Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (42 page)

Judd:
I was forced to realize how self-centered I was. I found it hard to shut my brain down so I could just hang out in my kids’ reality. It’s easier now because my kids’ realities are more like my own. We can talk about
Breaking Bad
episodes and why we think it is a bad idea to take Ecstasy. How would you like to spend your old age?

Miranda:
I’d like it to be just like now—writing and surrounded by people I love—except I want there to be zero anxiety. I want to feel like I’m sitting in a Jacuzzi all the time.

Judd:
I want to be like Mel Brooks. A great memory, a lot of energy, still making people laugh. I do not want to be like Jack LaLanne, pulling fifty
boats as I swim across a lake. Do you have a conception of the afterlife? Are you a spiritual person?

Miranda:
You know, it’s funny. I just wrote that I
was
spiritual and then sat here for about ten minutes trying to put words to that feeling. Everything I came up with seemed made up or like some idea I’d had when I was fifteen. It all felt distasteful to me so I erased it. I think I’m less entranced by amorphous things at this moment.

Judd:
I have some friends who had near-death experiences who felt a presence tell them to go back. It was not their time. That is all I can hold on to. When I am creative I think something more is going on, so maybe it does not end. I don’t think I am going to get ninety virgins or hang out in a beautiful kingdom. My biggest fear is that I will become a ghost and be forced to hang out in some house watching a bunch of jackasses live their lives. I don’t want to be a tree. I know that is supposed to be a beautiful thing, to become a tree or a beetle. I am not into that. I would like to stay me.

Miranda:
What are the top three times you’ve been most freaked out in your life so far?

Judd:
One, when I was in sixth grade my friend’s brother grew pot in his room. One day my friend got his hands on a joint and we attempted to smoke it in the middle of the night at a construction site. Before we took a real puff a security guard pointed a flashlight in our direction and we ran for miles and miles and miles as if he was hot on our tail. There is no chance he took even one step in our direction. We stared out the window at my friend’s house for a half hour, terrified that he would knock on the door and tell our parents. The next year I was so scared that my friends were going to become potheads that I switched social groups. My new friends eventually became the real potheads of the school, and after two years I ran back to my old friends, who never bothered to try it again. Two, when the Northridge earthquake happened it really felt like nuclear missiles were falling from the sky. The noise and the shattering of glass freaked me out. My girlfriend at the time seemed to have a bit of a mental break. Afterwards I wanted to go back to sleep. She wanted to look around so we
went outside and every time we passed a cracked section of sidewalk she laughed nervously in the way bad actors pretend to be crazy people on the TV show
Quincy.
We broke up soon after when she cheated on me with a sportswriter. A year later I tried to win her back but she refused my advances because she was dating a pot dealer. Three, I got freaked out when George Bush beat Al Gore for the presidency because he was so terrible in the debates and I assumed everyone in the country saw what I saw, a man who clearly was not equipped to lead our country.

Miranda:
One, aforementioned birth of baby. Two, that girlfriend you had who had a mental break during the earthquake? That might have been me. I was in bed and the next thing I know I’m on all fours growling in the corner. I was so scared I turned into a dog for a moment. Three, various flights with extreme turbulence. I grab the stewardesses, the people next to me—I pretty much do the dog/earth quake thing but without going down on all fours because the floor’s gross. Last question: Can you try to give a little running narration of what it’s like in your head, how the thoughts come and go? Are there fully formed words and sentences? Is it incessant and talky? Do you compose emails in your head? Or are you more in the moment than that?

Judd:
My mind is a noisy place. I tend to look for problems so I can solve them before they blow up in my face. I am like a lookout for disaster. I also have a voice that tells me to calm down. I have a TM mantra and every once in a while I try to breathe and think about some piece of advice I have heard or read, usually from the book
The Power of Now
by Eckhart Tolle. Then I will think about my mantra. About one second later I am worried that I will never have a good idea again, or that I have wronged someone in my life and I try to figure out what to do. Sometimes I am really hungry. Other times I am moved by a piece of music or a deeply felt thought and I cry. Laughter has happened, too, but less often. My great love for people and my family is pushed up close to terror and my existential crisis. Occasionally I think of a great dick joke, like when Steve Carell tries to pee with an erection, and I get very proud of myself and feel like I am adding something very positive to the world. I can almost feel people forgetting their troubles and laughing, and for a moment I feel like there
is a God or a higher purpose and I am truly happy. God gave me that dick joke. It all makes sense. Then I get scared again and it all starts over. You?

