Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [11]
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 through 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