Unfortunately, there was nothing funny to my mother about the embracing of imperfections. She didn’t even attend my high school graduation because I insisted on wearing a pair of shoes that did not match my dress.
For the first few years of college, I didn’t finish a single creative project I started. The more I cared about the work, the less likely I was to complete it. If I declared the work finished, and someone (like my mother) “didn’t happen to like it,” then it would be deemed worthless and ruined forever. I was too afraid to allow someone to puncture my dream. I needed to retain the fantasy that I might add some amazing last-minute finishing touches that would have the power to deflect the eventual onslaught of negative criticism.
Maybe, in the last analysis, that was why my mother never pursued her career as a writer. Her own impossible standards were too tough on her. And it pissed her off.
When I finished reading her diaries, I did have a sense of completion. My lifelong problems of feeling judged by her and coming up short in all areas became both tolerable and funny. After all, I did no worse than the women of Bali. And possibly a little better than certain parts of Venice:
We walked to St Mark’s square and it is one of the most remarkable squares I have ever seen. And in terrible taste. So terribly overdecorated that its very bizarreness makes it almost beautiful.
In retrospect, it seems ludicrous that I spent the first half of my life seeking a positive review from someone who thought Piazza San Marco was in terrible taste. Though now that I think of it, finding the beauty in bizarreness has always been one of my passions. But which part of the thing was the beauty and which was the bizarre would have been one more thing about which my mother and I would have disagreed.
The best I could have hoped for, all things considered, was to receive the kind of review she gave to Charles Dickens when she was a student. In the margin of The Dickens Reader, one of her old hardbound college textbooks from the late 1930s that I had taken home with me as a memento, I found a remark in pencil, in my mother’s distinctive handwriting. “Not one of his better works” she’d noted on the title page of Oliver Twist. “I was not impressed.”
* His detailed discourse delivered to my brother on the topic of “How to Fold a Napkin” remains to this day a classic of its kind. (“Hold both ends of the napkin out like so, one in each hand, and then shake the napkin until it is fully extended.…”) It’s also appropriate to note that on the occasion of the napkin seminar my brother was in his late thirties and had a Ph.D.
In Praise of Crazy Mommies
My mother to me: “So is everything always a joke to you?”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1977, WHEN I WAS IN MY MID-TWENTIES, I made the decision to switch professions from “artist/teacher” to “something in film or TV.” While I was aware that my new plans were both risky and vague, I had been inspired by the filmmaking and scriptwriting classes I had audited at USC the previous year, where I’d had a job teaching painting and drawing to freshmen. I had also noticed that the paintings I was working on—the centerpiece of my career as I then saw it—were increasingly full of plot, language, and humor.
Branching out into a more dynamic form of expression seemed like an exciting next step. After some contemplation of what seemed like the possibilities for new employment, I concluded that the most viable point of entry for me might come through writing.
Though I had never worked as a writer before, I had a sense that it was something I could do, possibly from the years of grammar-related browbeating my mother had provided me. So I sat down and studied all the TV shows of that moment—viewing them for the first time as a possible meal ticket, focusing my attention on the ones I hated least. Then I spent a few months writing spec scripts for them, guided by the formulas for scriptwriting that I found in classes and books.
Once I was armed with a briefcase full of work that I hoped would get me a job, I packed up my car and prepared to make the drive from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. My plan, to the extent that I had one, was to give myself two months to see some results.
Right before I left, I stopped by my parents’ house to spend the night. By now, I was well aware that neither of my parents thought much of my new vocation. My father’s quote on the topic, if memory serves, was “Whaddya, nuts?”
And he was the more agreeable of the pair. Since I’d graduated college, my relationship to my mother had become so dicey that I had learned to limit the amount of time I spent with her to less than thirty-six hours. Somewhere between hour 24 and hour 36, I would see a minor change in her facial expression, a tiny flash around the eyes or an almost imperceptible tensing of the lip muscles. These were the early warning signs that she had begun shuffling through her Rolodex of my many shortcomings. But on this occasion, by only spending one night at their house, I figured I was a good twelve to eighteen hours ahead of our regularly scheduled fight. By my calculations, I would be somewhere around San Luis Obispo or Santa Barbara by the time the conflict erupted.
