Eddie Krumble Is The Clapper Book

Meet Eddie Krumble. He’s a relatively happy guy. Content-ish. Fresh to Los Angeles, Eddie and his friend Chris Plork land their first gig: clapping as paid audience members for infomercials and sitcoms so heinous that tourists won’t even attend. Eddie spends long days clapping, laughing, and hissing — on cue, of course — and his life slowly begins to take shape as a relationship with Judy, a gas station attendant, begins to brew.
Suddenly his life is turned on its head. In one of his nightly rants, Jay Leno scrutinizes the state of late night TV and ends up unveiling two stills of Eddie as audience members for two different infomercials. Eddie is singled out as clapper-for-hire, Eddie’s career comes to a halt, and Leno turns his discovery into a segment on his show: “Who is THE CLAPPER?” takes the public by storm, and Eddie’s face appears on TVs and billboards throughout the nation.
A clever satire about fame, consumerism, and reality TV, Dito Montiel’s Eddie Krumble is The Clapper is the first work of fiction from the acclaimed author of A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.

Publishers Weekly

The widely acclaimed author and director of A Guide to Recognizing Your Saintsshifts from memoir to high-energy satire in his fiction debut. Eddie Krumble is a high school kid from Queens with a job at a lock factory and a bleak future that gets a bit sunnier when he and permanently stoned pal Chris Plork hop a bus to L.A., where they find work in the "audience participation placement" field (read: compensated clapping for shows too awful to draw a legitimate audience). Eddie wears disguises to maximize his earning potential-appearing as different people at different clapping gigs (sometimes three in a day). The producers of The Tonight Showmeanwhile, while trawling reels of bad television for material, notice Eddie's manifold personalities, prompting Jay Leno to make "The Clapper" into a recurring bit that puts Eddie's anonymity, and thus his livelihood, on the line. A whimsical tale where the underdog gets his day-and his few minutes in the spotlight-Montiel's first stab at fiction is an entertaining excursion into the mundane reality behind television's exuberant facade. (Mar.)