stood up, stroked his chin. “Actually, that’s not true. It’s always about drawing, one way or another. We’ll be implying about drawing.” He walked to the Caddy and got into the passenger seat. I stowed my work in the trunk with some consternation, climbed in beside him and started the car.

“So what is this mystery topic?”

He fastened the seat belt, and when he was through gave it a sharp tug. “Gags. What kind of driver are you?”

“Careful.”

He leveled me a skeptic’s glare. “Are you, now?”

“Yes! I’m very careful. What about gags?”

“We’re going to make up gags. We’re going to see how good you are at Family Funnies humor.”

“Oh, great,” I said, pulling out.

“Drive the speed limit, please,” said Brad Wurster.

* * *

We went to the Brunswick Plaza, one of the early malls: a single-story quarry-tiled complex with no skylights and a central fountain, dark with thrown pennies, that juggled filthy warm jets of water. Wurster and I walked slowly around the fountain, our hands in our pockets. He nodded every now and then.

“Well?” he said.

“Well what?”

“What do you think?”

I looked down at the fountain. A soaking child was kneeling at the water’s edge, raking the cement bottom with a grubby hand. He came up with a fistful of pennies and ran off, trailing damp footprints. “I think it stinks.”

Wurster shook his head. He took two small spiral notebooks and a couple of pencils from his shirt pocket and handed me one of each. “You’re going to have to be more specific than that,” he said. “The Mix family is at the mall. I want you to sit on this bench and make up five gags about this fountain.”

“Five!”

“For starters, yes.” He took a seat on the bench. “We’ll compare notes in a little while.”

I sat beside him and stared hard at the fountain, concentrating this time. It wasn’t very funny. He began to push his pencil almost immediately, a maddening sound, like mice scrabbling in a cell wall. It took me twenty minutes to come up with any jokes, and by the time half an hour had passed my little notebook read:

bitty wants to go swimming

lindy holding bittys hand, says ‘bitty wants to know

how come we cant go swimming’

stranger kid floating in fountain

timmy says I’d sure like to go swimming

bobby saying how come theytelling timmy if you

throw your pennies in there god gets ‘em

lindy

This was as far as I got. The fountain was so perfectly vapid, so meaningless and foul, that I might have believed it was specifically constructed to befog my comic sensibilities. Furthermore, I didn’t know how to draw water. Resigned, I turned to Wurster and admitted I was finished.

“Let me see,” he said. I gave him my notebook. He read it carefully, then pointed to what I’d written. “This one about God is pretty good. You got one of the common FF themes in there. I like that. The other stuff, though…you get a twenty-five percent. That’s an F.”

“Gee, thanks, teach,” I said. “What have you got, then?”

He handed me his notebook. The gags covered several pages in his neat, heavily slanted handwriting.

1. Lindy tells Bitty, “It’s called a fountain ‘cause there’s lots of money found in it.”

2. Timmy says to Carl, “How come we don’t get one of those in the bathtub at home?”

3. Bobby says to Carl, “How come we can’t throw dollar bills in there?”

4. Drawing shows lots of kids playing in the fountain; Lindy tells Bitty, “It’s the fountain of youth, because it’s got kids in it.”

5. Bobby says to Bitty, “It’s not a sprinkler. You can’t run through it.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Not too bad.”

“One and five are terrible,” Wurster said. “But four will do.” He cracked his knuckles. “Okay, we’ve got two we like. You draw mine and I’ll draw yours.”

“Really? I’ve never tried a whole cartoon.”

“It’s time. Go to it.”

I made several test sketches of the fountain of youth gag: in one, Lindy and Bitty were sitting at the edge of the pool with their feet in the water; in another they were on a bench, off to the side. In the end I decided to put them left of center, standing in the foreground; the fountain was visible in the background, small enough to obscure my poor draftsmanship. Kids frolicked in it. Lindy was bending over, her finger held up like a teacher’s, while Bitty, in a typical pose, had her hand in her mouth. It looked all right to me — something that an expert inker, which I was not, might be able to make whole. When I was done I found that Wurster had already finished his. He handed it to me.

I was amazed. My father might well have done it himself. In the background of the strip, a woman — endowed with that flawlessly bland matron sensuality that all women had in the Family Funnies — leaned over her child, who was tossing pennies into the fountain. And in the foreground, Bobby was telling me the punchline, the one about God getting the pennies, and I was listening. Bobby’s expression was perfect in its groundless confidence, while mine was one of effusive awe, both of what he was saying and that he knew it at all. It was marvelously stupid, exactly the kind of thing the guy who cleaned the fountain would cut out and tape to his fridge.

“Wow,” I said.

“Let’s see yours.” I gave it to him. He nodded. “Okay, sure. You could ink this up into something half-decent, couldn’t you?” He handed it back and stood up. It was time to move to a new site.

I was frustrated enough with Wurster’s effortless aping of the strip that I stayed an extra couple of seconds on the bench. Wurster was already walking. “Why is it,” I called after him, “that everybody can draw this goddam strip but me?”

He turned around. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what I said. I don’t even know why I’m up for this job. You ought to get it yourself. Or Ken Dorn.”

His eyes bugged out, and he took a step forward. It was a funny step, the kind you might take toward a caged lion in a poorly maintained zoo. “What did you say?”

“You ought to get the job.”

“Did you say ‘Ken Dorn’?”

“Yeah, Ken Dorn. You know him?”

Wurster sat down again, his eyes never leaving my face. “How do you know him?”

“He was at the funeral,” I said. “And at FunnyFest. He’s been hanging around town.”

“Riverbank?”

“Mixville.”

“What!”

I explained the name change to him. He shook his head. “For Christ’s sake. How stupid.”

“Well, whatever. But Ken Dorn.”

He brought his finger to my face. “Ken Dorn is a leech, Tim. He’ll grab you and suck all the blood out before you know what hit you, and by that time you’ll be dead in the water.”

I unmixed his metaphors and offered a respectful nod. “How do you know him?” I asked.

Wurster shook his head and stared off into the depths of a shoe store. “That’s not important,” he whispered.

* * *

That Friday, at lunch in New York, I got an idea of what Wurster was talking about. Susan had been gloomy and evasive the entire meal, and while we were eating — the time I would least expect her to speak — she put down her chopsticks and sat up straight in her chair. “Tim.”