The three of us had a pleasant enough bon voyage dinner. And then afterward, born of an old habit not yet dead, I said yes when my mother asked me to show her a few of the scripts I was taking with me. Since she considered herself my mentor, as well an expert in all things involving the English language, her approval of my work seemed like an important milestone. So I handed her my most polished script and disappeared into my old bedroom, which by then had been converted into my mother’s office. There I paced restlessly, feeling sick to my stomach as I waited for an official verdict.
About an hour later, I stopped by the living room to check on her reaction. She was sitting in her BarcaLounger, the script closed in her lap. I didn’t know if she had heard me enter the room so I stood quietly, watching her stare into the middle distance, trying to read something in the way she was running her tongue over her front teeth and pursing her lips.
What was her lack of facial expression saying?
“So?” I finally said, when I could take it no more.
She looked over at me, raised her eyebrows, and shrugged. “Well, I don’t happen to care for it. But I pray I’m wrong.”
Not until many years later, when I repeated this line in front of an audience, did I learn that it was funny enough to get a laugh from a large group of strangers. And not just one time but many times before many different groups. Since then, much to my delight, I have discovered that my mother inadvertently authored a number of very reliable jokes, most of them at my expense. For example, on my thirtieth birthday I met my parents for dinner at a nice restaurant. My father ordered a bottle of champagne, and when it arrived, my mother proposed the following toast: “May half of all your dreams come true.”
The table went silent.
“Mom,” I said. “Isn’t that kind of sad?”
“No,” she immediately replied. “Half is a good percentage.”
When I examine my own behavior, I can see that my lifelong compulsive desire to reinterpret every disagreeable and disparaging remark as funny can be traced back to my mother’s gift for presenting so many things in a dispiriting light. She possessed a rare capacity to find something grim and problematic in even the happiest situation.
But in talking about her with others, I learned something interesting. Over the years, as I listened to my comedian friends discuss and dissect their childhoods, it gradually dawned on me that an awful lot of people who make a living in comedy owe their livelihoods to a similar kind of mom.
The comedian and novelist Bill Scheft likes to use the following quote when offering a thumbnail sketch of his mother: “You’ll get unconditional love when you do something to deserve it.” Then there’s my friend George Meyer, comedy writer and for many years an important driving force behind The Simpsons, who describes his mother in an essay entitled “Gone, All Gone”:
Do you still have the adorable crayon drawings you made in kindergarten? I don’t. Not a one. Which means that at one point, many years ago, the following thoughts must’ve gone thr
ough my mother’s mind: “Hmm, what’s this? Oh, I see. It’s that irreplaceable drawing by my firstborn son. The one he proudly brought home from school. I’ll just put this in the garbage.” Then, as time went by: “Oh, another one of my child’s drawings. What is it that I do with these again? Oh yes—I throw them in the trash. That’s right.” Eventually her brain probably got it down to “Art—Son—Trash.” And on days when my mom was sick, and didn’t get around to throwing my artwork away, my dad would do it.
The beloved comedy icon Larry David, in an interview in the L.A. Times on June 18, 2009, spoke of his mother thusly: “The whole time I was doing Seinfeld she would call me up and she would go—and this is when the show was like … the number one show in the country—she would call me up, ‘Do they like you, Larry? Do they think you’re doing a good job? They must like you, otherwise they would fire you, wouldn’t they? You wouldn’t still be there if they didn’t like you!’ ”
Larry David’s remarks immediately reminded me of my mother’s response years ago when I told her I was going to be having dinner with Peter Lassally, then one of the producers of The Tonight Show. “Well, if he invited you over for dinner, I guess he must like you,” my mother said, as though I were presenting her with proof that the world is a miraculous place where wonders never cease.
