I Funny TV: A Middle School Story Read online

  I raise my eyebrows, awaiting a reaction.

  Silence. Dead silence.

  “Interesting,” says Stewart Johnson with a very slow head bob.

  Everybody else just clears their throats. Politely. Emma Smith sharpens her pencil.

  I slump down in my seat. Try to disappear.

  “How about,” says one of the other writers, “Jamie comes to school with a big banana cream pie on his lap? In fact, he brings a dozen pies to school. Maybe two dozen! Banana cream, coconut cream, Bavarian cream…”

  “They’re all cream pies?” asks Johnson.

  “Have to be or the gag doesn’t work. Jamie takes his pies to geometry class, where the teacher says that formula… you know the one… for finding the area of a circle…”

  “Pi times r squared!”

  “Bingo! And Jamie shakes his head and tells the teacher, ‘No. That’s wrong. Cakes are square, pies are round!’”

  “And he throws a pie in the teacher’s face!” says Emma Smith. “And he has to go to detention hall, and that’s where the big pie fight takes place.”

  Johnson spins around with a big grin on his face. “Whaddaya think, Jamie?”

  “Um, a pie fight is kind of Three Stooges–ish.”

  “You’re right. We need seltzer bottles, too!”

  The writers spend another half hour milking the pie-fight bit for all the cream and seltzer they can squeeze out of it.

  After a quick bathroom break, Stewart Johnson runs a clip from my comedy act on his computer screen.

  It’s a bit about Stevie Kosgrov.

  Johnson slams down his laptop lid. “That’s it! The pilot is all about how Jamie came up with this one bit about the bully.”

  “What about the pie fight?” asks Chip, the writer who’s been shadowing Stevie.

  “We save it,” says Johnson. “For the second episode. Or maybe season two.”

  Or maybe never, I’m thinking. Never would work for me.

  “I don’t know, Stewart,” says Chip. “For a bully, this Kosgrov is a real lightweight. Now, there’s this other kid, Lars Johannsen. He’s huge and hysterical. Yesterday, he stuffed Stevie Kosgrov inside a locker—right after he made Kosgrov gobble down a dozen bean burritos in the cafeteria. Talk about a gas trap.”

  Johnson springs out of his chair. “Jamie?”

  “Yes?”

  “We’re going on a field trip. We need to go back to school and see Stevie and Lars side by side! We need to pick our bully.”

  Chapter 25

  BULLY FOR ME

  The writers hoist me up into their van and we head back to Long Beach Middle School.

  We pull into the parking lot just as the final bell is ringing. Kids are piling out the doors, running for their buses.

  And not a single one of them is being shaken down by Stevie Kosgrov.

  “Isn’t this prime bullying time?” asks Stewart Johnson.

  “Not as big as first thing in the morning,” I say, “because everybody’s spent their lunch money.”

  “But wouldn’t a first-class bully be out here settling scores and punching people?”

  He sounds disappointed that little kids aren’t being tortured in front of him.

  Finally, we find Stevie sitting on a curb, trying without much enthusiasm to squish a line of ants with a stick.

  “Stevie,” says Johnson, “we want our TV bully to be just like you. Big. Tough. Nasty. What would you do to threaten Jamie?”

  “I don’t know. Call him a crip or something.”

  “Come on, Stevie,” urges Emma Smith. “You can do better than that. Show us your stuff.”

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. “We’re playing it for laughs. Give me a punch so I can give you a punch line!”

  Stevie’s eyes go wide. I recognize the look. He’s choking. Just like I do sometimes when everybody’s waiting for me to perform. He’s also sweating up a storm. Guess perspiration runs in the family, too.

  “What’s the matter, Stevie?” snarls a big, nasty voice. “Brain run out of gas? Maybe you need to eat another bean burrito.”

  It’s Lars Johannsen.

  “What are you doing here, Funny Boy?” Lars sneers at me.

  “Field trip?” I peep.

  “Oh, did you come here to see the fist exhibit?” He balls up his fist and waggles it in my face. “Well, here it is. In IMAX and 3-D.”

