Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [10]
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