Deadpan by Richard Walter
What's It About?
Deadpan follows the misadventures of a vaguely antisemitic West Virginia Buick dealer who wakes up one day transformed into the world’s most popular Jewish comedian. Steeped in magical realism, the narrative confronts the urgent issues of our day: Identity, intolerance, tribalism, and the transformative power of humor.It’s the end of an ordinary day for Dwight Bridges: Poor business as usual at his Buick Dealership in Hoggzswallow Hollow, West Virginia. He blames his lack of sales on the 1970s gas crisis caused by “towel-headed sheiks holding back their oil” and the “swarthy, brooding influence” of “cutthroat Jewish style” on the free enterprise system.
Lest you stop reading here, Deadpan by Richard Walter (Heresy Press) is not a cranky racist rant. On the contrary, the book “confronts the incendiary issues of our day: hate speech, bigotry (particularly antisemitism), and racial/religious identity,” says the author in an interview on his publisher’s website.
Satirical, Thought-Provoking Novel
The book is also a trip to an alternate reality of overlapping multiverses, timelines, and characters that spin together like a kaleidoscopic cartwheel. When Dwight flips off the showroom lights his dealership disappears. He’s in a backstage dressing room, and he’s no longer bald. And instead of his ratty wool sweater, he’s wearing a maroon tuxedo jacket and a ruffled blue silk shirt.
This is where Rod Serling introduces the next “Twilight Zone” episode, he suspects. But instead, he hears a heavy knock on the door and a voice saying “Five minutes, Mr. Ritchie! Five minutes!”
Ritchie? Who’s Ritchie, Dwight wonders. And five minutes to what? Seeking to escape, he stumbles onto a stage before an audience of thousands, including the Shah of Iran and his entourage in the front row. Even more puzzling, when Dwight tries to explain his predicament —“I’m an automobile dealer from Hoggzswallow Hollow, West Virginia” — the audience seems familiar with his words and repeats them with him, laughing and clapping.
It seems that Dwight has become a Jewish comedian named Richie Ritchie, and the whole world loves his stand-up patter. Soon, Richie Ritchie gets a master class in American humor as part of a panel discussion with comic luminaries Mel Brooks, Milton Berle, Don Rickles and Jerry Lewis. (They also moon him.)
“You take all the madness in the world,” says Brooks, “you turn it around, you give it your own perspective…”
“You say something in a new light,” adds Rickles. “And then you got comedy.”
“You show the people,” says Berle, “something in some way they… haven’t seen it yet in that way, that particular way, till before you just now showed it to them, and what you get in that case is comedy.”
“I happen to view the audience as the central entity in the performance process,” contributes Lewis. “It’s to them, God willing, we turn and with His good grace we attempt to reach their humanity.”
An Author Who Knows His Audience
Deadpan’s author knows from audience. Walter is also a successful screenwriter and a retired professor who for several decades led the screenwriting program at UCLA’s film school. He’s also Jewish and knows from antisemitism.
Back in Hoggzswallow Hollow (time and place are fluid), Dwight is cajoled into joining his fellow Dixieland garage band members on a midnight run to spray-paint antisemitic slogans on the town’s synagogue. The best (i.e., worst) Dwight can muster is “Dump Kissinger.”
Rabbi Solomon Geffner wants to scrub off the paint and forget about the vandalism. “If we wallow in outrage over slogans painted on a wall, if we marinate in vitriol over insults and slights, what’s left for the Holocaust?” he poses to Officer Al Henderson of the Hoggzswallow Hollow police. Henderson, however, follows the forensic trail and arrests Dwight/Ritchie while he’s performing in Las Vegas and brings him back to West Virginia for trial.
But before that, Dwight/Ritchie finds himself in Tehran as a guest of Shah Reza Pahlavi (an avid Ritchie fan), who has a secret project with Israel’s Mossad: a positron emission muon ionic holographic tele-transporter that zaps Ritchie through the space/time continuum.
There’s also a World Series game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Yankees (the Shah is a Yankees fan), a Mayan-speaking gorilla, a strip chess game, an impromptu visit with U.S. President Sarah Palin in the emergency command center 100 feet below the White House, and a visit from a theoretical mathematician from an alternative era and parallel dimension.
If you have to explain a joke, it’s not funny.
With so many opportunities to skewer bigotry and racism with farce and humor, Walter hints he “quite possibly” may write more books in this vein.
About Richard Walter:
Richard Walter is an author of best-selling fiction and nonfiction, celebrated storytelling educator, screenwriter, script consultant, lecturer and retired professor who led the screenwriting program in the film school at UCLA for several decades. He has written scripts for the major studios and television networks; lectured on screenwriting and storytelling and conducted master classes throughout North America as well as London, Paris, Jerusalem, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Beijing, Shanghai, Sydney and Hong Kong.
His latest novel, Deadpan, is published by Heresy Press. Subscribe to his podcast on Substack and blog on Medium, and follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
