Waiting for the Punch

by Marc Maron

  TOM SCHARPLING—COMEDIAN, WRITER, RADIO AND PODCAST HOST

  I think it is a very bad thing to have a 4 on the front of your age at this point in history because you saw three lifetimes’ worth of changes crammed into twenty years, and it’s the wrong twenty years to grow up with.

  Part of your current daily routine would take half a year not too long ago.

  MARGARET CHO—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  I want to age really dignified, like Amy Tan. I want to be really thin. I want to have kind of a very sharp, short bob haircut that’s gray. I want to wear sort of Mandarin collar shirts all the time and be really, really Amy Tan about it. Teach. Do a lot of workshops. A lot of workshops and a lot of tai chi. I’ll be at a university or teaching at a school, although I don’t think I can do that because I don’t even have a high school diploma.

  NORM MACDONALD—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  I love super old people because they help you with perspective. I love country songs and shit, but there’s this myth about the old guy that never forgot about the girl and he’s drinking and shit. That’s not true. When you meet old people, you ask, “Hey, is your heart broken?”

  “Huh? What?” They don’t care. It’s all like comedy to them. They have incredible perspective.

  Then I was thinking if I could only get that perspective instantly. Just pretend you’re a fucking old man and forget stuff instantly.

  RUSSELL PETERS—COMEDIAN

  You know how you find out what’s inappropriate? Talk to an old person. They always just say what they see. There’s no malice involved. They just say what the fuck they see.

  My dad was born in 1925. He would say things when my friends would come over, and 95 percent of my friends were black. They would come over, and my dad was like, “Russell, there’s some Negro here at the door,” and I’m like, “Dad, what are you doing?” and you would think my black friend would be like, “What the fuck did you say?” But he’d be like, “Eh, what are you going to do? He’s old.” There’s no malice. It’s just, it’s really about intent.

  RAY ROMANO—COMEDIAN, WRITER, PRODUCER, ACTOR

  I remember when I was living in New York and it was ten degrees out and I drove past an old woman at a bus stop at about ten at night, so the buses aren’t coming frequently. This was in Queens. She was an old woman. Ten degrees, maybe fifteen degrees, and I’m driving somewhere and I can see her. I think to myself, “That woman could die tonight. At fifteen degrees, she’s eightysomething years old.” My conscience tells me, “I got to go back and make sure because whatever.”

  I go around the block and I open my window as I drive by and I just go, “Are you okay?” She’s a little startled, like, “Who’s this guy talking to me?” She says, “What? What?” And I ask, “Are you okay? It’s very cold out. Are you okay?”

  She doesn’t know, creepy guy talking to her. I saw that I startled her so I drove away, she said she’s okay. Then I started thinking, “I just startled her in fifteen-degree weather. What if her heart’s skipping beats?” So I had to go around again just to make sure she’s calming down.

  I went around again and she saw me go around again. Now I’m fucking stuck going around the block all night.

  BOB SAGET—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, WRITER

  I went through a lot of metaphysical stuff in my twenties. I went to past life therapy. I sat there and went, “Oh, I was a pharaoh when I was fourteen.” Then I started getting into drugs, so I was fine after that.

  My outlook now is to not be afraid of death. This is a stupid thing to say for a mortal—if you can stop your fear of death or at least stop thinking about it for a while, you can give some thoughtful moments to the things that actually mean something to you.

  TERRY GROSS—RADIO HOST

  I think about death a fair amount. I’m not obsessed about it or anything. Part of the meaning of life is knowing that you’re going to die, that’s part of where you derive meaning, knowing that life is a measured amount of time, so you have to use that time wisely.

  Marc

  Yeah, something like that.

  JULIA SWEENEY—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  My daughter said to me recently, “You know, Dad’s side of the family, they don’t even believe in an afterlife. They don’t talk about people dying that much. But your side of the family, they all believe in this afterlife”—even though she knows I don’t—“you’re totally comfortable talking about how this person’s going to be dead and soon we’ll all be dead and soon we’ll all be in the ground.” And I think that’s healthy. I like it.

