The leader of the club, “The Chief”, is a young law student at New York University who is described as lacking in physical attractiveness but appears beautiful to the narrator.
In the format of a serial adventure novel, The Chief's story describes the Laughing Man as the child of missionaries who was kidnapped by bandits in China, who deformed his face by compressing it in a vise; he was obliged to wear a mask, but compensated by being profoundly athletic and possessed of a great Robin Hood-like charm and the ability to speak with animals.
The narrator summarizes the Chief's ever more fantastic installments of the Laughing Man's escapades, presenting him as a sort of comic book hero crossing “the Chinese-Paris border” to commit acts of heroic larceny and tweaking his nose at his archenemy “Marcel Dufarge, the internationally famous detective and witty consumptive”.
However, he instructed the entertainment licenses department of his literary agency, Harold Ober Associates, to send his story out to producers for a potential film deal.
In that film, “The Chief” (as the plot takes place in 1980s Spain) tells the story of superhero “Sponge-Man”, who never cries as his powers retain the last tear inside his body, and his nemesis, Oniongirl - also killing off the character after a conversation with the woman, here named Socorro Soriano.