Today I’ll harvest sage wisdom from two comic minds. One is a silent clown, the second a gypsy magician.
The silent act has spent much of the past few decades doing cabaret inEuropewhen he wasn’t doing odd arena style opening work for major musical acts. The magician by contrast has played everything from children’s cartoon show feature, to authoring of the Klutz Book of Magic, from large venue stage shows to very intimate venues where he roves the crowd performing close up.
Having blended my life from all show business, on stage, full time, 300-500 shows per year, into part show business full time novelist, completing a novel about every 21 months, and presenting some 100-150 shows per year, my comic muscle remains in shape while the minds and imaginations of my two associates remain honed and their instinct for what is funny sharp.
Literary fiction is a realm with a different set of rules than the set that comes with a variety show stage act. There is an intersection, a place where they overlap, and one can inform the other. The secret is to know not just what to do (entertainer) but knowing something about how to do it (author.)
Still, in developing the outline to Hot Spring Honeymoon what I have is now a set of potentials. My friends are relentless imaginations. The silent clown is ever obsessed with any slight, least, moment he can exploit for his own mirth making purposes. He is granular, sees the world through a lens that is of its own kind.
The magician is different still. He is concerned with illusion, trickery, surprise and revelation. It isn’t what the performer sees from stage, but what his audience sees, and as an illusionist first and funny guy second, he understands the intermediation that good narrative demands.
Both know situations that are inherently funny offer a power that a singular funny line does not. They have a nose for circumstance, have strengthened their instincts to respond to opportunities.
I will go with a hundred ideas and return with a thousand. A few of these ideas will be worth their weight in fools gold. We write alone at a desk. We write what we know. Pieces of what we come to know have been generously donated to us. Sometimes it comes as a gift from the well seasoned comic minds of veteran showmen.
