A comedian’s career is ended after a presidential assassination, and a journalist tries to track him down decades later, in this darkly humorous novel

In 1963, Jimmy Wynn was the second most famous man in America. The comedian’s uncanny impression of the president made him a star. But when the genuine article died in a hail of bullets on a sunny afternoon in New Orleans, Jimmy’s career met a fate almost as grisly. What happened to the funny man afterward was a mystery no one cared to solve.

Nearly twenty-five years later, Nathan Grant, an ambitious young journalist, discovers the trail Jimmy cut through the entertainment netherworld. He soon comes to realize that this forgotten court jester may have played a very serious part in the country’s favorite conspiracy theory. His strange and increasingly dangerous odyssey takes him from a dingy New York record store to the showrooms of Las Vegas, a ghost town in the Mojave Desert, and even a dinner theater in Niagara Falls, in a dark comedy about the cost of fame, a man who became a punchline, and a writer who is desperate to find out how the rest of the joke goes.

Jason Anderson's profile page

Jason Anderson is a Calgary native who lives in Toronto. His arts journalism appears in the Globe & Mail, Toro, Saturday Night, Toronto Life and eye Weekly. His fiction has appeared in Taddle Creek and THIS Magazine. Showbiz is his first novel.

“A weird and hilarious trek through American faux-history.” — Richard Scrimger, author of Mystical Rose

“An amazing feat of invention and imagining. In the alternate reality of Showbiz, things are funny, touching, and very true.” — Paul Quarrington, author of King Leary