Funnymen, by Ted Heller

A comical history of the 20th century

The private life of the professional comedian nearly always shrivels to dust beneath posterity's stare. One scarcely needs to be told that Benny Hill died in misery or that Eric Morecambe wrote a melancholy semi-autobiographical novel entitled Mr Lonely: it is all there, somehow, in the bounce and swagger of the public persona. With a double act, where the comedy is born out of rivalry and tension, this contrast seems even less avoidable. Put two comedians together who genuinely like each other, history proclaims, and by and large they cease to be funny.

This, at any rate, is the message of Funnymen, a punctilious account of an imaginary duo whose joint career stretches across four decades of American history (there is no obvious real-life equivalent, except for a faint savour of Abbot and Costello). Following the best traditions of the genre, Fountain and Bliss come together more or less by accident. Ziggy Blissman is the fat, stupendously well-endowed, pop-eyed scion of a couple of veteran vaudeville hoofers, who raises his first laughs by sabotaging his parents' song-and-dance act. Victor Fontana, on the other hand, is a ladykilling crooner less concerned with the calibre of the band than the supply of backstage talent.

A chance appearance on the same bill on the pre-war touring circuit comes at a joint low-point. Ziggy's parents have both died of shock, having learned of their covert replacement. Vic is dying, metaphorically, in a riot of coughs and audience unrest. Unexpectedly, Ziggy appears on stage beside him.

What starts as real irritation ends up as top-grade comic banter. An onlooker has a heart-attack, bringing the evening's fatalities to three. Ziggy and Vic and their expanding entourages of wives, mistresses, cousins and minders (through all of whose eyes the tale is told) step out in the paralysing glare of US medialand.

Although a touch irritating at first – chunk upon chunk of third-party reportage, some no more than a paragraph long – Heller's narrative strategy turns out to be finely judged. Rather than suffocating Zig and Vic beneath a mass of period detail, it gives the atmosphere an authenticity that more straightforward arrangements might have struggled to achieve. It also helps to frame the set-pieces in which Heller excels: their first radio break when they wrest the microphone from the avuncular emcee and rampage around the studio, or their summons to the New Mexico desert (it is mid-1945 by now) to play for Oppenheimer's nuclear scientists.

Beneath it all, predictably, lie two sharply opposed personalities: Ziggy devious, manipulative, driven by all kinds of fantastic private resentments; Vic easy-going (despite having had two toes removed by a predatory lady admirer), grateful for the ride, but capable of his own manipulations when circumstances demand it. Huge swathes of mid-century Americana are quietly admitted by the back door to mingle, amid the rows of clubland chairs, with a stack of real people.

Another of those axioms about comedy has it that no novel about professional comedians is ever funny. Funnymen, mysteriously, is a hoot.

The reviewer's novel 'The Comedy Man' is published by Duckbacks