Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [14]
Bill’s wife, the comedian Adrianne Tolsch, tells of the time when she found out that she was going to be in Newsweek magazine in a big article featuring her as one of the new “Queens of Comedy.” “I called Mom, dizzyingly excited and proud. ‘Mom, Newsweek magazine called me one of the new queens of comedy!’ I said. ‘A two-page spread, with a picture and everything!!’ … And Mom said, ‘You don’t say hello? You don’t say how are you? And we don’t get that magazine here.’ She lived in Los Angeles.”
Then there’s the comedian friend (who asked to remain anonymous) who tells the story of coming home for the holidays right after she had broken up with her comedian boyfriend. “My father would not stop praising him. I finally said, ‘How can you be so enamored with a man who didn’t love your daughter?’ This made my father so angry, he stormed away from the dinner table. At that point, my mother stared daggers at me and said, ‘I can’t believe you. Your father has never known anyone who was on The Tonight Show before.’ ”
It’s in our DNA to believe that our mothers have our best interests at heart. The idea is presented as truth in every corner of our culture. Clearly there’s a wide assortment of ways to define “best interests.” I even wrote this essay in order to try to recast otherwise disturbing anecdotes into something useful and uplifting. Because no matter how uncomfortable the circumstances were the first time through, it’s a really gratifying gift when an audience laughs at an awful narrative from a painful past. It’s almost like some kind of heavenly jury has redecided an unfair original verdict in favor of the poor weary kid with the saner perspective.
Therefore, when people ask me, as they sometimes do, how to get into comedy, I have mainly one piece of advice. I tell them, try to be raised by a woman who has at least five or six of the following traits, which I culled from descriptive lists solicited from the people whose Crazy Mommy stories you just read: bright, clever, crafty, fearless, complex, artistic, resourceful, and inventive while at the same time oblivious, controlling, manipulative, neurotic, tasteless, intractable, solipsistic, thwarted, repressed, inconsistent, critical, self-destructive, depressed, angst-ridden, furious, suicidal, violent, narcissistic, fearful, self-loathing, selfish, and sadistic.
If your mother has some qualities from each of the two areas, congratulations. Entertainment-starved drunks await you!
Naturally, the legacy of a mother like this is not only upbeat. Side effects may also include the inability to ever trust anyone or feel at ease with yourself. You may also experience depression, hypersensitivity, obsessive compulsive disorder, masochism, backaches, migraines, rashes, eating disorders, and other rage-related symptoms. In my own case, my mother’s relentless micromanagement and harsh criticism instilled in me a sense of insecurity that, some twenty years after her death, can be managed but not eradicated entirely. And I got off easy. Dealing with my mother was not nearly as difficult as it must have been for my comedian friends who tell stories about alcoholic, drug-addicted, manic-depressive, narcissistic, sadistic, and Munchausen by proxy mommies.
Fortunately, we live in an era where therapy and counseling lurk around every corner. Especially in Los Angeles and New York, where a lot of comedians wind up. Comedians are to the therapy economy what ten-year-old boys are to the videogame industry.
Because I had been seeing a therapist for three or four years, when my mother insisted that I show her a television show that I had written and also appeared in, I decided to try out a new approach in my ongoing effort to make our interactions less painful. So after agreeing to let her watch a video of my work, I presented her with