  I am trying to think about death a lot. I think it gives me a more palpable sensation about being alive. My new thing is when I see babies anywhere, I think, “When that baby’s my age, I won’t be alive.” And it gives you a little tingle. I don’t know why that makes me feel calmer.

  LENA DUNHAM—ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER

  Sometimes if I’m in the middle of a conversation I think is stupid or unnecessary, the first place my brain goes, is like, “You know we’re all going to die someday, you idiots. Why are you being so lame when you’re just going to die? What do you think, you’re going to live forever because of your stupid green juice, you bitch?”

  WILL FORTE—COMEDIAN, ACTOR, WRITER

  Every once in a while I will go very big picture on stuff. Ultimate big picture is realizing you’re, at some point, going to die. What does it matter anyway? That’s the biggest picture. Slightly pulled back from that big picture. I’ll go there. “What does it matter?” All I care about are really my family and friends. That’s what I really care about.

  I remember when my grandma died, and the ultimate big picture thing, I thought, “This is going to happen to all of us. Why do I spend one moment of my life worrying about anything? I should just be not worrying about anything ever.”

  ROBIN WILLIAMS—COMEDIAN, ACTOR (1951–2014)

  One time on TV, David Letterman leaned over to me during a commercial break and said, “Do you find yourself getting really emotional after this heart surgery?” I said, “Yeah,” and I started to cry. And then he said, “We’re back.” I went, “Oh, fuck. I’m not going to break down. I’m not going to pull a Barbara Walters.”

  I think you get more emotional because literally they’ve cracked the armor. Guys are like, “Fuck you, man, I’m armored up.” Then, the moment they peel you open and it’s like literally you have this scar here. They opened you up and literally to the world, went inside, fixed the box, and then sealed you back up again, and said you’re back. You’re very conscious of it because there’s wires and shit and you’re literally so vulnerable in a weird way.

  MEL BROOKS—COMEDIAN, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER, ACTOR, MUSICIAN

  The war was, on the surface, a patriotic and exciting phenomenon. Unconsciously, the idea of maybe dying, it was very complicated.

  When you’re a soldier, and there’s any kind of shooting— We’d broadcast and I’d be on the radio. I give them coordinates. I’d start with Y, Tango, you know, Dodge, Easy, Over. Then I’d say, “Can you see the white church? Can you see the steeple, the white church? A little to the left of it. The Germans, go shoot them.” I would end up talking like that.

  We were in a command car or a jeep, highly mobile. Less than a minute after we broadcast, the road was straddled with gunfire—bang, bang, bang, bang—big shells. They’d get radio coordinates and take the shot at where we just were.

  Marc

  Dealing day-to-day with the idea that you could get blown up must have driven you nuts.

  Mel

  It did. We talked to each other. Soldiers would talk to each other. There was a guy from Jersey City. He said, “You know, Mel, it’s like a newsreel. We’re in a newsreel.” I said, “You’re right.” I never forget it but you’re right, we think we’re in a newsreel. We don’t pay attention to body bags inside.

  STEPHEN TOBOLOWSKY—ACTOR

  There was a period of time for a couple years, I was doing the TV s
how Heroes. I was slowly losing my voice. I didn’t know how or why. It was scaring me because I’m an actor. I didn’t know what it was. Eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t talk. I went to the head of Cedars-Sinai, like head and neck and everything, and he said, “Well, you have a growth on your vocal cord,” and that was enough to make me piss my pants and I was terrified.

  I went to see my brother in Dallas, who’s a doctor. He sent me to a friend of his who said, “You need surgery yesterday. Why have you not had surgery?” I had surgery. I couldn’t speak for like two months. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t sneeze, I couldn’t whisper. I had to write. When I was pissed off I had to write in red ink. I had no options but just to write. When I was recovering from this, I remember I was getting these dull headaches at the same time, so with the fact that I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t work, I had dull headaches, I naturally thought I had a brain tumor.

