Funny Girl

BACHELOR GIRLS

by Wendy Wasserstein

Knopf; 209 pages; $18.95

Wendy Wasserstein is funny. She must be funny. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for writing funny in The Heidi Chronicles. And in this collection of pieces, she says she's funny. She first realized this, she claims, in the second grade when she "brought down the classroom with my comedic routines on our prospects for lunch (vegetable chop suey was a highlight)." More recent evidence is that she likes I Love Lucy.

Humor is often in short supply in books by writers who assert they are funny. This is not second grade, and the territory Wasserstein covers has been strip-mined by those who preceded her -- Nora Ephron, Ellen Goodman and Anna Quindlen. A piece about the split between women who shave their legs and those who don't would have to come up with some dazzling insights to merit another look. Ditto painted nails, being fat or single.

The pressure Wasserstein feels to come up with material is frequently evident. Disappointment that a weekend in Maine was not a chintz-covered, Ralph Lauren-infested affair but rather one where the couch was acrylic and the drink Diet Coke is stretched to five pages. A lunch interview with Philippe de Montebello is a struggle to win his admiration. When she drops a name he recognizes, she writes, "Once again we are on equal ground." Equal ground with the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art? So eager for approval, she becomes the journalistic equivalent of Sally Field at the Academy Awards trilling "You like me. You really like me."

Wasserstein sometimes elicits pity when she is reaching for empathy. In "Jean Harlow's Wedding Night," she describes arranging a trip to Paris to be there at the same time as a banker she has been dating, then his trying to sneak off in the morning without saying goodbye. He tells her he is involved with someone else. She slips into near hysteria, making jokes (she says they are funny) about the waiter, the croissants, the plates, the Ayatullah. They part, but she calls him later in the day to have dinner at a "hilariously hip restaurant." Of course, he says no. Any greater rebuke to her fatal attraction and she might be tempted to boil the rabbit.

Wasserstein's real talent comes through in the last piece of the book, Boy Meets Girl, a one-act play between Dan and Molly, two New York City "professionalites." When Wasserstein is being the playwright, she is just as funny as she says. And her audience is broken up, the way they were back in second grade.