ROBERT PLUNKETT is an American novelist. We don’t have access to his actual birthday, though we know he was born on 1945. Anyone with more information is kindly requested to contact me. 

Plunkett is best known for his novel first novel, My Search for Warren Harding, which immediately established him as one of America’s most promising novelists. Unfortunately, the promise soon faded, and he now lives in a trailer in Sarasota, Florida, where he ekes out an existence as a gossip columnist, covering everything from gala charity balls to KKK meetings. He has also served on the boards of Sarasota AIDS Support and the Humane Society of Sarasota County, and is currently running for election to the Mosquito Control Board, District 6.

His novel anticipated and influenced much of what the culture would begin to find funny (and maybe what some of us are still waiting for the world to find funny). In our contemporary humble-bragging world of filtered selfies, virtue signaling, and good optics, we find increasing release, and comic relief, in fictional characters we are not asked to admire or envy—in characters so awful or amoral or vapid that the joke is on them.

Rumor has it that Larry David was such a fan of the novel he kept copies of it available in the Seinfeld writing room and told his writers to imitate the tone. It’s clear reading this novel that he even lifted details from the book, such as the absurd way that Seinfeld’s Elaine dances—clearly based on the novel’s depiction of how Weiner’s girlfriend Pam dances: “She is one of those people who ‘abandon’ themselves to the beat, clapping their hands over their head and emitting little yelps. To make matters worse, she studied modern dance in college and thus considers herself a Movement Expert. The thing she does—I can only describe them as Martha Graham routines. Her arms fly out into space, she makes sudden turns, then she half-squats, her head flung back in ecstasy.”

He has also made appearances in film. Notably in the Martin Scorsese film After Hours. (That’s his voice you hear at the beginning of the film’s trailer.) He is also the guy who picks up Griffin Dunne’s character. He also acted in (and wrote) Insomnia (1994), and a minor role in Autumn in New York, alongside Winona Ryder and Richard Gere.

His novel “Love Junkie” was published in 1992. In it, Plunket transforms Broadway’s Dorothy Rodgers into a clueless and cloying Bronxville housewife, Mimi Smithers. Married to a Union Carbide executive who escaped the Shah’s regime, Mimi wants to impress Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III and the other society ladies. But after her first failed attempt she settles for an unpaid job in the city with an arts organization, where she first falls for her gay boss, Tom Potts.

Then she falls for all of his friends, including Joel, a gay-porn star who turns out not to be gay. She takes over Joel’s mail-order business, sending eager customers his soiled Jockey shorts and cassette tapes from his “Verbal Abuse” series, with titles such as “On Your Knees, Cocksucker, Part Two.” This kind of thing may not be for everyone, but the people who go for it really love it: Madonna reportedly bought the film rights, and, when her option lapsed, Amy Sedaris stepped in.

Robert Plunket lives in a trailer park in Englewood, Fla., with his pug, Meatball.