Is Artie Lange the Incarnation of Ignatius Reilly?

Will the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "Confederacy of Dunces" finally be made into a movie 40 years after it was written?

The answer should be yes.

ARTIE LANGE IS IGNATIUS REILLY!

There can no longer be any reason for the drug addled Hollywood directors to delay bringing the funniest character in literary history (my opinion)to the Silver Screen.

Read this description of Ignatius from Walker Percey's foreward to the original publication of the classic novel:

"Here at any rate is Ignatius Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of -- slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one -- who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt, in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, who between gigantic seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective..................

An intellectual, ideologue, deadbeat, goof-off, glutton, who should repel the reader with his gargantuan bloats, his thunderous contempt and one-man war against everybody -- Freud, homosexuals, heterosexuals, Protestants, and the assorted excesses of modern times. Imagine an Aquinas gone to pot, transported to New Orleans whence he makes a wild foray through the swamps to LSU at Baton Rouge, where his lumber jacket is stolen in the faculty men's room where he is seated, overcome by mammoth gastrointestinal problems. His pyloric valve periodically closes in response to the lack of a "proper geometry and theology" in the modern world."

I ask you, is this character a clone of the Artie Lange we know and love? Is the author of "Confederacy", John Kennedy Toole who committed suicide in 1961 many years before his epic was published,a distant uncle of Artie?

What a great movie this would be. Lange would be sure to win an Oscar as he would be playing himself; there would be no need for him to act. Hand him the script and make sure he stays with it. Of course, knowing Artie,he will probably be back on heroin before the movie is completed but that would make him even more like Ignatius.

My suggestions for casting the major characters from the novel:

Patrolman Mancuso....................... Jim Carrey (a blockbuster supporting role is just what he needs to revitalize his, dead in the water, career.)

Ignatius Reilly's whacko mother................ Celest Holm, an Oscar winner in the 50's, 92 years old going on 48, still hot, either senile or insane but, still damn funny.

Myrna Minkoff of the Bronx,Reilly's Socialist gril friend..........Marisa Tomei

Jones, the black bum turned janitor, a hilarious observer of the New Orleans scene who gets back at whites for 200 years of oppression with his acidic tongue.

He can ONLY be played by Tracey Morgan.

Your suggestions and opinions are invited and welcomed.