The Comedy Writer

Peter Farrelly

Doubleday, 1998

“I’d been inspired by my setback, taken advantage of my despair, and that, I think, is the key to success for a writer.”            

Rating: 4/5 stars                 

This is a comedy story. And you will laugh, big time. I do not know what is it about 90’s books but I do seem to love them as equally as the YA books of today. The setting of The Comedy Writer is all too familiar with me, conjuring up the stories of The Pleasure of My Company, Based on the Movie among others (okay Google those two titles now). But this one’s darker, but not that dark mind you, anything that involves a story about living alone is dark for me anyway.

So, this book is about Henry Halloran, your average American guy (loves to party, loves women, loves to drink, loves to take drugs, and loves women again) who quit his nice job in Rhode Island because he just decided he wants to become a screen writer—in LA. A writer, without any background. That was after his girl dumped him. And he had read only two books. Yes, two.

So as you might have imagine, it was chaos, and Henry was thrown into the chaotic world of Hollywood and the people living inside it. It turns out that the guy was funny after all, thus he became a comedy writer.

“The world had lost its beauty. Los Angeles was a thief…robbing the young of their breath and the elderly of their lives.”

This is a kind of story that you would not mind if it is crappy or not (in this case, it is not) because it will take you to a journey that will end without you even noticing it. It is a story that you would want to read if you want to escape your “real” world as they say. But with a healthy dose of laughter thrown in its way, you might find that The Comedy Writer is more like the world we are living in: full of dark shadows, bad people who do not know that they are bad, psychotic strangers, 7-11 stores and weird neighbors.

What was special about this book is that it is not pretentious; it tells you the world as it is. Despite of the fact that some of the scenarios might not be that real, (a sexy neighbor and… okay I give up) its honesty is what will keep you reading until the end, and laughing alongside it. It will make you realize that life is just that, yes full of bad people, but nothing a good laugh could not cure.

Favorite Part/s:

The late night script writing in front of the refrigerator, with its doors open.

Favorite Quote/s:

“I could hear the world passing me by outside and nothing in the universe seemed to be going my way.”

“I’d been inspired by my setback, taken advantage of my despair, and that, I think, is the key to success for a writer.”

“Why couldn’t I for once get something good without something bad having to balance it out?”

From the Critics:

“Farrelly’s taste for slapstick and scatological humor will either delight or offend, according to the reader’s taste. Oddly (considering Halloran’s screenwriting talent), this first-person narrative reads like a diary or a theme paper called “What I did in L.A.” The snappy one-liners amuse us without interesting us in the guy who makes them up.” –Publisher’s Weekly