The new novel from writing partners Lee Kelly and Jennifer Thorne opens with a decades-long cold case: Comedienne Lillian Martin has been dead 40 years, and nobody knows exactly what happened.
Martin was a rising star on a late-night comedy sketch show called “The Midnight Show.” She disappeared after a Valentine’s Day episode in the show’s volatile third season, and evidence shows that she either jumped or was pushed from the Williamsburg Bridge. Telling the story in modern times is journalist Madeline Cohen, who pitches a story to Rolling Stone to honor Martin’s life and legacy and to investigate a comedy industry that she says “categorizes, commodifies, dismisses, and discards funny women.”
What unfolds after that is a collection of transcripts from Cohen’s interviews with surviving cast members, producers and friends, and other documents that set the story and thoughtfully advance the plot. It lays bare the ultra-competitive, hard-partying world of New York City comedy in the 1980s and the whirlwind early days of a show that clearly is modeled on “Saturday Night Live.”
The Midnight Show is a slow burn mystery with an oral-history format that reads like an episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music.” Fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & The Six or Layne Fargo’s The Favorites will appreciate the ensemble narrative, which plays especially well on audio.
At its heart, though, the novel is a study in female friendship and feminism. Lillian Martin represents so many women who were discounted, overlooked and abused by industries that men commanded (and continue to dominate), including comedy and show business. The authors describe a time when female comics were quickly stereotyped as “the slut” or “the Rapunzel,” and backstage episodes that eventually led to the avalanche of testimony that ushered in the #MeToo movement. Throughout the novel, journalist Cohen challenges Martin’s female friends and co-stars over what she sees as their lack of agency in the 1980s, and they push back with harsh lessons on the realities of that earlier age.
The book deals with alcoholism, drug use, the AIDS epidemic, and the dizzying, caustic nature of fame. Kelly and Thorne vividly portray up-and-coming improv players, hot-shot producers and sarcastic stand-up comics, but the mystery of Martin’s death always hovers in the background.
The Midnight Show is an addictive novel that will keep you reading — or listening — until its surprising and satisfying finish.
