Review: A Horse Walks into a Bar

A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you think about it completely outside the transaction of comedian and audience, there’s something oddly cruel about stand-up. We, the people intent on laughing, ask the comic to stand on a stage and entertain us. Once upon a time, maybe, in the long-ago of the Borscht Belt, we got a series of jokes, one-liners we could take back home or to work to share with others. Jokes were jokes without context, or with only the context of a general men-are-men and girls-are-to-be-ogled-or-to-mutual-misfortune-married.

That hasn’t been true at least since Lenny Bruce, though, and maybe long before, and a large part of the best comedy is also a deep sadness. If it takes a teaspoon of salt to make cookies truly sweet, it takes a dash of tears-of-the-clown to make us really laugh. It was always true of the great Louis CK (to take just one example) that he was quietly bleeding on stage even as he nailed us with his observations. It’s all the more poignant today that he was also at least dimly aware of how his success was warping him, how it was turning him into someone who’d lost his sensitivity, who was testing the limits of his fame and his shame by exposing himself (literally as opposed to the figurative work he did so brilliantly on stage) in front of women who knew and admired him.

Anyway, this book explores that tension in the abstract. It gives us a comedian, “Dovaleh G,” who’s bombing more or less deliberately as he goes through his stand-up act in the Israeli city of Netanya. He feels compelled to recount some of the trauma of his childhood – he’s the son of a bitter father and a Holocaust surviving mother – but his audience has come for the jokes. So he does some of each; he performs an emotional striptease at the same time as he punctuates his life story with shtick.

And that story is a tough one. He’s spent much of his life getting picked on and beaten up. Always the smallest, always the least equipped to handle the aggressive culture of Israel in the mid- to late 1960s, he adapted to his pain by making others laugh. When the other kids pour a full shaker of salt on his lunch, he eats it with exaggerated pleasure. When they douse his baseball cap in the leftovers of their own food, he slurps the bits that drop past his mouth, smiling and laughing as if he is an author of the joke.

All of that builds to a crescendo, though, one that [PARTIAL SPOILER] culminates in the final third of the novella. He’s summoned from his army training camp as a young teen and led to understand that one of his parents has died. No one tells him which one, though, and he has to drive across the country – chauffeured by a would-be stand-up comedian, no less – for the funeral, weighing which parent he hopes it will be. It’s excruciating, but it’s also funny.

And then, of course, for being funny it’s also all the more excruciating.

The funnier the book gets, the more it hurts. And, at times, it’s first rate comedy. Some highlights: Of his mother, “It’s interesting, actually, that we both had post-partum depression after I was born, except that with me it’s been going on for fifty-seven years.” Or about the time a guy gets invited to a major soccer match by a friend he hasn’t seen in decades. At the game and grateful, the guy asks, Why ask someone so distant from your everyday life to this great event? Did you ask your wife? “My wife’s dead,” he says. Well, what about other people, your relatives or friends? “Believe me, I tried,” the guy says, “but they all said they’d rather go to her funeral.”

Or the one about the man who, told by his wife that he can cure her fatal disease if he has anal sex with her, bursts into tears at the success. “Why are you crying,” the wife asks, “aren’t you happy I’m better?” “Of course I am,” he says sobbing, “but I can’t help thinking I could have saved Mom, too!”

Forgive me please, someone, for finding all of that funny, especially when it comes in the midst of Dovaleh’s deep acknowledgement that he has failed as a human as a bad parent, a bad spouse, and in choosing one parent over another, that he was destined to fail no matter the choice he made. But all of that is the power of this novella.

Or part of it.

Because as stunning as that abstract exploration of comedy is, this is also a very particular story. Dovaleh is not quite alone. He has invited our narrator, an old friend who has recently lost his wife and recently been compelled to give up his career as an important judge. We see Dovaleh’s act through the narrator’s eyes, through memories of when they were both bullied or near-bullied kids at the same army camp.

Our narrator is suffering too, wondering what’s left of his life, until – at least as I read it – he gradually discovers he’s been called upon not to serve as a judge at Dovaleh’s ever-more-of-a-train-wreck comedy show and autobiographical dismemberment but rather to serve as a dispenser of mercy. That’s what he is most fully ably to recall of his dead wife, with whom he never had a child and who’s increasingly fading from his memory. Show some compassion sometimes, she said, let others know you’ve heard them without the obligation to pronounce a verdict.

That’s yet another level of depth to what’s happening on stage, or on page, as the almost in real time episode plays out. Dovaleh wallows in his own disgrace, opens up with pain and anger and humor. And our narrator, at the other end of the transaction, grows in his private way too.

So, yeah, this one is brilliant – hardly an original insight on my behalf since it just won the Man Booker prize. It’s a universal story of the power of comedy to help us understand, and of the simultaneous price it demands for that understanding. It’s also a particular one, showing us a glimpse of a modern Israel, a modern Jew, a modern citizen of the 21st Century, called upon less to act than, in some fresh way, to move beyond our callouses into feeling the pain, the humor, and the slippery joy of the lives we’re given to lead.


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