Miranda:
Many words and fully formed sentences. Whole emails written out in my head. Lots of planning thoughts—like every single moment planning what I’m going to do in the next moment, the next hour, the next day, week, year. I have the next ten years planned, work-wise. I also think a lot about washing the dishes or vacuuming. The more boring the task, the more of my mental space I have to devote to it. I also instruct myself a lot, like: “Robot, go brush your teeth.” I lay in bed and think about what I’ll bring in my carry-on bag on a trip I’m going on in five months. Sometimes I instruct myself to “free fall”—exist without thinking. It feels like falling through space. I can also get super-duper focused, wormhole-style. That’s the space that I go into when I’m working—about five hours a day. It goes by in a flash.

This interview was originally published in
Huck
magazine in May 2013.

Back in the late eighties, a friend of mine—fellow comedian and
Undeclared
writer Joel Madison—told me about this guy he knew named Tom Arnold, who was moving to L.A. to write jokes for Roseanne Barr. Before we knew it, we were hearing that Tom was going to marry Roseanne, which seemed insane and impossible. It
was
insane and impossible, of course, but it happened, and Tom Arnold went on to become one of the producers of her television show as well. My secret hope was that, through my connection with Joel, I might somehow get the call to go write for
Roseanne
, one of the biggest shows on TV. As it turned out, the call I eventually got was to write jokes for Tom’s act, which went well and soon led to a gig writing for Roseanne’s nightclub act.

For the next several years, I spent a lot of time with Roseanne trying to craft a standup act that wasn’t just about raising her family and growing up poor, but about what it was like to now be rich and mega-famous. It always felt odd to me, as a twenty-two-year-old guy without a ton of life experience, to be writing jokes for an ass-kicking middle-aged woman who happened to have multiple personalities. I used to force her to sit with me and tell me her life story, so I could try to get in her head. The depth of her experience and imagination was astonishing.

This was all happening at the absolute height of Roseanne mania, with the national anthem scandal, and the very public divorce from Tom Arnold, and the number-one show on television, year after year after year. Many people only remember the drama that surrounded her at that time, but I believe that
Roseanne
was one of the most influential shows ever on television. Because it reflected the real lives of working-class people and their daily dramas. Because it managed to be riotously funny while also
exploring the deep truths about how people were living in America at the time, and still are today. It took an enormous amount of courage and madness to make that happen.

Judd Apatow:
How much stand-up are you doing now?

Roseanne Barr:
None.

Judd:
None?

Roseanne:
I’m writing jokes. I write about fifty jokes a day for nothing.

Judd:
Do you get onstage at all?

Roseanne:
No. I have horrible stage fright—you know, how you go through the bipolar stage fright thing? Then you go on drugs to get over the stage fright and perform but then you’re not funny at all.

Judd:
Were you always scared when you did stand-up, to the point where you felt like you needed to be medicated?

Roseanne:
No, it was only after
The Roseanne Show
that it felt like that. I’d go on and I’d want to do edgy material and the audience would be like, “Where’s Dan?” I was like,
Where’s a gun so I can blow my fucking brains out all over this stage?

Judd:
Is that the worst part of success—that it defines who you are and what you do? If you succeed in one area, people think you should stay in that area.

Roseanne:
They don’t even know who I am. They think I’m Roseanne Conner. It’s like, “You’re not a writer. You’re not even a comedian. You’re Roseanne.” And then I was like,
This is freaky because I can’t get another job ever
. And I wanted to work.

Judd:
It’s like Archie Bunker going on tour as a stand-up.

Roseanne:
I’m going to do whatever it takes and I’m not going to let them—I’m not going to let this not make me funny—so I suffered the indignities. I see other comics going through the same shit. Once you make it, it’s, like, well, you’re not like hungry or whatever. What the fuck am I supposed to talk about now? My maid?