  He socks me in the stomach.

  I go flying backward. When I’m sprawled out like a flopping fish, Lars stomps on that line of ants Stevie was trying to torment. Then he kicks Stevie in the butt.

  “Now you have ants in your pants, Kosgrov!”

  “Love it!” giggles Emma Smith. “Ants in his pants!”

  Lars swaggers away.

  None of the writers stop taking notes to help prop me back up. Stevie skulks away, rubbing his sore behind.

  Fortunately, Gaynor and Pierce come out of the building just in time to see me spread-eagled and flat on my back.

  And, like always, they help me back into my chair while pretending that’s not what they’re doing.

  Chapter 26

  ME AND MY FUNNY FRIENDS

  The weekend comes and I can finally take a break from prepping the TV pilot.

  I can actually spend some time with my real buds, not the actors playing them on TV.

  Gaynor, Pierce, Vincent O’Neil, and I all meet at Gilda’s house, where we turn her mother’s dining room into our own version of the sitcom writing room.

  “Is this how the real TV people do it?” asks Vincent eagerly. “They sit around a table just like this one and tell each other jokes and write the show?”

  “Sort of,” I say. “All the writers toss out ideas. They call it spitballing.”

  “So,” says Gaynor, “do we need, like, straws?”

  “No. It’s just another way of saying ‘brain-storming.’”

  “I have an idea,” says our resident brainiac, Jimmy Pierce. “Termites have been known to eat food twice as fast when heavy metal music is playing. You could do your movie about that.”

  “What?” says Gilda. “Jamie plays a termite?”

  “Ooh, cool,” says Vincent. “We could put antennae on his head!”

  “And then I shred my guitar,” says Gaynor, jumping into a pretty amazing air-guitar jam complete with rippling fingers, windmilling arms, and thrashing hair.

  “You don’t play the guitar,” says Pierce.

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s heavy metal, man.”

  “It could be a spoof on an insect video they’d show in science class,” I say.

  “Spoofs are funny!” says Vincent. “Like in Mad magazine.”

  “I don’t know,” says Gilda, shaking her head. “Termites?”

  “I could eat a box of pencils,” I say. “They’re wood.”

  “O-kay,” says Gilda. “That’s one idea.”

  “Ooh, oooh,” says Vincent. He’s so excited, he even raises his hand and waves it at Gilda, the way he always does in class.

  “What’ve you got, Vincent?” she asks.

  “What if, instead of spoofing a science video, we do a parody of a driver-education movie? One of those old-school ones!”

  “This accident should not have happened,” I say in my deepest Highway Patrol Guy voice. “How could it have been avoided?”

  Vincent snaps his fingers and points at me. “Exactly.”

  “Whoa,” says Gaynor. “Since Jamie is the star, it could be, like, driver’s ed for wheelchairs.”

  “But the accident,” I add, “isn’t a wreck.”

  (I really don’t want to make fun of car crashes. Been there. Done that. Wasn’t laughing.)

  “My accident,” I say, “is accidentally running into the school’s toughest bully.”

  “Your cousin Stevie!” says Gilda.

  “Or someone dressed like him.”

  “I could play that part,” says Vincent. “I’d just have to slick back my hair and maybe stuff a pillow under my shir
t—”

  “And,” says Gilda, who’s totally getting into this idea, “we could shoot the ‘accident’ in slow motion like they do with crash-test dummies.”

  “But,” I say, “since you’re a student director, we pretend you can’t afford real slow motion—”

  “So we have to act out everything in fake slow-mo like a bad stop-motion dinosaur battle in a cheesy horror flick,” says Vincent.

  “But,” says Pierce, “while you two are moving as slowly as you can and slurring your words like you’re even talking in slow motion, we have some people walk through the background at normal speed—”

  “And,” I say to Gilda, “you could keep coaching us. We do the same scene over and over. We shoot you giving us directions. Slower, faster, happier, sadder…”

  Gilda’s eyes sparkle. “It’s a film about directing a film!”

