Attempting Normal (27 page)

I prepare a yearly Thanksgiving dinner for twenty-four people at my mother’s house in Florida. It is a healing and horrifying event for me, full of joy and spite. My mother taught me to be afraid of food. Not all food, but certainly all foods with sugar and fat in them, so almost all food. I think the first word I was taught by my mother was
mommy
and the second word was
skinny
. Counting calories was how I learned to do math. My mother has been 116 pounds for as long as I can remember. Needless to say, she is an awful cook because she doesn’t eat anything that normal people would want to eat.

I like to cook. I didn’t learn much in college but I did learn to appreciate cooking. I had a philosophy professor who threw awesome parties at his house. He was one of those borderline inappropriate teachers full of menace, intelligence, and sexuality and he was a gourmet cook. At one of his soirées I asked how he learned to cook and he said by reading cookbooks. Then he hit on me. That’s it! I was inspired—not to be gay but to learn how to
cook. The idea that I could do something giving and seemingly selfless for a group of people and still be the center of attention seemed like a magical talent. I wanted to cook for people—or “at” people, as a recent girlfriend accused me of doing. It all made sense. I wanted to cook at my mother for making me crazy.

Of course I cook with spite. That is part of my creativity as a comic and an amateur chef. Armed with a knack for recipes and a vengeance against my mother, I started the tradition of traveling from wherever I lived—New York, Los Angeles—to Hollywood, Florida, to cook
at
my mother and
for
my extended family.

Every year I get to her house a few days before Thanksgiving and start stocking up. Fresh-killed turkey, turkey parts, potatoes (sweet and regular), cream, sour cream, whipping cream, butter, sugar, flour. I fill my mother’s fridge with some of her mortal enemies. She deals with it. She likes having me there once a year. She even has her one knife sharpened and borrows a carving set.

I refuse her help and I mock her questions.

“Can’t we use low-fat sour cream?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you use half the butter?”

“What’s the point? This is once a year.”

“Will you make a few brussels sprouts without butter?”

“Fine. I can do that. Now leave me alone. I am cooking.”

The stuffing is the key to my Thanksgiving dinner. It is a recipe passed down to me from my college professor. It is rich and mind-blowing. It is memorable. It makes an impact. It is talked about. I cook the stuffing outside the bird.

Last Thanksgiving, in the crucial moments before serving the meal, I put the stuffing in the oven in the condo next door to brown the top. Mom’s neighbors are snowbirds and we use their condo for a second oven. She has the keys. I ran back to my mom’s
to strain the brussels sprouts. I went back next door to a smoke-filled kitchen. I pulled the stuffing out. It was black and smoldering. I stormed back to my mother’s and said, “We’re screwed. Everything is ruined. Send everyone home.” She came back with me to the other condo. I paced around screaming, “What’s the point, let’s throw it away, the whole dinner is destroyed!” My mother said, “Scrape the burnt stuff off the top. Stop making a production.”

I wanted to make a production, The “Marc’s Thanksgiving Dinner Is Perfect” production. I do every year and now my lead actor was a mess and might not be able to perform.

“What do you know about food? Who is going to eat this? Look at it!”

“So what?” she said. “You’re being a baby.”

I was. I pulled all the charred stuffing off and I put out the food. No one seemed to notice. The dinner was a hit.

My mother sat there with her plate of plain brussels sprouts and some of the black stuffing top.

“You know what, Marc? The burnt top is the best part.”

I guess my mother loves me.

  25  

Welcome to the Montreal Just for Laughs Comedy Festival and fuck you, some of you; you know who you are. Wait. Sorry. That was the old me. I would like to apologize for being a dick just
then. Goddamnit. See, that’s progress. The amount of time between action and apology was seconds.

I am excited to be here. So I will now proceed to make this speech all about me and see where that takes us.

Things are going pretty well for me right now and that is a problem. I don’t know what kind of person you are but I am the kind of person who when things are going well there is a voice in my head saying, “You’re going to fuck it up. You’re going to fuck it up, Marc.” Over and over and over again. I just wish that voice were louder than the voice screaming, “Let’s fuck it up! Come on, pussy! What happened to you? Fuck it up. Burn some bridges, fuck up your career, fuck up this speech, break up with your girlfriend, start drinking again, pussy! You used to have balls and edge! Have you forgotten what it’s like being alone on a couch drunk and crying with no future and nothing left to lose? Have you forgotten what freedom feels like, pussy? Fuck it up!”

So, that is going on right now.

When they asked me to give this speech months ago the first thing I said to my manager was “What? They can’t get anyone else? With this much time? Really?” Then my manager said, “They want you.” So I asked, “Why me?”

