Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [12]
It’s almost as though laughing at something horrible sets the clock back to a moment when everyone still had a normal level of optimism, logic, and mutual respect. Discovering a funny piece of terrain in an otherwise dreary landscape works like one of those doors that Bugs Bunny used to paint on a solid wall and then escape into anyway. Add a new and different perspective to a terrible moment, and an unexpected exit suddenly appears.
Yes, yes, I realize that the kind of problematic childhood I am describing can also produce children who kill small animals and/or average-sized members of the community, but for now let’s focus on the disturbed people who become obsessed not with snuffing out the life force of strangers but with making assembled groups of them laugh (and, of course, later telling everyone how they “killed”).
Comedy is, after all, about an imbalance of power. Therefore, creatively inclined children raised on the wrong side of a continuous power struggle end up developing an ability to see the world as a setup in need of a punch line. At least a percentage of the smart ones know intuitively that it is a great way to make things appear, for a moment, sort of manageable.
For the creatively inclined, growing up under the thumb of a good old-fashioned insensitive, dismissive, difficult, or in some cases wholly unbalanced mommy can be a lot like growing up permanently enrolled in a graduate seminar in comedy. As she presents her child with an overwhelming set of unsolvable problems, while also promising and withholding her support, a Crazy Mommy instinctively inflicts just the right amount of emotional damage needed to provide her twitching offspring with the fortitude they will need to face down the drunken patrons of bars and nightclubs. Somehow, Crazy Mommy magically senses that by backing her kids into a corner, forcing them to feel alone and under attack in a world that doesn’t make sense, she is also offering a hands-on daily workshop in how to assemble from scratch that most classic of all comedy characters: the disenfranchised, put-upon little guy.
And there’s so much more! By doing her job correctly, every Crazy Mommy also provides her pulverized offspring with an essential starter pack of unfortunate situations on which they can base their first original jokes.
The comedian Cory Kahaney offers the following example: “So my sister just started therapy, and I am very supportive because I am in therapy for fourteen years. Not that I have the greatest therapist—it’s just the longest relationship I ever had. Anyway, I tell my sister, ‘That’s great you’re in therapy,’ and she says, ‘Yeah, but I think I should let you know I confronted Mommy about the “lunches.” ’ And I am like, ‘The “lunches”? What “lunches”?’ And she says, ‘You know, the fact that she never made our lunch.’ So I said, ‘Oh yeah, the lunches. See, I would’ve started with the beatings.’ ”
In some cases, daily life with Crazy Mommy is like watching an endless one-woman show in which she stars as the poor beleaguered keeper of the flame, suffering at the hands of tyrannical children. Since she alone seems to be in charge of the whole production, she leaves her kids no choice but to set about trying to rewrite their own parts. Depending on how well they are able to do this, they can begin to imagine they are in an entirely different play.
“How to describe the family Amoros?” says comedian Larry Amoros. “Imagine Grey Gardens, but without Jackie Kennedy. My mother told me that I had an older brother named Melvin, who attended a boarding school for very smart children, which is why I’d never met him. But if he died, then I could be the smart one. When I was fourteen my father became ill, and anytime I’d do anything horrifically, egregiously wrong (like chew with my mouth open or drop a napkin), my mother would yell, ‘That’s right, upset your father. Put him in the ground.