The Funny Thing about Norman Foreman by Julietta Henderson (e book reader online txt) 📕

Then they started talking about the good old days when comedians were properly funny and didn’t just swear and tell dirty jokes, like they do today. And then that’s when the best thing of all happened, because Lucy said that the way I told my story, he could see a lot of those old-style comedians in me. And that I reminded him of a slow-burn type of funny guy like Dave Allen. Dave Allen! Can you believe it?

I was thinking to myself that I wish I knew exactly what about me reminded Lucy of Dave Allen as I could do with some more of it when Beano says, oh yeah, and you know why, don’t you? Well, I didn’t and I said so, and Beano goes, it’s because you’re a natural born rack-on-terr, lad. Which wasn’t much of a help to me, because I didn’t know what that meant, but before I could ask if he might please be able to explain James said, enough with the big words, Beano, like you said, Norman can tell a bloody good story.

Then Lucy piped up and said that not everybody knows it but being a stand-up comedian is one of the hardest jobs in the world. Because basically you’re getting up there in front of a crowd of people and saying you’re the funniest guy in the room. So you better have the chops to back it up or they’ll eat you for dinner. But then he said there are the slow-burn ones like me and Dave Allen (which I still can’t believe I’m saying) that can reel in the laughs by holding a microscope up to life. An observational monologue is what Lucy said it was called, and when he said that everybody else went quiet and kind of thoughtful. And so did I.

So maybe I figured it out by myself and maybe I didn’t, but when Lucy said that I suddenly realized I’d been doing everything wrong. Because even though Jax was gone, I was acting like he was still there. I was still shooting the jokes out into space like the funniest guy in the room was still there to catch them and finish the job. Like I was still the straight man part of a pretty cool comedy duo instead of the guy that’s got to reel in the laughs all by himself.

And then just as I was getting a little bit excited about working out that I was probably never going to get anywhere by trying to be like Jax and maybe everywhere by trying to be a bit more like Dave Allen, I noticed James leaning back in his seat with his hands behind his head and looking at me a bit funny. And then he goes, hey, Norman, just why did your mother want to look me up when she got to Edinburgh?

And even though I’d only known James for one super-fun-fantastic-cool night, I could tell by the look on his rock-star face that the piggin’ jig was up. Again.

49

First rule of comedy: It’s fun when you’re funny.

It’s funny, but it wasn’t even hard to tell James that he was the last guy on Leonard’s Finding Fathers spreadsheet. When I came clean about it, he totally didn’t seem to mind and he just smiled and said, well, what dae ye ken? quite a few times. But what was properly funny in the comedy way was that when I said that James could maybe be my dad Beano let out a big, long woohoo, and then he slapped James on the back so hard that he knocked another full glass of Guinness into his own lap all over again.

After everybody finished cracking up at that, which took a while, James said that it was almost midnight and we should probably try and get a bit of shut-eye so we could be up early in the morning to get back to the Soft Fudge and find Mum. And then I swear, not even one second after he said it his phone rang. He started going, aye, mmm hmm, aye, aye, is that right? OK, nae bother. Then he looked over at me and goes, Norman, it’s for you. And I tell you what, after the night I’d just had I wasn’t even that surprised.

The only person I would have been happier to hear from at that moment was Mum, but Leonard was almost as good. Straight up he told me that Mum had found him, which I knew she would. But that even though she had tried her hardest to get back to the Soft Fudge by six at the latest like she’d promised, the universe had conspired against her.

When he explained exactly what he meant and that Mum was in hospital, it was scary at first, but then he said I wasn’t to be worried because he promised everything was going to be OK, especially Mum. And I knew it was true because Leonard wouldn’t lie to me about that, not even if it did turn out that he’d actually told us a pretty big fat lie so he could come on the trip.

It turned out the universe had also conspired against Leonard when he tried to come back to look after me, because there was a lorry rollover on the road and the bus he was on was held up for more than two hours. Then when he finally did get back to Edinburgh the traffic was so bad because of the Fringe it took him almost another whole hour on the number 16 bus to get back to the Soft Fudge. When I said I thought I was the one with bad timing, Leonard laughed so much I wondered if being funny was like being brave and the more you did it, the better you got.

He kept saying how sorry he was for going off in the car and worrying me and Mum and then not being able