Sci-Fi Tale of 24th Century Shtick Energized by the Full Monty

Science fiction and comedy aren’t strangers, but they haven’t often been buddies, either. Most stories set in the future elicit awe or dread or sober speculation, not laughter. The exceptions prove the rule: Ed Wood’s movies, whose hilarity is accidental; Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadore, a fantasy of escape for characters trapped in contemporary, Earth-bound horrors; the ration of wisecracks allowed to serious Enterprisers on “Star Trek”; the campy nastiness of “Mars Attacks!”

Now, however, Eric Idle, formerly of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, has written not just a funny novel about the 24th century, not just a novel about 24th century comedians, but a novel in the form of a theory of comedy conceived by an android, who concludes: “May the farce be with you.”

The android, Carlton, is a “Bowie,” modeled on the 20th century rock star. He is the faithful companion of lean, saturnine Lewis Ashby and stout, manic Alex Muscroft, the Abbott and Costello of their generation. They tour the second-tier moons and space stations of the middle solar system on a vaudeville circuit known as the Road to Mars, hoping for the big break. Carlton, whose logical computer mind can’t understand irony, studies his employers’ shtick as he tries to figure out what makes humans laugh and why.

Can a comedy gene be isolated? Does humor serve an evolutionary purpose? Can an artificial intelligence, such as Carlton, “actually be programmed to think funny, to create fresh comedy? Or is comedy something endemic in the species Homo sapiens?”

These words aren’t written by Carlton himself but by William Reynolds, an academic who has found Carlton’s neglected, 80-year-old dissertation at the University of Southern Saturn. Reynolds at first plans to publish it as a rebuke to humans’ “DNAism,” their refusal to acknowledge the achievements of machines. Later, seduced by the prospect of a Nobel Prize (which would prove that his girlfriend was foolish to leave him), he decides to publish it under his own name.

Reynolds’ voice as he surrenders to the pull of the fame he once despised--levity, Carlton would say, the bright, expansive force of the universe, giving way to gravity, the tug of dark matter and black holes--lends the novel much of its tone. It’s a tone we’re familiar with: alternately arch and cheeky. It’s the Monty Python tone, in fact, combining the comic archetypes of what Carlton calls the White Face (Ashby) and the Red Nose (Muscroft). You can take the boy out of the Flying Circus--Idle has written a previous novel, “Hello Sailor,” a play, “Pass the Butler,” and a children’s book, “The Owl and the Pussycat”--but apparently you can’t take the circus out of the boy.

There’s also a plot, a traditional science fiction plot. Muscroft and Ashby land a gig on the giant cruise ship Princess Di, then lose it when a Muscroft gibe offends pop diva Brenda Woolley, whose ego is as big as Jupiter. Trying to right their careers and deal with ex-wives and kids, they run afoul of a scheme by galactic terrorists--descendants of Silesian coal miners who talk just like Cold War heavies--to blow up Mars, the “home of Showbiz.”

Never mind that the terrorists’ cause has some justice to it. In the spirit of the 1990s, politics is seen as retrograde, clunky, humorless--pure gravity, which our heroes (and a mysterious Slavic beauty with whom Muscroft falls in love) are born to subvert.

Indeed, the main reason “The Road to Mars” is funny--and the reason it isn’t, at bottom, science fiction at all--is that nothing has changed. The technology Idle imagines for the 24th century may be dazzling, but the language, the jokes, the problems and foibles of his characters are purely of our time. What does this mean? If levity is the expansive force, why is it so backward-looking at heart? Where’s Carlton when we need him?