A few years ago a short novel plopped onto my desk: "Not Enough Indians," by Harry Shearer. I couldn't believe my luck. Shearer - the voice of Ned Flanders and others on "The Simpsons," coauthor of the classic movie "This Is Spinal Tap," creator of the hilarious radio comedy "Le Show" - is a comic genius. This was going to be a funny book.
I picked it up, I put it down. "Indians" wasn't particularly funny. In a painfully diplomatic
In the immortal deathbed phrase variously attributed to actors Edwin Booth, Edmund Kean, Donald Wolfit, and others: "Dying is easy, comedy is hard." Comedy on the printed page may be the hardest of all. Writer Roy Blount Jr. once opined that, to succeed, good comic writing had to be funnier than it needed to be. Like Christmas. A great Christmas was one where there were lots and lots and lots of presents.
It's not so hard to be funny for a thousand words or so, the typical length of a New Yorker magazine Shouts & Murmurs feature, or for the duration of a newspaper column. Dave Barry was almost always funny in the newspaper and succeeded at magazine length many times. Funny for the duration of a book? Carl Hiaasen, Barry's colleague at the Miami Herald, pulled that off, often. Michael Dahlie did it in "A Gentleman's Guide to Graceful Living," as did Paul Torday with "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen."
Two writers recently offered to send me their funny books. I gave them fair warning. Saying you have written a funny book is a big claim. James Thurber Award winner Bill Scheft stepped up to the plate with "Everything Hurts," a novel with a clever premise: A fraudulent, successful self-help author comes under the care of a genuine, successful self-help author. Much hilarity ensues.
Or does it? Scheft is funny in person. I attended one of his readings, and he killed. He did standup for 12 years and wrote for David Letterman. His comic timing is perfect; you can almost cue the rimshot lines in his delivery. The book? Naaaah. It was less funny than it needed to be. First I threw it against the wall, then I gifted it to Scheft's college classmate Sabin Willett, who wrote "Present Value," one of the funniest books I have ever read. The unfunny parts of the jocoserious "present value" were less successful, I thought.
Rehoboth's own Daniel Asa Rose e-mailed me to hype his forthcoming "Larry's Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China With My Black-Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant - and Save His Life" (henceforth "LK"). He calls it "the world's first comedy about medical tourism." Rose has chutzpah, I'll give him that. In "LK," he stands up at a sabbath service at an expatriate synagogue in Beijing and asks if anyone knows where he can procure a black-market kidney! The answer turns out to be yes.
Rose assured me his book "would make even you guffaw." Chuckling is easy, guffaws are hard. To be fair, the book has plenty of funny moments, fully two-thirds of which may actually be true. And it's the rare comedy that is also a page-turner; even before Rose and his cousin arrive, China has outlawed organ sales to foreigners. Hence Rose's amusing "nice clear moral" to his story: "Don't try to go to China for a kidney. We got the last one."
Everyone's a critic, right? Those who can, do. Those who can't, cavil. I've done this. I published a comic novel in 1991, and I occasionally steal glances at it. With my faculties sharpened by the passage of time, I would say the book was funny enough, but not funnier than it needed to be. More like the first day of Hanukkah than an overstuffed Christmas, to pursue Blount's analogy. Comedy is hard, very hard.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