  And the ideas keep tumbling out of all of us. The bit keeps getting bigger and funnier. I toss out a few funny one-liners. So does Vincent O’Neil. There are no pie fights or seltzer-bottle battles, but we’re cracking each other up.

  Gilda is so psyched, she kisses all four of us.

  And I realize something: Being funny is a lot more fun when you do it for laughs instead of money.

  Chapter 27

  KILLING FOR A GOOD CAUSE

  Saturday night, Uncle Frankie and I do an appearance for a literacy charity on Long Island called Books of Hope.

  The event is held in a huge hotel ballroom. One thousand people pay a ton of money to hear me tell a few jokes and to watch Uncle Frankie twirl his yo-yo. All the money will be used to buy books for kids who otherwise wouldn’t have anything to read except Happy Meal boxes at McDonald’s.

  Uncle Frankie warms everybody up with an impressive display of tricks including a Pop ’n’ Fresh, a couple of Boingy Boings, and his big finish, the Man on the Flying Trapeze. That one starts on his left, loops around, and lands on his right. And he does it blindfolded. He flings a double Lindy Loop when he takes his bows.

  Then it’s my turn.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” booms a big voice from the ceiling speakers. He sounds a lot like the guy who announces the WWF wrestlers on TV. “Please put your hands together for the Planet’s Funniest Kid Comic, Long Island’s own, soon to be the star of his own sitcom on BNC-TV, the one and only Jay-meeeeee Griiiiiiiimmmmmmmm!”

  I’ve never heard anyone take so long to say my name.

  I roll up a ramp to the stage and tell a bunch of the jokes I’m famous for. I slay ’em.

  Since I’m killing it big-time and the audience is totally with me, I try out a new joke about battling bullies that I’m hoping I can sneak into the script for the TV pilot.

  “A boy I know was being picked on by a bully at school,” I say, gripping the microphone with both hands. “So his father hired a boxing coach to help the kid out. Two weeks later, he knocked out the bully with one punch. The father and son just sat on their bench and laughed.”

  The audience is howling.

  “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen! And thanks for helping so many good kids get good books to read!”

  I wave to the crowd and roll down my ramp.

  Where I practically run over Cool Girl.

  “You were terrific, Jamie.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So remember this night. This is what it’s all about.”

  I arch an eyebrow. “Telling jokes in hotel ballrooms while people eat dessert?”

  “You know what I mean.” She points to the big pictures of smiling kids with books that are displayed all around the ballroom. “The doing is its own reward.”

  I sometimes wonder if Cool Girl is my own much more attractive, less wrinkly Yoda—here to give me words of wisdom.

  “Hey, Jamie.” Uncle Frankie bustles over to join us. “We’re a hit. The charity folks want us back.”

  “Here?”

  “No. The Long Beach Public Library. A bunch of kids from the Books of Hope program meet to work on their reading skills. They want us to do lunch with the kids, give ’em a special treat.”

  “But what about the TV pilot? They may not let me out of rehearsal.”

  Cool Girl gives me a very chilly look. So I keep going.

  “But if those people try something dumb like that,” I say with all the bluster I can muster, “well, I’ll just tell them I’m the star and they have to work around my schedule.”

  Uncle Frankie claps me on the back. “That’s the spirit, Jamie!”

  As for Cool Girl’s reaction, let’s just say Yoda is smiling again.

  I guess I’m a better actor than I thought.

  Chapter 28

  WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?

  On Monday, Uncle Frankie, Ms. Warkentien, and I take the Hummer limo back to Silvercup Studios.

  My tutor tries to teach Uncle Frankie the entire history of the yo-yo in sixty seconds or less.

  “A terra-cotta yo-yo from fifth-century Greece is on display in Greece’s national museum. Hunters in the Philippines hid in trees and used yo-yo rocks with cords twenty feet long to slay beasts on the ground. It was a fashionable toy for French nobility, many of whom used their yo-yos to relieve stress as they walked to the guillotine.…”

  Unfortunately, we don’t get to hear the rest. We’re needed on set.

