Attempting Normal (28 page)

Then my
new
manager got back to me and said, “They liked the jokes you did when you introduced Kindler a couple of years ago. That’s why they asked you.”

So, it was the jokes about them, you, the industry, that got them interested. Hmm. Fuck. That was like two jokes. I’m not good at insult comedy. Any time I do roast types of jokes they go too far, cut too deep, too true, get me in trouble.

I think the president of Comedy Central, Doug Herzog, is still mad at me. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize again to Doug. Years ago, when Doug Herzog and Eileen Katz first moved to Comedy Central from MTV and began retooling it, I performed at a Comedy Central party at Catch A Rising Star. I remember the joke I did. I said, “I am glad that Doug and Eileen moved from MTV to Comedy Central because I think that all television should look like a twenty-four-hour, round-the-clock pie-eating contest.” I don’t know if it was the venom I said it with or what, but two days later I was in Eileen Katz’s office with my old manager, who was having a great hair day, apologizing to Eileen for that joke. So, I am not the guy to make you industry people laugh at yourselves. Kindler will do that in a couple of days. And if I could, in the spirit of making an amends, I would like to apologize to Doug Herzog, again, and say I am sorry, Doug. Since you have been there, Comedy Central has become the best pie-eating contest on television.

Yes, I have been bitter in my life. I have felt slighted by the industry and misunderstood. I have made mistakes and fucked things up. That’s the kind of comic I am. It isn’t unusual. I will admit and accept my faults and mistakes but it bothers me that the industry takes comics for granted and makes us jump through stupid hoops and lies to us—constantly. I get it. You think it’s part
of your job but how about a little respect for us—the commodity. The clowns.

When I was a kid watching comedians on TV and listening to their records they were the only ones that could make it all seem okay. They seemed to cut through the bullshit and disarm fears and horror by being clever and funny. I don’t think I could have survived my childhood without watching stand-up comics. When I started doing comedy I didn’t understand show business. I just wanted to be a comedian. Now, after twenty-five years of doing stand-up and the last two years of having long conversations with over two hundred comics I can honestly say they are some of the most thoughtful, philosophical, open-minded, sensitive, insightful, talented, self-centered, neurotic, compulsive, angry, fucked-up, sweet, creative people in the world.

I love comedians. I respect anyone who goes all in to do what I consider a noble profession and art form. Despite whatever drives us toward this profession—insecurity, need for attention, megalomania, poor parenting, anger, a mixture of all the above—whatever it is, we comics are out there on the front lines of our sanity.

We risk all sense of security and the possibility of living stable lives to do comedy. We are out there in B rooms, dive bars, coffee shops, bookstores, and comedy clubs trying to find the funny, trying to connect, trying to interpret our problems and the world around us and make them into jokes. We are out there dragging our friends and coworkers to comedy clubs at odd hours so we can get onstage. We are out there desperately tweeting, updating statuses, and shooting silly videos. We are out there driving ten hours straight to feature in fill-in-the-blank-city-here. We are out there acting excited on local morning radio programs with hosts whose malignant egos are as big as their regional popularity. We are out there pretending we like club owners and listening to their “input.” We are out there fighting the good fight against our own
weaknesses: battling courageously with Internet porn, booze, pills, weed, blow, hookers, hangers-on, sad, angry girls we can’t get out of our room, Twitter trolls, and broken relationships. We are out there on treadmills at Holiday Inn Expresses and Marriott suite hotels trying to balance out our self-destructive compulsions, sadness, and fat. We are up making our own waffles at 9:58
A.M.
, two minutes before the free buffet closes, and thrilled about it. Do not underestimate the power of a lobby waffle to change your outlook.

All this for what? For the opportunity to be funny in front of as many people as possible and share our point of view, entertain, tell some jokes, crunch some truths, release some of the tension that builds up in people, in the culture and ourselves.

So, if I could I would like to help out some of the younger comics here with some things that I learned from experience in show business. Most of these only refer to those of us that have remained heatless for most of our careers. I can’t speak to heat. I do know that symbiosis with the industry is necessary after a certain point and there are great agents, managers, and executives who want to make great product but for the most part it’s about money. To quote a promoter who was quoting an older promoter in relation to his involvement with the Charlie Sheen tour: “Don’t smell it, sell it.” True story.

The list.

The amazing thing about being a comedian is that no one can tell us to stop even if we should. Delusion is necessary to do this. Some of you aren’t that great. Some of you may get better. Some of you are great … now. Some of you may get opportunities even
when you stink. Some of you will get them and they will go nowhere and then you have to figure out how to buffer that disappointment and because of that get funnier or fade away. Some of you may be perfectly happy with mediocrity. Some of you will get nothing but heartbreak. Some of you will be heralded as geniuses and become huge. Of course, all of you think that one describes you … hence the delusion necessary to push on. Occasionally everything will sync up and you will find your place in this racket. There is a good chance it will be completely surprising and not anything like you expected.

I’m not a household name, I’m not a huge comic, I have not made millions of dollars, but I am okay and I make a living. I’m good with that. Finally. Comedy saved my life but also destroyed it in many ways. That is the precarious balance of our craft and some of us don’t survive it. We lost a few truly great comics this year.