Judd:
I think about that, too. Did I have a different point of view when I was broke? I don’t think I did. I mean, obviously a lot has happened but I don’t know if my point of view about things changed.

Roseanne:
Define
broke.

Judd:
Well, I shared an apartment with Adam Sandler and the rent was four hundred and twenty-five dollars a month and I was just trying to make enough money to eat and go to the Improv.

Roseanne:
How old were you then?

Judd:
Twenty-two, twenty-three.

Roseanne:
What did you guys do to make each other laugh—or were you just depressed all the time?

Judd:
It was very different because Sandler—it was clear that he was going to be a big star from the second you met him. It was fun because he had the charisma of a worldwide comedy star but he had no outlet for it, so his outlet would just be hanging out with you at Red Lobster. He had all that power and energy, and he would try to be that funny with you all day long because he had no one else to do it with.

Roseanne:
Oh, shit. That’s what’s worth it all. That’s what I miss: There are no comics to hang with and make each other laugh. I miss that a lot.

Judd:
I went to the Comedy Cellar in New York recently. You go there and there’s this group of people working hard, making each other laugh, hanging out all night long and—you know, when you have kids and a life, it becomes hard to say, “Honey, I’m going to go hang out at a club for a few hours….”

Roseanne:
That’s why you need to have a screening room. That’s what I used to do, but then I couldn’t do it anymore because I had to home-school my kid. So I had no life.

Judd:
How did that work, homeschooling?

Roseanne:
Argh.

Judd:
Leslie and I always talk about that. Wouldn’t it just be easier? School ruins everything. You’re stuck in their schedule. The schedule doesn’t
make sense because the kids have to get up too early. They’re too tired. They have too much homework. They have no life. Was homeschooling better?

Roseanne:
It was a fucking ball. I’d be like, “We’re going to Paris and we’re going to go to the Louvre to study art,” you know. We did awesome shit like that.

Judd:
But it’s a full-time job.

Roseanne:
Yeah. But I had two tutors because I can’t fucking read. I’m blind.

Judd:
How old is your youngest?

Roseanne:
He’s eighteen and he graduates, please Lord, in three weeks.

Judd:
And he’s homeschooled?

Roseanne:
No, he was. He went back to school in eighth grade because he got over the hyperactive stuff. He was so hyper, they wanted to put him on drugs.

Judd:
He just pulled out of it? Some kids get over it.

Roseanne:
The thing is, they’ve got so much focus it’s like they’re
not
focused. I have it, too. I’m so focused but I have my choice of a thousand things that I’m interested in—you know, too many options. I try to do too many things at once.

Judd:
And then you melt down and get nothing done. It’s just that your brain is trying so hard getting so much done and then you realize you’re not getting anything done. I actually was diagnosed a few years ago with obsessive-compulsive thinking. That’s probably from childhood trauma—from being hypervigilant. But I think it makes you a good producer and performer and writer. The thing that ruined your life makes you good at your work. And then you get rewarded at work, so you don’t bother to fix it in your life.

Roseanne:
That’s exactly right.

Judd:
So what did you do about that?

Roseanne:
Things happened to me that—you know, I got pregnant with my son and I had to have a fifth baby. But let’s talk about the obsessive-compulsive thing for a minute. I was told when I was a girl that every Jewish woman has to have five children to replace three-fifths of our people that were killed. That’s how I was raised.

Judd:
Wow.

Roseanne:
In an apartment building with survivors from concentration camps. So I had trauma because I couldn’t even talk.

Judd:
Parents don’t realize that when they teach you about the Holocaust too early, it ruins you for life.

Roseanne:
It ruined me for life. I remember the exact moment well—I was like three and they had the TV on and they were of course enjoying the Eichmann trial. When they weren’t talking about Eichmann, they were talking about babies on meat hooks. They used to say it in front of me. I was so horrified by the world but I looked at the TV and it showed the piles of bodies, and I was like,
I don’t want to be on this fucking planet. This ain’t for me. Fuck it.
And I went in the bathroom, in my grandma’s house. There was this black button on the door, and I turned it. I had to stretch real hard to turn that lock. So then they were all like, “She’s locked herself in the bathroom,” and then it was like all this screaming. I was never—the only time they talked to me was to tell me that the Nazis used to shoot little girls right through the head in front of their parents. That’s how they talked to me. Other than that, it was like, “Pick that up.” They were all traumatized. Everyone was traumatized.