  It’s time to meet the rest of the cast—the actors who will be playing Uncle Frankie, the Smileys, and all my friends at school. I have a funny feeling Meryl Streep and Brad Pitt won’t be there. Or The Rock.

  I’m wondering if the actors who are there will be as experienced (and as weird) as Donna Dinkle. I didn’t have any say over the casting, which I guess makes sense since I’ve never done it before. Still, for a show that has my name on it, I feel awfully left out of the whole thing.

  As we roll through the Silvercup lobby, a man carrying coffee in a paper cup comes over to introduce himself.

  “Great to meet you, Jamie,” he says. “I’m Richard Wetmore. I’m going to be the booth director on your pilot.”

  “There’s a booth in the show?” I ask.

  “A phone booth?” adds Uncle Frankie. “And it needs directions?”

  Mr. Wetmore smiles. “No. I’m going to be the frantic guy in the control booth calling the camera shots. Since this is a live show, Brad Grody will be handling the artistic end of things on the floor while I take care of all the less glamorous technical details upstairs.”

  Uncle Frankie whistles. “Sounds like a pretty high-pressure job.”

  “It is. But don’t worry, Jamie, I can handle it. In fact, I’ll do everything I can to make sure your show is the best it can possibly be. My daughter, Serena, is a huge fan.”

  And then he tells us about her cerebral palsy.

  How she’s confined to a wheelchair.

  How I make her laugh.

  How I give her hope.

  I’m about to start sobbing. Uncle Frankie already is.

  “You’re her hero, Jamie,” says Mr. Wetmore. “And that makes you my hero, too.”

  I sign an autograph for Mr. Wetmore to take home to Serena, and then Uncle Frankie and I head into Studio B to meet the rest of the cast.

  “Boy,” says Uncle Frankie, “I can’t wait to see what I look like!”

  Chapter 29

  MY INCREDIBLE SHRINKING FRIENDS

  It turns out that Nigel Bigglebottom, the actor playing Uncle Frankie, looks just like him. Sounds like him, too, except when he’s not in character. Then he sounds very British.

  “I can teach you how to twirl that yo-yo,” Uncle Frankie tells Nigel.

  “Splendid!”

  They head off to practice Walking the Dog while the director, Brad Grody, introduces me to everybody else.

  “You’ve already met Jillda Jewel, chya?”

  “Um, yes.”

  Donna Dinkle bats her eyelashes at me. I can smell her cinnamon-bun perfume from twenty paces away.

  “Did you talk to the writers?” she whispers so loudly they c
an probably hear her back in Long Beach.

  “Um, not yet.”

  She pouts.

  “But I’m going to!”

  She smiles.

  She’s good. She can change her whole attitude faster than most people blink.

  “Next,” says Mr. Grody, “we have the four freaky Frownies.”

  “You mean the Smileys.”

  “F words are always funnier, little dude. If you don’t believe me, talk to Stewart Johnson.”

  “Right.”

  “We’re looking forward to not laughing at anything you say, do, or think,” says the actor playing Mr. Frownie.

  “Thanks,” I say. “Appreciate it.”

  “And,” says Grody, “instead of a crappuccino dog, we gave them a grumpy cat.”

  “You got Grumpy Cat?” I say. “The Internet sensation?”

  “No, bro. GC wanted his own private litter box. We picked up Frownie Cat in an alley behind the studio. She’ll work for kibble.

  “And, of course,” continues Grody, “here’s your tormentor. Our bully, Lars from Mars.”

  “What about Stevie Kosgrov?”

  “This is totes awk, Jamie, but your stepbro didn’t make the cut. The real Lars, on the other hand—whoa, that blond Viking dude is flipping cray-cray. Gives us more to work with. And, last but not least, meet Bob.”

  “Hi,” I say to the boy who’s wearing a porkpie hat and has a nose ring.

  Then I turn to Mr. Grody.

  “Who’s Bob?” I whisper.

  “Your best bud. We took those goofballs Gaynor and Pierce and squished them together to make one character. We save money that way.”

  “B-b-but—”

  “It’ll be better, little dude. Trust me. Less of them means more of you.”