Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [13]
When inevitably the day comes that the child grows up and has metamorphosed into a rage-filled comedian, standing alone in a darkened room full of Crazy Mommy substitutes who have now paid money for the privilege of offering their conditional love as audience members (which completes the circle by including the right to scream mean things at the person they are watching on the stage), he or she will also know intuitively how to maintain his or her cool under pressure, thanks to all those years of practice deflecting Crazy Mommy.
Don’t forget that although the world at large may roll their eyes as each Crazy Mommy goes on her appointed rounds, the children she raises are required to take her seriously as long as they live in her home. They are told to accept her point of view as reasonable, and to obey it without question. And this they are expected to continue indefinitely into adulthood if they want familial peace, as we see in this cautionary tale from the comedian Wendy Liebman: “The day before my first/only wedding at age forty-two, I said to my mother, ‘Mommy, please don’t play the drums tomorrow.’ Yes, I still call her ‘Mommy.’ I told her not to play the drums because she loves to play the drums and has been known to sit in with the band at functions where there is a band. She says, ‘Why not?’ I say, ‘Well, it’s my only wedding, and I just don’t want you to play the drums.’ ‘Okay,’ she says. Cut to the night of the wedding, after she’s had some wine: I see her make a beeline for the drums. I step into her path and look her in the face. ‘Mommy, what are you doing?’ I say. She says, without missing a beat, no pun intended, ‘I’m going to play the drums.’ I stand there speechless. My new husband of three hours looks at me and says, ‘Let her play the drums.’ My mother played the drums at my wedding.”
So we see that a standard model Crazy Mommy, with her inability to see her children as separate human beings who have their own easily bruised feelings, is also supplying them with all the important paving stones on the path to becoming funny. The comedian and writer April Winchell also offered an example from her childhood of both skewed maternal judgment and the comedic usefulness of a carefully placed non sequitur: “There was a local TV show on when I was a kid called The Sandy Becker Show. He had kids on and talked to them. So when my sister was about eight she wanted to be on it more than anything. My father pulled a few strings and got her on the show. While she was backstage, a couple of wardrobe mistresses got into a nasty argument, and one of them called the other one a ‘dyke.’ My sister went to my mother and asked her what a dyke was, and my mother said, ‘She’s a woman who never gets married,’ which wasn’t too bad for 1958. Finally, it was my sister’s turn to go out onstage and talk to Sandy Becker. She went out and sat on his lap. He started asking her questions: What do you like to do? What do you want to be when you grow up? Finally he asked her if she wanted to get married, and she said, ‘Oh no, I’m going to be a dyke.’ After that, they hustled her off the stage pretty quick. She was devastated; she had no idea what happened. Sobbing, she asked my mother why they took her off the show. And do you know what my mother said? ‘Your head was too big to fit on the screen.’ ”
I grant you that at first glance the very idea of a childhood so hammered by insensitive behavior that it creates people driven to seek love and attention from inebriated strangers may seem truly pathetic. But it’s also lovely that show business exists to provide this kind of arena, where the emotionally pummeled can offer their wounds for the inebriated to lick.
Perhaps the most ironic part of the whole Crazy Mommy syndrome is that even after the comedian in training has grown up, moved away from home, and bothered to achieve enough status in show business to offer his or her discounting parent concrete evidence of his or her success in the outside world, it rarely changes the original parent-child dynamic. Our friend Bill Scheft discovered