  Yeah, so the doctor sent me to a head and neck specialist. The head and neck specialist did X-rays of me, a whole CAT scan of me and told me, “Well, you have advanced arthritis of the neck so bad that the spine of your neck is 180 degrees curved the absolutely wrong way. You have ossification of the vertebrae.” I’m going home thinking, “Not only can I not talk, but now I’m crippled! I’ve always been a healthy guy, why do I have this ossification of the neck?” Well, to recover from the throat surgery I was told to go somewhere where I could be quiet, so I thought I could go fishing. But that’s a bad idea because when you catch a fish, you scream, “Oh, shit!” and I can’t do that.

  The other thing was to go horseback riding in Iceland, which I’d been to before.

  Marc

  Sure, that’s a common thing that people do when they’re stressed out. I’ve heard that horseback riding in Iceland is at the top of everyone’s list.

  Stephen

  Oh, it’s beautiful. You get on that horse and ride. My wife and I, we were riding to an active volcano, very close to the one that exploded.

  Marc

  Also, another nonstressful thing to do, to ride a horse directly into an active volcano. It’s all making sense, Stephen.

  Stephen

  The last day of the trek, I get up on the ridge of the volcano and a wind comes and lifts me and the horse off the ground and threw us! The head of the riding group ran over and I was getting back on my horse and he said, “Are you okay after the fall?” Then I said, “What fall?” He said, “Get off the horse.”

  They drove me over to a little town and the woman said, “You know, I’m putting you in a neck brace. We’re sending you to Reykjavík to be CAT scanned.” They CAT scanned me there. I had a broken neck. The guy said, “Yeah, you’ve, you’ve fractured a vertebra.” They put me in one of those soft collars like people get when they have whiplash.

  Marc

  Or when they want to make money off a doctor in court.

  Stephen

  Yeah. I’m getting on the plane going back from Iceland to New York and there’s a guy there who happened to be a surgeon from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. He loved me from Deadwood and said, “Man, have you found out a way to get onto the plane without waiting with the collar?”

  I said, “Well, actually, I just broke my neck here.”

  This guy turned pale, and he said, “Are you kidding me?”

  I said, “No, sir.”

  He said, “Well, you are in the wrong collar. You could die on this flight. You have to be in a hard collar. This is not gonna keep your neck stable. You have to hold your neck the entire time you’re on the flight. Don’t pick up a bag, don’t move, don’t do anything.”

  He said, “Do you have a head and neck specialist?” Voilà! I happened to have a head and neck specialist. Who in the world has a head and neck specialist? I had one who just did a whole series of X-rays on me, like, three weeks ago!

  I said, “Yes, I have a head and neck specialist in Los Angeles.”

  He said, “You go to that head and neck specialist immediately.”

  I went back to New York holding my neck the entire way. I went from New York to LA holding my neck the entire way. I go to my head and neck specialist and he does another series of X-rays. He turns pale.

  He said, “They misdiagnosed you in Iceland. You don’t have a broken vertebra. You have five broken vertebrae from C2 to C7. You have a fatal injury. Your C4 vertebra is crushed.” The same as Christopher Reeve.

  He said, “I want to show you why you’re alive.” He took me over to his computer, where he had the picture of the X-rays. There, on the X-rays, he said, “Do you see your neck? Because of the arthritis in your neck, because the curve of your neck was 180 degrees different than it should have been, it made the force of the blow go into your shoulders instead of into your spinal cord. Because your vertebrae were ossified, it protected your spinal column. You are alive because of your malady.”