I am not sure where these women got the idea that brutal honesty is an indispensable parenting tool, but Larry Amoros’s mother apparently read the same manual. “When I was in fourth grade, we were having our class pictures taken,” the comedian told me. “I asked my mother if I was handsome, and she said, matter-of-factly, ‘No.’ ”
As painful as that probably was, I am here to point out the easily overlooked bright side. Larry Amoros’s mother, like the other mothers, was teaching a valuable comedy lesson that dates back to the ancient Greeks: A casually cruel remark delivered in the face of innocent hopefulness is funny! Presumably because there is no other way to cope. When we laugh at a tactless remark, the world is happily returned to a place where outright rudeness can be seen for what it is: a betrayal of love and trust. Also: a fairly direct route to a laugh.
Which brings me to the positive contribution that Crazy Mommies have been making, unheralded, for generations. Yes, perhaps these are unconscious contributions, delivered at the cost of traumatic childhoods, but just as a half-full glass of milk is still a vitamin-rich glass of milk, a good standard-issue Crazy Mommy offers career nutrition by teaching her children that if they wish to retain their sanity, they had better start to see the awful things that happen to them as funny.
As Larry David also said (in that same L. A. Times story), “Positive is not funny.… When you speak in negative terms, the more negative, the funnier it is.” And over time he has proved his point by including all the negative and uncomfortable things that ever happened anywhere near him in his work.
Of course, blindingly upbeat is also funny, as we see in the following piece of positive spin offered by George Meyer’s mother, whom he quotes thusly: “Eileen Bleizig’s husband just died. Which is fine.…” Still, Mr. David was correct that it is the perverse maternal attitude that most often creates children who are obsessed with being funny.
In fact, it recently occurred to me that these mothers might just be responsible for the existence of stand-up comedy as an art form. My research, if you can call it that,* shows that the lion’s share† of compulsively funny people had a problematic relationship with a narcissistically inclined mother. The desire to rearrange grim facts into a joke seems to develop in direct proportion to the hysteria-filled humorlessness of the environment in which the Crazy‡ Mom in question conducted her family’s daily affairs.
It’s almost as though laughing at something horrible sets the clock back to a moment when everyone still had a normal level of optimism, logic, and mutual respect. Discovering a funny piece of terrain in an otherwise dreary landscape works like one of those doors that Bugs Bunny used to paint on a solid wall and then escape into anyway. Add a new and different perspective to a terrible moment, and an unexpected exit suddenly appears.
Yes, yes, I realize that the kind of problematic childhood I am describing can also produce children who kill small animals and/or average-sized members of the community, but for now let’s focus on the disturbed people who become obsessed not with snuffing out the life force of strangers but with making assembled groups of them laugh (and, of course, later telling everyone how they “killed”).
Comedy is, after all, about an imbalance of power. Therefore, creatively inclined children raised on the wrong side of a continuous power struggle end up developing an ability to see the world as a setup in need of a punch line. At least a percentage of the smart ones know intuitively that it is a great way to make things appear, for a moment, sort of manageable.
For the creatively inclined, growing up under the thumb of a good old-fashioned insensitive, dismissive, difficult, or in some cases wholly unbalanced mommy can be a lot like growing up permanently enrolled in a graduate seminar in comedy. As she presents her child with an overwhelming set of unsolvable problems, while also promising and withholding her support, a Crazy Mommy instinctively inflicts just the right amount of emotional damage needed to provide her twitching offspring with the fortitude they will need to face down the drunken patrons of bars and nightclubs. Somehow, Crazy Mommy magically senses that by backing her kids into a corner, forcing them to feel alone and under attack in a world that doesn’t make sense, she is also offering a hands-on daily workshop in how to assemble from scratch that most classic of all comedy characters: the disenfranchised, put-upon little guy.
And there’s so much more! By doing her job correctly, every Crazy Mommy also provides her pulverized offspring with an essential starter pack of unfortunate situations on which they can base their first original jokes.