Greg Giraldo isn’t here, which is weird. He was always here. Greg was a friend of mine and of many of yours. He wasn’t a close friend but we were connected by the unspoken bond between comics. After talking to hundreds of comics I know that bond runs deeper than just friendship and is more honest than most relationships. He certainly was a kindred spirit. I battle demons every day and as of today, I am winning, or at least have a détente. Greg lost that fight. He was a brilliant comedian but in a way that is rare. He was not a dark, angry cloud. He was smart, current, honest, courageous, and did it with humility and light. He was a comedic force of nature that is profoundly missed. He was just a guy that always seemed so alive that accepting that he isn’t is hard and sad. He is survived by his ex-wife, his kids, and his YouTube videos. We miss him.

In an interesting twist this year, Robert Schimmel did not die of cancer but he did pass. Bob was a class act. A legacy to true-blue lounge comedy and an impeccable craftsman of the story
and the joke. He battled a horrible disease for over a decade and brought a lot of laughs and hope to people affected by cancer. He made me laugh—a lot. I listen to his CDs if I need a real laugh. That is as honest a tribute as I can give. I miss him and I am sad I didn’t get to talk to him more.

Mike DeStefano as a person went through more shit than I can even imagine. Some of it self-generated, all of it tragic and mind-blowing, and he overcame it. How? With comedy. I recently talked to his brother, Joe, who said, “Mike had a tough time living until he found comedy, and then it was the opposite. Doing comedy is what saved him. His comedy helped a lot of people and it helped him.” I’d never met a guy more at peace with his past and present and more excited about a future that sadly isn’t going to happen now, but he knew in his heart he was living on borrowed time and every day was a gift.

All of these guys should have had many more years of life between them but they didn’t. These guys were unique in that they were real comics, hilarious, deep, hard-core, risk-taking, envelope-pushing artists that made a profound impact on people and changed minds and lives with their funny. I know that to be true.

I’m not sure if there is one point to this speech or any, really. If you are a comic, hang in there if you can, because you never know what’s going to happen or how it is going to happen and there are a lot more ways and places for it to happen. I know my place in show business now. It’s in my garage. Who knows where yours is but there is truly nothing more important than comedy.… Well, that may be an overstatement. There are a few things more important than comedy but they aren’t funny … until we make them funny.

Godspeed. Have a good festival. We’re good, right?

The day I started taping my TV show for IFC called
Maron
, my cat Boomer disappeared. It was a monumental day. On some level I had been working toward it my entire life. Everything was changing for me. What I had invested my whole life into was coming to fruition, and on my own terms. I walked into my backyard to feed him and he wasn’t there. There was a crazy stray out there but no Boomer. So I fed the stray. Maybe he would go give Boomer the heads-up on the food. I also thought the stray might have had something to do with Boomer’s disappearance. They had been fighting. But then again, he’d been coming around for years, so I didn’t really think that was the reason. Boomer had gone away before for a couple of days here and there but he had always come back.

Throughout the first weeks of shooting my show I woke up every morning wondering if Boomer would reappear. Waking up was harder because Boomer was also my alarm clock: Every morning he would go into the crawl space under the house and
let out his raspy meow just beneath my bedroom, asking me to feed him. After about a week I knew he probably wasn’t coming back.

Boomer was a unique and very intuitive cat. He had a full range of emotions that you could read on his face. He had been a feral kitten when I got him at a shelter in 2002. A crazy antisocial cat that evolved into a warm, sweet guy. There were obstacles along the way. My second wife and I got him to keep another cat we had company. That was a female cat called Butch, who died young. I was away when she died. My ex said that Boomer really showed up for her after Butch. I’m glad someone did. I was away a lot. Boomer had that sense. He knew when you were hurting and he would be there for you.

Boomer had one flaw: He peed on everything. I mean everything. You never saw him do it. We thought about setting up cameras in the house to catch him but there was really no point, since he was the only cat. He peed in luggage, on shoes, on books, on furniture, where we made food, everywhere. It’s amazing how much of that behavior cat people will tolerate before something forces them to take action. One of two things has to happen. Either friends come over and, immediately upon entering your home, say something along the lines of “Holy shit, did a giant cat pee on your house?” You respond with something along the lines of “Wow, really? I can’t even smell it.” Or you end up spending a good chunk of your day wandering around your house smelling general areas, trying to focus in on where the pee is, until one day you realize that what you are wearing is the source of the smell and you think, “How did he pee on me? We have to do something about this.”

I remember the night of the discussion with my second wife, Mishna, because it offered a window into her soul that was jarring. We were lying in bed and I said, “What are we going to do about Boomer peeing on everything?” Without even a pause she
said, “Let’s just put him down.” It was unsettling. I always knew she was a little cold-hearted, but that was disturbing. It also fed my paranoia on a cultural level. She came from German stock. As a Jew I thought that way of thinking was a slippery slope that probably led to the Final Solution. In retrospect that was probably a little extreme but you get my point.

We put Boomer outside to live. That was humane but hard for me. I worry. There were other cats out there. Mishna acquired a calico kitten to keep Boomer company. That was Moxie. Moxie was a fat, shameless, needy cat. She was very smart but she annoyed me. I like ferals. You have to earn their respect, and even then it’s tentative. Boomer and Moxie became inseparable. When I split with my ex I made her take Moxie. I guess I wanted Boomer to feel heartbreak too. I don’t think he ever forgave me for that.