There’s a story in my new Netflix comedy special, “The Good Life,” where I’m fiercely arguing politics with my father at his house about 20 years ago. The conversation got so meanspirited that when I walked out to my car, my dad didn’t even say goodbye.
I said, “Bye, Dad.”
And he said, “Well, you’ve gone another way.”
At that point in “the special I say, “My whole life I wanted to be my dad, and at a certain point I decided I wanted him to be me.”
But if I’m being honest, that’s not what I thought in the moment. I thought something along the lines of, “What is he thinking? He’s just wrong.”
About a year ago, my dad had an acute stroke that put him in the hospital for months and now he’s home with care. He can’t stand up. He can’t walk. He can speak, but he doesn’t remember anything that’s happened in the last 12 months.
This is a huge change for my family. My dad has always been a big personality. Sometimes too big. When I was a kid, he’d sometimes fly off the handle. So in my special, I make the joke that the silver lining is that as horrible as the stroke has been, “if I’m being completely honest, it has calmed him down.”
One night, after I made that extremely dark joke, the audience didn’t know how to feel about it. It sort of sat there. I think the audience thought, Are we allowed to laugh about this guy’s ailing father? So I improvised a line: “Most of the jokes tonight are for you, but some of the jokes are for me. This is a coping mechanism. And I hope it is for you too.” That lit up the crowd. There was an acknowledgment that this was something I was really grappling with.
I’ve been doing comedy professionally for 23 years, and I’m just starting to realize that comedy is the coping mechanism I developed in my childhood. When I’m performing, I’m sharing that tool with my audience. I’m basically saying: “Here. Maybe use this.”
My dad never wanted me to be a comedian. He wanted me to be a doctor, like him. Or really any profession other than comedian. In college, I got a job busing tables at the DC Improv comedy club and he was furious.
He said, “You’re working at a comedy club? What do the people do? Strip?”
I said, “No, they perform comedy.”
And he said, “That is not your priority.”
But it was. I became obsessed with every comedian who came through that club: Mitch Hedberg, Margaret Cho, Brian Regan. I gravitated toward jokes that confessed something the comedian had experienced. I was raised in a very Catholic town in Massachusetts, and kids were never encouraged to express themselves. The conventional wisdom was: “Don’t tell anyone.” So my interest in comedy was to tell everyone.
Over the years I’ve made jokes about my life-threatening sleep disorder, my bladder cancer when I was 20, my breakups. Basically, my lowest moments. My goal is to find the comedy in the most challenging situations. If you can discover the laughs in those dark places, your bond with the audience is deeper.
When I started writing “The Good Life,” the show was about how insecure I felt as a parent of an 8-year-old. I was struggling to explain the big stuff: Drugs. Sex. X-rays. But when my dad had a stroke, the topics became even more challenging: Death. Sickness. Family crisis. The show took shape around a new question: What have I learned from my father and what can I pass on to my daughter?
Sometimes people assume that comedians are trying to mock their subjects. That’s not always true. In my case, I’m trying to understand who they are. So I’ve spent the last year of my life trying to understand my dad. And it’s hard.
When crafting the special, one of my first jokes that landed was, “When I was a kid, it seemed like my dad knew everything. He was a doctor and in his free time he got his law degree. That’s how much he didn’t want to be a dad. He thought, What could I do in these slots of time when I would be parenting? In fairness, we weren’t great kids. We always … wanted a dad. … And he wanted another secondary degree.”
As I wrote other jokes like that, I felt the necessity to look at my own blind spots. It only seemed fair. When was my dad a good dad? When was he a good doctor? When was he a good role model? I ended up painting a portrait of him that is, I hope, loving.
After a lifetime of puzzling over the mystery that is my dad, it was the art form that he desperately didn’t want me to pursue that helped me understand him the most. Twenty years after he told me, “you’ve gone another way,” I’ve realized that I definitely have and that’s OK. Better than OK. It’s funny.
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