Comedy = Tragedy + Time. And then what?
All the lonely people, where do they all come from.....
The pre-pandemic pre-Parkinson’s version of yours truly would often be found reading stories like the ones I’ve posted here in different venues around Chicago. In post show blib blab sessions, I would often be asked if I had considered doing stand up comedy. My default response was always “No, I don’t hate myself that much.”
Disclaimer before I move on: I did take a stand up comedy class to explore another kind of writing and I learned so much. Highlights included cutting all unnecessary words to keep it as brief as possible and not overthinking it, which were both counterintuitive to me. Also sharpening your comedy requires you to get in front of an audience and see what works; you cannot test jokes without human reaction. To hone your craft, you must bomb until you absolutely have no pride left to destroy. In Chicago, there are hundreds of open mics where you can sign up to 85th in line to do your tight 5 (the best five minutes of material you have) and you will be subjected to a night of projectile stream of consciousness insanity from most of the participants with a few random laughs from unlikely sources, ending with you sorta bombing at 1 am. It will be an interactive drunken trial by fire that you must attend as often as possible until you are surrounded by assholes who will seethe at your every success but they are now your people and that’s all you know how to do. See what I mean about self hatred?
Comedians often bloom in family environments soaked in struggle. Growing up in an unhappy house can lead to a child becoming a pleaser to gain approval, or better yet, a court jester. I loved watching comedians as a child, quickly learning that there was power in being able to change the mood at my house. I repeated the jokes that got the most laughs on SNL whether I understood them or not. Imagine a 10 year old randomly popping off with “I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines.” I listened to albums by Robyn Williams, George Carlin, and Steve Martin. From an early age, I sensed that they were my people.
I read Steve Martin’s biography “Born Standing Up” in 2007, hoping to feel a connection with one of my childhood idols. It left me cold. While certainly well written, it was a rather antiseptic account of his upbringing and his career. It felt like he was only showing us the cards he was comfortable revealing, to me coming off as something I have often been described as: guarded.
I had this same feeling while watching the first half of the Apple TV documentary on Steve, entitled “STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces”. In fact, I turned it off after 25 minutes, thinking I’ve already heard about his background working at a magic shop at Disneyland, his early days doing stand up opening for Linda Ronstadt, The Carpenters, and Toto, his eventual rise to doing huge arena shows before walking away at the top of his game in 1981. I didn’t need a soulless retelling twice, no matter how much I enjoyed his work.
I stuck with it and the real reward was in the second piece.
Steve opens the second part of the doc recounting the night of the premiere of “The Jerk” in 1979. Someone asks his father what he thought of the movie and he replies, “He’s no Charlie Chaplin.” Oof. As someone who shared an early piece of writing with my mother and received a dismissive “You’ll get better”, I felt that blow. Steve then explores his years making movies, this time through the eyes of how alone he felt. His friends described him as “very shy”, “solitary”, “closed off”, and “difficult to connect with”. When he began to write movies, his characters shared a melancholy, a longing. He describes himself as “removed, always somewhere else in my head”. In his romantic life, he felt his relationships were perpetually “just about to go wrong”. Divorced from his first wife, Victoria Tennent in 1996, he felt on the edge of a “bottomless pit”. He had always immersed himself in his career, looking for approval, finding emptiness. He began to trauma dump his secrets to strangers on airplanes, becoming aware that growing up without hugs or affection had left him with a deep emotional distance from others. He called his father by his first name at his insistence so he never knew a “Dad”.
I’ve gone pretty far out of my way detailing the life of Steve Martin in an effort to explain how I’ve felt for a majority of my life. I began writing stories of my life shortly after I moved to Chicago for the reason most dumb lonely people do anything, to try to win the heart of another. The internet caused my path to collide with a truck driving poet in Springfield, Missouri. We emailed regularly and had a connection that I thought merited a real life meeting, he disagreed. But he still wanted to write. I threw myself into crafting stories of my past and sending them to him, campaigning to make a romantic connection like I was a modern Midwest Scheherazade. It didn’t work but I did take my portfolio of stories out for a spin and ended up working with a local theater company who produced autobiographical tales to perform for audiences around town. During the process of workshopping my stories (basically a series of meetings where your peers try to find the universal kernel within your anecdotes that will make the story invade everyone’s soul), I was encouraged to “go deeper to explore the loneliness you felt” or “expand on the emptiness inside you” or “get more real about the pain of feeling alone”. This went on to the point of me yelling “I AM TIRED OF BEING ELEANOR RIGBY IN EVERY FUCKING STORY!” at a meeting. I just wanted to be funny, why were they trying to take that away from me?