  Now, when you have a broken neck, and a lot of people out there don’t know this, you have to remain vertical for three months. I mean vertical. You cannot lie down. When you go to bed, you have to sleep vertically. You have to lean up against the wall like you’re in a bus stop. The neck brace can never come off. I made the mistake once of taking the brace off, thinking, “Well, I can lie down.” The world went away. My vision went dark, I suddenly couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t move. Fortunately, I screamed. Ann put the brace back on and I sat up again, but I realized that was the last time I was ever going to be horizontal for the next three and a half months. It was a nightmare. It isn’t just pain. It stops your central organs from functioning. Your heart stops, your breath stops, and if one of those vertebrae, as they’re healing, slips, you’re in blinding pain. You lose your vision, you lose your hearing, you lose your ability to breathe, you feel your heart stopping. It’s a nightmare of darkness.

  After this, I went to prayer services twice a day for a couple years because I lost my mother. Not because of my neck. It was during this period of time. There is one of the psalms you read in the morning service that God counts the number of stars in the sky. He heals the brokenhearted. He knows the secrets of the ocean.

  I asked my doctor, I said, “How does this neck brace thing work? How do I heal? How does this happen?” He said, “Well, the brace holds the broken ends together, and after a month the ends get kind of sticky. Then after two months the stickiness becomes a soft bond. After three months it becomes a hard bond, then it’s solid.” I said, “No, that ain’t my question. I get that. How does it happen?”

  He said, “Oh, we don’t know.”

  I realized, God heals the brokenhearted, and that’s when I think, Oh, I get it. The astronomers say they don’t know the number of stars in the sky. You can’t talk about God because who knows what it is? Who knows what the concept is, but I felt it when I had my broken neck. I said, “I got it. I got it now.” It’s that life force that connects me and you and all of us together that you want the other guy to do better. You want the other guy to heal. It’s that thing, the force of positiveness that moves us forward in the universe.

  I mean, that’s the only thing I could say it is and the broken neck made me see the wonders of it all. It made me see things I never saw before. I know people who have cancer and people who have heart disease and people with broken necks, they say it’s a blessing. I’ll join that long list of people with the same boring kind of thing and say, “Yeah, it was a blessing. The broken neck was a blessing.”

  JOSH HOMME—MUSICIAN

  I got this MRSA infection, which is an antibiotic-resistant staph. I couldn’t shake it because my immune system was so destroyed. People die of that all the time. In fact, down the hall someone died of it while I was in the hospital, and I was like, “Oh, no. What have I done?” Then when I was having surgery to try and fix it, they lost me trying to get the oxygen tube down my throat and reoxygenate my blood. I choked to death.

  There was no tunnel.

  When I woke up I knew something was wrong, someone had hurt me. Really something
was stolen from me or I had lost something because it took a couple of years to recover. I’ve always heard music in my head since I was a little kid. When I woke up this time, I heard nothing for a couple of years and it affected me.

  Marc

  Oh my God. They told you you died?

  Josh

  Yeah. My doctor was like, “Whoa. I lost you. I thought you were going to stay lost.”

  I knew it. I could feel it in my body. When you get defibrillated, you’re being electrocuted. You wake up and you feel like you’ve been beat up. Feels like you’ve been in a car crash. Then I was kind of contagious and in bed for four months and you can’t hug your little kid. Your mind starts to play tricks on you. I’d never been knocked down that hard. You’re in your tower without the Rapunzel hair.

  I was stuck in a room for four months. I had to have these tubes in my leg and it was painful. Then all of a sudden after two months in bed you go, “I’ve got two months left. How do I do this?” It did the greatest thing it could ever do to me. It zeroed me. I was below zero. I had to crawl back up to zero, and I’m really thankful for it because I know what’s important.

  MEL BROOKS

  I was on a show once, and the announcer who was interviewing me said, “So, when you were only two and a half or so, you lost your father.” I took a pause.

  I said, “No, no, no, no. He was dead. He wasn’t lost. We knew just where he was. He was in the back. Finally, they took him away and they put him in some cemetery, but we never lost him. We were never that careless with our father. We cared about him.”