In Nick Hornby’s novel Funny Girl (not at all related to the musical and movie of the same name), Barbara Parker has just been crowned Miss Blackpool. But the tiara won’t stay on her head for long. Instead of being a beauty queen, Barbara wants to be a famous comedic actress like her idol Lucille Ball. But this isn’t going to happen in a town in north England in 1964.
Rejecting the crown and the title, Barbara leaves Blackpool and moves to London where everything is happening and she hopes she’ll become a successful and famous actress, the British Lucille Ball. Barbara soon gets a job at a department store cosmetics counter (where the store always puts the pretty girls) and lives with one of her co-workers, Marjorie, in a dumpy bedsit.
Being the gorgeous lass she is, Barbara gets a lot of attention. And during a night on the town, Barbara meets talent agent Brian Debenham. Don’t worry. Brian isn’t some sleazebag with nefarious designs on Barbara. He’s truly legit.
Proving to be more than a pretty face, Barbara convinces Brian she has the talent and drive to be a comedic actress. Barbara auditions for a sitcom that ultimately gets named Barbara (and Jim). She is cast as Barbara and her name is changed to Sophie Straw. And we learn making a sitcom is no easy task. The writers, Tony and Bill, agonize over the scripts like its brain surgery.
Barbara (and Jim) becomes a huge hit and Sophie becomes a big star. The media wants to interview her, women want to be her, and men want to get into her knickers. Sophie even gets engaged to her co-star, Clive, though it’s not meant to be. But don’t fret. Sophie does find love, and has a long marriage. She also tries to prove herself as an actress and a women at a time just before second wave feminism. And as Funny Girl ends, Sophie is older and considered an icon of British television.
Funny Girl also conveys England changing from the staid, uptight post-war 1950s to the more fun, adventurous swinging 1960s. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones are name dropped. The sexual revolution is gaining steam, but homosexuality is still considered a crime. Some gay men do marry women and have children and others are on the downlow having secretive trysts.
Nick Hornby is usually a writer that delivers. His books High Fidelity and About a Boy are classics. But Funny Girl just falls flat. Hornby does the writerly sin of telling not showing. We are told Barbara/Sophie is a laugh riot, but I barely got a chuckle out of this book, let alone a full belly laugh. Funny Girl promised so much yet doesn’t deliver. You’re better off watching the 1968 film Funny Girl featuring another Barbra, Barbra Streisand.
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