The same reason why I walked away from Steve’s book feeling nothing. I didn’t recognize that I was using humor as a shield. A lifetime of trying to extract my self worth from a quality that I also used to water down my emotions for public consumption had left me confused and empty.
Steve has a dream that a woman takes him to the site of his own grave. In it is his skeleton with a smile. He asks her if that means it’s possible to die happy. She tells him it is. She tells him he needs adventures. He assumes that means seeing waterfalls and touring the world. She tells him no, his adventures simply require “people”.
I’m sure Steve was always surrounded by people, as was I. As someone who was also always somewhere else in my head, being surrounded by others did not fill the dark pit inside me. I also trauma dumped on others to try to find connection, to the point of finding an outlet that helped me to mold and shape my life’s complications into something that people found entertaining enough to leave their houses and pay money to see. But even that act didn’t provide a feeling of belonging. Even when I made it funny, the laughter just scratched the surface of the approval I was desperately seeking.
But the act of crafting my past triumphs and mistakes into amusing ten minute dialogues did help me over time to see that my loneliness was defined by the disparity between the relationships I had and the relationships I wanted. We often are magnetized to the people we feel we deserve; in my case narcissistic types that I could support unconditionally. But seeing others connecting in ways that I admired made me take pause and reassess and look at my circle. I slowly let people fall away. Not bad people by definition, just not the people for me.
When I was diagnosed with PD in 2018, the circle became smaller more rapidly. I was instantly required to choose only those who could meet me where I was, who were willing to listen and adapt and understand that I was no longer going to be able to be the person I once was. People who didn’t question my inability to be helpful as I had been in the past, people who smiled and hugged me despite my seemingly never ending foul mood. I now spend time with people who feel good to me, not that they are relentlessly positive (ew) but they see me for all of who I am and who I am not. My housemates are equal parts tenacity and tenderness, with them I’ve grown to know the true definition of family. I no longer feel an emptiness that longs to be filled. I am surrounded by the love I’ve looked for over five decades. I am slowly making plans to embark on what I intend to be the most satisfying period of my life. With all that Parkinson’s has taken from me, I relish that it gave me the power to fill my pit of longing, to quell my desire for approval. I embrace growing older on my terms as an emotionally whole individual, despite my physical limitations.
Steve is now deliriously happy playing the banjo and doing magic tricks for his lovely wife who he met while she was a fact checker at the New Yorker. They had a daughter when he was 67, and he absolutely adores her. Usually stories of older men having kids make me upchuck in my mouth a bit, but not this one. It seems that Steve never experienced joy in his own childhood, so he wasn’t drawn to that life until he was truly ready. Steve made peace with his father before he died, recognizing that his father’s great dream was to be an actor. The family moved to Los Angeles from Texas so Steve’s father could pursue that dream, but he didn’t have the time as he struggled to support their family.
I never noticed how many books my mother owned on the craft of writing until I became a writer.
I’ve long been fascinated by comedy and sadness and how it seems that you can’t have one without the other. And how truly great comedy seems to rise out of suffering and hardship. And with my studies of tv history that’s proven true for a lot of the big names —Jonathan Winters, Sid Caesar.
But I always go back to Carrie Fisher “if my life weren’t funny it would just be true.”
I also watched the Steve Martin documentary. A couple weeks before watching it, I watched a good portion of the film "Three Amigos!". It was late at night and I remembered the film as being pretty silly. I felt like partaking in some silliness. There's a scene that just had me laughing. Steve Martin's character was walking atop a wall doing some recon above the other amigos while they waited below for the "all clear." He was trying to get their attention and had to resort to increasingly bizarre, goofy & silent antics. Martin's physical comedy was superb. I was distinctly reminded of Charlie Chaplin! It was so striking to me, I mentioned it to my husband the next day. And hence his dad's comment in the documentary about Martin's performance in "The Jerk" landed like a soul punch.
Your last line is brilliant.