FUNNYMEN

Friends, enemies, employees, associates, enablers, girlfriends, relatives and other observers tell absolutely everything about a zany/croony midcentury comedy duo.

Heller, who sent up glossy publishing in Slab Rat (2000), turns his formidable skill to the world of low humor, following the genesis and exodus of Vic Fountain and Ziggy Bliss, Italian crooner and Jewish clown, respectively, whose successful comedy act hides mutual jealousy and, eventually, loathing. Sound a lot like Martin and Lewis? Okay, Vic Fountain, né Fontana, does have Superman blue hair, an insatiable appetite for everything but work, and an engaging way with not-too-tricky music, but his kids are more like Frank Sinatra’s, and Bliss, born Sigmund Blissman, does take over-the-top wackiness to exhausting lengths. Still, he has orange Brillo hair and never gets involved with French comic theory, so they’re not exactly the same as Dean and Jerry. And they’re not really the show here, because Heller’s long, detailed, and thoroughly believable story is actually about the enormous cast of characters who made the comedy duo possible while the comedy duo made all their lives impossible. You don’t even have to think the comedians are funny—you probably won’t. You just have to sit back and listen to the reminiscences of their writers, wives, arrangers, siblings, offspring, toadies, and everybody else who got rich or ruined in their wake, and the voices, even with such a huge cast (the list of characters at the end takes up four pages), are all distinct and credible. The history takes the duo from Bliss’s neglected childhood as the only offspring of an unsuccessful vaudeville duo and Fountain’s Brooklyn Italian girl-crazy youth through the movies and the last years of the big nightclubs to bitter Vegas. And the business about pan-fried toes is spectacular.

Totally entertaining, but Mike Nichols and Elaine May couldn’t get here a minute too soon.