John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces" Finally to be Filmed, With Zach Galifianakis playing the Inimitable Ignatius Reilly

So one of the funniest American novels EVER is about to (finally) make it into a film version (in which Hollywood will no doubt muck it up, but so it goes): John Kennedy Toole’s (infamous) A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), published 11 years after he committed suicide (supposedly because he was unappreciated as a writer/could not get published). We sympathize, don’t we? Does it matter that the book, published that many years after his untimely end, then went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? Yes, kind of.
I’ve heard from writer friends that Dunces is a book you either love or hate, and I’m definitely in the love category. (I actually have a hardback of it, from LSU press, though not a 1st edition, a 10th printing.) It’s laugh-out-loud funny. Ignatius Reilly is fat, arrogant, bawdy, homebound, and hilarious.
And I’m no fan of Zach Galifianakis, but I think he’s got the right physique for the part. John Candy could have done it best, but like John Kennedy Toole, he died rather prematurely. Mainly Galifianakis seems to inhabit a lot of dopey “guy comedies,” and many of them (including Hangover 5 or whatever) seem rather disposable. But this might be a classic. If he can pull it off. I’ll be waiting for it. For more info on the upcoming film, click here.