Judd:
I didn’t go to Hebrew school. My parents went the other way—everyone in the family became atheist. No one was religious. That was their way of dealing with the Holocaust.

Roseanne:
God is dead, that’s what they said.

Judd:
But I remember I went to Hebrew school once with a friend, just visiting. And they showed the Kristallnacht documentary and it definitely messes with you. That, and a fear of Russia.

Roseanne:
Yeah, no shit—the Russians. I remember having dreams of black airplanes hovering over the house, and it was Russia. Russia was
coming in black airplanes and they were going to kill us all. In school, we had to practice getting under the desk for air raids and shit like that. It was drilled in—that fear, was always there.

Judd:
The next holocaust, the nuclear holocaust. I used to have nightmares all the time about it. I don’t know the first comedy that you were interested in, but I didn’t understand how I was processing any of that. I just knew that I liked the comedy figures who told everybody to fuck off. So I loved George Carlin and the Marx Brothers. I loved that the Marx Brothers were saying that all of the rich people and the leaders were idiots. I was obsessed with them. I bought every book. I was looking for somebody to say, “Isn’t the world crazy? This all makes no sense.”

Roseanne:
I loved the Stooges. I thought they were gods. And I still do. It was fucking godly. Because it was like, you know, one’s making fun of Einstein, one’s making fun of Hitler. They’re making fun of the politics of the world. They were fucking deep thinkers, and their subject matter was deep, too.

Judd:
It’s a survival mechanism, when you’re a kid, to like that stuff. When did that interest turn into being funny for you?

Roseanne:
My dad was a big fan of comedy. He wanted to be a stand-up, so he made me that way. My dad loved Lenny. He also loved Lord Buckley and jazz and stuff. He was a hipster. My parents were kind of beat-nicky, you know, for Salt Lake City.

Judd:
Did people in Salt Lake know you were Jewish?

Roseanne:
They knew. I mean we never lied about it but it’s a real weird place. Like, when I was three, I fell and I got Bell’s palsy in my face. My mom said the first day she called the rabbi and they said a prayer for me but nothing happened. The second day she called the Mormons and they said a prayer for me and my face was healed, so my whole life was going around as a Jew who was giving talks in Mormon churches about being healed by the Mormons. That was my life.

Judd:
It’s interesting that when you get older and you’ve raised kids and you’ve had your life, you look back at things that your parents did and you think,
It was just so crazy—a whole other level of crazy.
When my parents
got divorced, my dad would never talk to me about how I was feeling. And that affects your whole life.

Roseanne:
I think parents don’t know what to say and, like, Jews—it’s better to say nothing so that the kid comes and parents you.

Judd:
That’s exactly it.

Roseanne:
I think we know—as Jewish parents, or maybe it’s all parents, ethnic parents—that our kids are frigging way smarter than we are.

Judd:
And they’re supposed to make
us
happy. And that makes kids insane.

Roseanne:
Kind of.

Judd:
That’s what makes you a comedian. I’m a big self-help freak and I read all those books and they’re always about mirroring, that when you’re with your kids, they’re supposed to see themselves. They’re not supposed to see your need. If they see your neediness then they just try to please you and they lose the sense of who they are because they’re trying to please you. And that’s what seems to create a comedian, too: How do I make other people happy?

Roseanne:
Yeah, a people pleaser kind of thing. But my humor, I think, came from wanting to disarm people before they hit me. My family were hitters. And if you made them laugh, they didn’t hit you. My dad wouldn’t hit me if I got him with humor right between the eyes.

Judd:
What age were you when he would hit you?

Roseanne:
Always.

Judd:
Even into like high school?

Roseanne:
Oh, yeah. He’d walk over and smack me upside the head for whatever. I used to bite my nails a lot—I learned it from my dad, who bit his nails to where there was no fucking nail at all and he couldn’t bend his fingers and he’s like this all the time, just like anxiety, you know. And so I’d sit there biting my nails and he’d look at me and he’d go, “Stop fucking biting your fucking fingernails.”