Ali Lauder isn’t having the best 40th birthday. The heroine of Julia Raeside’s debut novel has already had a humiliating run-in with the wife of the colleague she’s been sleeping with, and been brushed off by Paul Bonatti, the celebrity comedian she’s supposed to recruit to host a new radio show – a show she’d hoped might signal her breakthrough as a producer. Now, thanks to a backstage tipoff, she’s learned that Bonatti, her boss’s pick, is “not a good choice if any women work at your radio station”.
Don’t Make Me Laugh is, at its most straightforward, a robustly funny and fleetingly soulful revenge caper, set in a comedy world that’s about to have its (long-overdue) #MeToo moment, but Raeside’s freewheeling style – a perfect match for lonely, lackadaisically flawed Ali – allows her to edge into some discomfiting, provocatively grey areas. Because while Bonatti is clearly a dangerous creep, it’s a certain type of self-styled “good guy” that the author dares to expose here.
Ali, retreating to the bar to take stock of her lamentable love life and career, falls into conversation with another famous standup, Ed Catchpole. Older and endearingly shambolic, attentive and eager to listen, Ed quickly comes to embody all the care and devotion that’s missing from her life. He’s even up for presenting that radio show.
No spoilers are required to reveal that he’s not at all the cosy, cardigan-wearing fantasy saviour that he initially seems. That he’s no Bonatti, either (to quote Ed himself: “I’m a cunt, but I’m not that cunt”), makes the ensuing drama all the more arresting. As Ali tries to wean herself off the intense emotional intimacy with which he’s reeled her in, she’s made acutely aware of the overlap between revulsion and residual lust, for instance, and forced to examine the boundary – troublingly porous, in Raeside’s telling – between coercion and collusion.
Don’t Make Me Laugh is not without missteps. A handful of chapters told from Ed’s point of view are heavy-handed, adding little. And it should probably be noted that the only decent male character here – Ali’s depressive dad – is deceased. On the whole, though, it’s a confident interweaving of action and ethics, building towards an ingenious Edinburgh fringe finale and revelling as it goes in the heavy-drinking grubbiness of a certain kind of unattached London life.
It’s also full of droll turns of phrase and genuine laughter – never a given in a novel about comedy, least of all one tackling the industry’s ingrained misogyny. Ali’s married colleague, for instance, appears seductively capable when glimpsed out of the corner of her eye. Looked at straight-on, “he was a furious teacher waiting for a minibus”.
Early on Raeside delights in dangling, then dashing, the notion that we might be in romcom territory. It’s not a narrative entirely devoid of romance, however. On the same night that Ali meets Ed, she also encounters two young women who will introduce her to a group of underground activists named Scold’s Bridle. Slowly but surely, Ali falls for that quaint-seeming, still vital concept: the sisterhood. The reader will be right behind her.
• Don’t Make Me Laugh by Julia Raeside is published by Bedford Square (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
