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Review: Nick Hornby's 'Funny Girl' should be more entertaining

 
Published Feb. 18, 2015

Speaking at a college campus a few years ago, I joked about feeling like Lucy in the chocolate factory, and an undergraduate asked me when Lucy Hale worked in a chocolate factory. It was one of those moments when you suddenly picture yourself stooped and holding an ear trumpet.

As a child, I watched the black-and-white reruns of I Love Lucy till I knew every frame. Vita meatavegamin, the grape-stomping brawl, the expanding bread — are any family memories more vivid than those immortal scenes?

Nick Hornby's new novel, Funny Girl, is pitched to those of us who still ask, "Do you pop out at parties? Are you unpoopular?" It's about a young British woman named Barbara who adores I Love Lucy. "Everything she felt or did came from that," Hornby writes. "If there was a way to watch Lucy every single day of the week, then she would."

Hornby sets this mildly amusing story in the 1960s, when the BBC was expanding and experimenting, and people were wondering how to attract a younger television audience without pandering to the lowest tastes. ("10 Reasons Why This Sounds Familiar Today — No. 8 Will Blow Your Mind!") Even in the Age of Aquarius, British and American networks were still broadcasting long conversations among intellectuals "about God and the H-bomb and theater and classical music." Indeed, the funniest scene in Funny Girl is an episode of Pipe Smoke, a talk show so deliberately dull that it seems like "an attempt by the BBC to persuade the workers of Britain that they needed more sleep." In Hornby's pitch-perfect re-creation, a comedy producer slays a stuffy academic who's raging on about "horse-racing and variety shows and pop groups who look and sound like cavemen." Move along, old man — be grateful you won't live long enough to see Sex Box.

Young Barbara from north England is determined to be part of this television revolution. But that can't happen in her small town, so she tosses off her beauty queen crown, leaves her father and heads to London. She knows nothing except that "making people laugh meant crossing your eyes and sticking your tongue out and saying things that might sound stupid or naive."

There's a preordained quality to these early scenes, but Hornby moves Barbara along funnily enough through a few odd jobs and auditions before she reads for a part in a dreadful pilot called Wedded Bliss. The writers love her. "Here," they think, "was everything they wanted to bring to the screen, in one neat and beautifully gift-wrapped package, handed to them by a ferocious and undiscovered talent who looked like a star." In a classic moment of entertainment mythology, Barbara suddenly finds herself the star of Britain's most popular sitcom.

Barbara (and Jim), as the quickly reconceived show is called, is "fast and real," despite the corporate suits who, as always, want the sharp edges sanded off. Even in 1967, the writers are already complaining that all the good sitcom plots have been "done to death." But Barbara's comedic brilliance electrifies the script, the cast, the nation.

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How fun it would have been to really see her in action and read one or two rollicking episodes in this novel. After all, a book that invokes Barbra Streisand's Academy Award-winning movie and Lucille Ball's television reign probably should wind us up with at least one fit of eye-watering, gasping-for-breath, wet-ourselves laughter. Alas, Hornby is constantly asking us to take his word for it. I'm reminded of my father-in-law, who once came to the end of a long joke and couldn't remember the punch line. "Think of something really funny," he told us. "It was exactly like that."

And so, while Barbara's allegedly hilarious TV show plays on through a glass, darkly, we're asked to attend to the parallel but not-too-funny marital antics of the actors, writers and producers. The best sections, by far, concern a friendship between the show's two gay writers, Tony and Bill. Every week, they make England laugh at a version of family life they're legally barred from enjoying. But Tony, ever the practical one, finds a way to play the straight man, as it were, and shape a marriage that works for him. Bill, meanwhile, clings to his cynicism and artistic purity and descends into chronic unhappiness. It's a poignant portrayal of unconsummated desire and the corrosive effects of homophobia.

But much of the novel, bathed in the TV-blue light of baby-boomer nostalgia, suffers from an enervating strain of pleasantness. The dozen archival photographs of period entertainment sprinkled through these pages add a touch of comic history, but the novel's cultural-criticism knob is turned down very low. Its faint feminist theme about the plight of sharp-tongued women is a rerun we've seen many times. There's some light satire about the interplay between actors' lives and their TV characters, but certainly nothing that pushes the laugh track beyond Entourage, Episodes or The Comeback.

Funny Girl eventually jumps ahead to Barbara's golden years, when she has lived a full life in the glow of that too-early, too-bright fame. It's sweet, tinged with sadness and hard-working gratitude, but the story remains slack and surprise-free. We read on simply because we like Nick Hornby, the way we keep watching the tepid eighth season of some once-funny comedy out of a vague sense of devotion.