Why ask why me?
is the better question. This was obviously a good thing—I got the gig—but I’m the kind of person that needs to deconstruct even a good thing so I can understand what is expected of me and who is expecting it. You would think, “Well, Marc, they want you to be funny.” Not good enough. In my mind I needed to know what the angle was. Did no one else want to do this? Did someone drop out? Be honest, who said no already? Chelsea Handler? Did Chelsea Handler say no already? I don’t want Chelsea Handler’s sloppy seconds. Am I cheap? I mean, shit,
I’ve been doing comedy for twenty-five years and I’ve been invited to this festival maybe twice before this. Which is ridiculous considering how many “new faces” I’ve tried out along the way. To their credit the festival did have me on the “remember these old faces” show a few years ago, but I get it. Let’s be honest. I haven’t made anyone in this room any real money. I’m currently working out of my garage. I am in a constant battle with resentment against many people in this room. So, again, why me?

You see what happened there? Within minutes the opportunity to give this speech became “This is a setup. They’re fucking me. What kind of bullshit is this?”

That is the kind of thinking that has kept me out of the big time for my entire career.

Okay, I’m going to try to address both sides here—the industry and the comics. It’s not really an
us against them
situation but sometimes it feels like it is.

As I said, I have been doing stand-up for twenty-five years. I’ve put more than half my life into building my clown. That’s how I see it. Comics keep getting up onstage and in time the part of them that lives and thrives up there is their clown. My clown was fueled by jealousy and spite for most of my career. I’m the clown who recently read
The War for Late Night
and thought it was basically about me not being in show business. I’m the clown who thought most of Jon Stewart’s success was based on his commitment to a haircut. I’m the clown that thought Louis C.K.’s show
Louie
should be called
Fuck You, Marc Maron
.

Three years ago my clown was broke, on many levels, and according to my manager at the time, unbookable and without options. That was a good talk:

My manager: Nobody wants to work with you. I can’t get you an agent. I can’t you get you any road work. I can’t get you anything.

Me: Uh, okay, so, uh, what do we do …

My manager: Are you looking at my hair? Why are you looking at my hair? Does it look bad?

Me: No, it’s fine. What should I do?

My manager: I don’t know what we’re going to do. Stop looking at my hair. Am I fat? Seriously, am I?

My first thought after that meeting was: “I’m going to kill myself.” My second thought was: “I could get a regular job.” My third thought was: “I need a new manager.” I think I had the order wrong. I drove home defeated. Twenty-five years in and I had nothing. I was sitting alone in my garage in a house I was about to lose because of that bitch—let’s not get into that now—and I realized, “Fuck,
you can build a clown, and they might not come
.” I was thinking, “It’s over. It’s fucking over.” Then I thought: “You have no kids, no wife, no career, certainly no plan B. Why not kill yourself?” I thought about suicide a lot—not because I really wanted to kill myself. I just found it relaxing to know that I could if I had to.

Then I thought maybe I could get a regular job. Even though the last regular job I had was in a restaurant like twenty-five years ago. I said to myself,
I still got it! It’s like riding a bike. Just get me a spatula and watch me flip some eggs or some burgers
. Then I thought, “What, are you fucking crazy? You think they’re going to hire a forty-seven-year-old man whose last restaurant job was part-time short order cook in 1987? How are you going to explain those lost years? Are you going to show the bar manager your
Conan
reel? You’re an idiot.”

Broke, defeated, and careerless, I started doing a podcast in that very garage where I was planning my own demise. I started talking about myself on the mic with no one telling me what I
could or couldn’t say. I started to reach out to comics. I needed help. Personal help. Professional help. Help. I needed to talk. So I reached out to my peers and talked to them. I started to feel better about life, comedy, creativity, community. I started to understand who I was by talking to other comics and sharing it with you. I started to laugh at things again. I was excited to be alive. Doing the podcast and listening to comics was saving my life. I realized
that
is what comedy can do for people.

You know what the industry had to do with that?

Absolutely nothing.

When I played an early episode for my now former manager in his office, thinking that I was turning a career corner and we finally had something, he listened for three minutes and said, “I don’t get it.”

I don’t blame him. Why would he? It wasn’t on his radar or in his wheelhouse. There’s no package deal, no episode commitment, no theaters to sell out. He had no idea what it was or how to extract money from it
and
I did it from my garage. Perfect. It took me twenty-five years to do the best thing I had ever done and there was no clear way to monetize it.

I’m ahead of the game.

So, back to the offer for this speech. I thought
wait
, that’s the reason they want me—I do this podcast out of my garage that has had over twenty million downloads in less than two years. It is critically acclaimed. I have interviewed over two hundred comics, created live shows, I am writing a book, I have a loyal borderline-obsessive fan base who bring me baked goods and artwork, I have evolved as a person and a performer, I am at the top of my game and no one can tell me what to do—I built it myself, I work for myself, I have full creative freedom.

I am the future of show business. Not your show business, my show business. They want me to do this speech because I am the future of our industry.