Funny man

HEYWOOD BROUN

A clown's newly acquired virtue proves to be not only its own reward but the public's great loss

Tommy told me that I ought to see Hap La Chance. He said he was the funniest man in the world. "If it wasn't for the stuff," said Tommy, "Hap would have been a star on Broadway years ago."

"He drinks," I suggested.

"When did that ever keep an actor off Broadway?" answered Tommy scornfully. "Hap's got Sherlock Holmes' habit only worse."

Before Tommy became a society pianist he worked at Stagger Inn along with Hap La Chance. His rapturous admiration for the comedian left me a little cold. The things which Tommy repeated didn't sound very funny. "It's the way he puts it over," he insisted. "You got to see him."

So we went to the Stagger that same night. It was one flight of stairs up—a long room over a garage. At one end stood the bar and all around the edge were tables. The dance floor was plain unvarnished board and a small portable piano furnished the music. I've seldom seen a more dingy speakeasy. The carpet under the tables was of a sort which you might have spread upon toast with a butter knife.

Hap was performing when we got there. Right away I understood what Tommy meant by saying that the "stuff" had kept him off Broadway. His appearance was shocking. Hap La Chance was an inch or so more than six feet and I doubt if he weighed a hundred and twenty pounds. His face was much whiter than the Stagger's tablecloths. As we came in he was singing a song. The refrain, which indicated the end of each topical verse, ran, "And then my pipe went out." He did it well enough, but this was certainly not the extraordinary performer of whom Tommy had spoken. I wanted to go after the first drink. I like air warmed and aged a little in the wood but the atmosphere doesn't come any thicker than they have it in the Stagger along after midnight on a Saturday.

Tommy laid a restraining hand on my shoulder. "Wait till he talks," he urged.

Hap La Chance got up from the piano and leaned against it. He thrust out a long right arm and waved a hand. Instantly, I knew he had something because in that crowded, noisy room even the waiters stopped clattering trays. A moment ago it would not have been possible to hear a girder drop. Even before he spoke Hap fascinated me. I wished that I had been a better boy and had learned to draw with charcoal while in college. Beardsley would have liked to set him down just as he was there in the tobacco fog lounging against the piano.

I can't give you any conception of what his monologue was like. The arresting thing was his terrific, feverish vitality. He was a sort of delirious Will Rogers. But, of course, he wasn't in the least wholesome. The jokes weren't obscene in any way. The drug had burned all earthiness out of him. According to the familiar theatrical classification, Hap La Chance would have been labelled a nut comedian. That's inexact. He saw a reeling world filled with grotesque shapes. At the moment he spoke of evolution, a topic which the newspapers had been giving some belated attention. Hap contended that it was a great pity we all had lost our tails. But for that, he explained, the rail would be on the ceiling and we could hang down to our drinks instead of having to stand up to them. His patter was so fast and furious that I can't remember half the things he said and the material did need the spot and manner. However, while he galloped along I saw the monkey bar and its patrons festooned from the ceiling. He wasn't just being whimsical. He saw it himself with his strangely illuminated eyes.

But after all, he said, maybe there was some good in evoluting out of tails. It could be an awful nuisance getting them caught in the doors of taxicabs. He stopped rather abruptly and though Tommy called to him he went quickly out of the room. "He comes on again in about an hour. I guess he has to go and get steamed up," Tommy explained.

I told Tommy that the "funniest man in the world" stuff was somewhat strong, but that Hap seemed to me a curiously moving comedian.

"There's no one like him. It is an amazing talent."

A few months later I asked Tommy how his friend was getting along and he told me that La Chance had disappeared. Nobody knew anything about him. July, as is its. custom, came around again next year and Tommy and I were having coffee and cheese blintzes in Joe's Red Room Restaurant. Tommy kept looking at a table near the desk. Finally, he asked me, "Did you ever see that man before?" I looked at the beefy individual he pointed out but it was no one I knew. "This is queer business," said Tommy. "It can't be Hap but it could be his brother. I'm just going to bust right over and ask him."

The big man leaped up when Tommy spoke to him and threw an arm over his shoulder. He patted my little friend so hard that I felt sure his shoulder blades must have rattled. They called me over.

"You remember, Hap La Chance," said Tommy.

But I didn't. Not this one. He looked like the physical director in a "Y". Hap caught my puzzled look. "I guess you must have seen me in the days before I made a man of myself. Mr. Brown, you're a writer, I want you to sit down and listen to my story. I'm sure you'll be interested. You saw me. You know what I was. It went on for eight years and then suddenly in the middle of the night I said to myself, 'Hap, you can lick it.' I went to Canada. I've got two brothers there. They work for a lumber company. Near the camp is a hut where they store things in winter. I got 'em to search me and take all the stuff off me and then lock me in the hut. It's got iron bars on the windows and a big oak door.

"They poked food in at me but for the first three days I couldn't touch it. I broke all the glass out with my bare hands, but I couldn't break the bars or smash the door. In about a week I got to eating and then they took me up to the camp and I chopped trees for three months. The more I see of people, Mr. Brown, the better I like trees. There's nothing like getting out in a forest to find yourself. It was that tree chopping that did it. But of course my dentist helped some when I got back. I'd been neglecting my teeth. No man's body can be clean as long as he has bacteria in his mouth. You can't get away from that. Let me tell you gentlemen, as we sit here I weigh one hundred and ninety-two pounds stripped and my blood pressure is one hundred and twenty-eight. Pretty good for a man of thirty-seven."

"A cup of Postum," he said to the waiter, "and some spinach with a poached egg."

"If people only knew what red meat does to their metabolism, I don't suppose there'd be a stockyard left in the country," Hap said to us.

"Where are you working?" Tommy asked.

"I'm just putting a new act together," answered La Chance. "It ought to be a knockout for clubs and things like that."

"I always thought you'd go big in private work," Tommy assented.

"You didn't ever really see me," Hap interrupted. "I'm not going to use any of that foolish stuff I had when I worked at the Stagger. This new act's got some sense to it. You see I pretend that I'm a radio announcer on an exercise program and that it's seven o'clock in the morning. That's the first big laugh. I pretend that all the people at the dinner are in bed and that they must get up and go through their daily dozen. That's the big idea. You know how some people can get the audience to sing with 'em. Well, it's my idea to give 'em the story of my own life and then when they're all excited by it persuade them to lie on the floor and work their legs like they were riding a bicycle. I call the stunt Hap's Health Talk."

Tommy and I exchanged distressed glances. The big man sitting between us had done an extraordinary thing. He had cured himself. It was a complete cure. He wasn't funny any more.