The comedian Cory Kahaney offers the following example: “So my sister just started therapy, and I am very supportive because I am in therapy for fourteen years. Not that I have the greatest therapist—it’s just the longest relationship I ever had. Anyway, I tell my sister, ‘That’s great you’re in therapy,’ and she says, ‘Yeah, but I think I should let you know I confronted Mommy about the “lunches.” ’ And I am like, ‘The “lunches”? What “lunches”?’ And she says, ‘You know, the fact that she never made our lunch.’ So I said, ‘Oh yeah, the lunches. See, I would’ve started with the beatings.’ ”
In some cases, daily life with Crazy Mommy is like watching an endless one-woman show in which she stars as the poor beleaguered keeper of the flame, suffering at the hands of tyrannical children. Since she alone seems to be in charge of the whole production, she leaves her kids no choice but to set about trying to rewrite their own parts. Depending on how well they are able to do this, they can begin to imagine they are in an entirely different play.
“How to describe the family Amoros?” says comedian Larry Amoros. “Imagine Grey Gardens, but without Jackie Kennedy. My mother told me that I had an older brother named Melvin, who attended a boarding school for very smart children, which is why I’d never met him. But if he died, then I could be the smart one. When I was fourteen my father became ill, and anytime I’d do anything horrifically, egregiously wrong (like chew with my mouth open or drop a napkin), my mother would yell, ‘That’s right, upset your father. Put him in the ground.’ ”
When inevitably the day comes that the child grows up and has metamorphosed into a rage-filled comedian, standing alone in a darkened room full of Crazy Mommy substitutes who have now paid money for the privilege of offering their conditional love as audience members (which completes the circle by including the right to scream mean things at the person they are watching on the stage), he or she will also know intuitively how to maintain his or her cool under pressure, thanks to all those years of practice deflecting Crazy Mommy.
Don’t forget that although the world at large may roll their eyes as each Crazy Mommy goes on her appointed rounds, the children she rai
ses are required to take her seriously as long as they live in her home. They are told to accept her point of view as reasonable, and to obey it without question. And this they are expected to continue indefinitely into adulthood if they want familial peace, as we see in this cautionary tale from the comedian Wendy Liebman: “The day before my first/only wedding at age forty-two, I said to my mother, ‘Mommy, please don’t play the drums tomorrow.’ Yes, I still call her ‘Mommy.’ I told her not to play the drums because she loves to play the drums and has been known to sit in with the band at functions where there is a band. She says, ‘Why not?’ I say, ‘Well, it’s my only wedding, and I just don’t want you to play the drums.’ ‘Okay,’ she says. Cut to the night of the wedding, after she’s had some wine: I see her make a beeline for the drums. I step into her path and look her in the face. ‘Mommy, what are you doing?’ I say. She says, without missing a beat, no pun intended, ‘I’m going to play the drums.’ I stand there speechless. My new husband of three hours looks at me and says, ‘Let her play the drums.’ My mother played the drums at my wedding.”
So we see that a standard model Crazy Mommy, with her inability to see her children as separate human beings who have their own easily bruised feelings, is also supplying them with all the important paving stones on the path to becoming funny. The comedian and writer April Winchell also offered an example from her childhood of both skewed maternal judgment and the comedic usefulness of a carefully placed non sequitur: “There was a local TV show on when I was a kid called The Sandy Becker Show. He had kids on and talked to them. So when my sister was about eight she wanted to be on it more than anything. My father pulled a few strings and got her on the show. While she was backstage, a couple of wardrobe mistresses got into a nasty argument, and one of them called the other one a ‘dyke.’ My sister went to my mother and asked her what a dyke was, and my mother said, ‘She’s a woman who never gets married,’ which wasn’t too bad for 1958. Finally, it was my sister’s turn to go out onstage and talk to Sandy Becker. She went out and sat on his lap. He started asking her questions: What do you like to do? What do you want to be when you grow up? Finally he asked her if she wanted to get married, and she said, ‘Oh no, I’m going to be a dyke.’ After that, they hustled her off the stage pretty quick. She was devastated; she had no idea what happened. Sobbing, she asked my mother why they took her off the show. And do you know what my mother said? ‘Your head was too big to fit on the screen.’ ”
Cool, Calm & Contentious Page 3
