People tend to describe me as a “strong woman.” I personally feel that phrase is redundant. All women are inherently strong. We regularly endure a screaming nine-pound mammal tearing through our bodies and live to post about it. I heard once that childbirth is apparently the pain equivalent of getting twenty bones fractured at once, so I think we can officially end the debate about whether women are strong or not.
Another reason I prefer to reject the term strong is because on some level it signifies enduring pain, whereas after a long reparenting process, I now view being strong as having enough self-respect and foresight to avoid pain. I now redefine strong as being brave and vulnerable enough to ask for help, whether it’s from a doctor, a therapist, or from trusty Siri.
Today if someone calls me strong, it almost feels like an insult. It usually means I’ve fallen back into putting the needs of others before my own or am overworking myself. In my opinion, our society is plagued by an epidemic of self-sacrifice and self-deprivation. We’ve become a culture of martyrs; we glorify busy and almost seem to celebrate exhaustion. In our workplaces, employees compete over who slept the least, who needs the most coffee, who worked the latest, who has the most packed schedule. There’s obviously some other psychological phenomenon at play here because people who are truly that busy don’t have time to blather on about how busy they are.
My point is, maybe I’m not strong. Maybe I’m fragile and vulnerable and terrible at snowboarding, and maybe that’s just fine.
THE ROAST JOKE CHAPTER
People always ask me how I got funny. The short answer is: I had to figure out a way to be liked. The long answer is more complicated because humor also developed as a survival mechanism to protect myself and disarm or intimidate people when I didn’t feel safe, to make fun of myself before other people could, to avoid having to feel sadness, or to mitigate the gravity of a situation because laughter was my anesthetic for pain. Also, my last name is Cummings, so as you can probably imagine, I had to learn to defend myself from insults pretty early on in life.
My parents were also very funny. My dad was a master of hyperbole and notorious for performing scenes from ¡Three Amigos! in public, much to my chagrin as a kid with low self-esteem. When he would pick me up from school, he would hide behind a car, and caw like a nasal bird, yelling, “Look up here! Look up here!” à la Steve Martin in the scene where he’s standing on the billboard. The later he picked me up, the louder his bird impressions were, always managing to make up for his lack of actual timing with impeccable comic timing.
My dad also had a very serious side, especially when it came to studying for tests. He’d drill me on spelling over and over, instilling a relentless work ethic and deep fear of failure in me. But every now and then, if I was nailing my vocabulary definitions or state capitals, he would look at the textbook I was memorizing from, bug his eyes out, and say, “You’re right, but how do we know this book is right?!” He would momentarily look super panicked, which caused me to have a complete freak-out that the textbook was wrong. Once he got me, he would crack up laughing. Then I would crack up laughing. This could have been very damaging to my psyche and ability to trust men, but in our family, laughs were way more important than mental health.
My dad’s all-time classic bit was at restaurants. After I had excused myself from the table to go to the restroom, he would dramatically shout “Hey!” Then when I’d turn back to the table, he’d wistfully announce, “I’ll wait here.” Again, this may not sound funny to you, but the fact that he did it so consistently and cracked himself up made it a timeless classic for us. My dad showed me that it’s my responsibility to provide my own joy, and that every moment is a chance to find lightness.
My whole family had jokes like this, using humor to make us all think things were fine when they were far from it. Nebulous work situations, failed marriages, and financial uncertainty were constantly joked about. Some people take pills, some people drink, some people gamble—my family cracked jokes to make the pain go away. I’m sure some of them probably also took pills and drank, but that’s another chapter I’ll write after I’ve had a couple of pills and some drinks.
My mom’s brand of humor was more of the Ab Fab slapstick genre. She’s blond and beautiful, and always dressed very stylishly, so this wasn’t a huge reach, given that she was always juggling way too many bags, balancing a coffee cup, and frantically looking for her glasses when there were two pairs on her head. I vividly remember as a kid getting stuck in a parking lot because my mom had lost the ticket. She bribed the parking attendant with whatever she could find in the car. Vogue magazine? A kid’s thermos? Panicked and bombing, she snatched the bag of peanut butter crackers out of my hand and tried to make them appealing to the Hispanic parking attendant, who I can only guess was being given more ammunition to resent white people. It was humiliating at the time, but in retrospect, I can appreciate how hilarious it was that she was bartering with trash from her car in order to absolve us of a parking fee.
• • •
Everyone in my family loved to laugh. Looking back, I now realize they needed to laugh. Loud laughter was how we all said “We’re fine!” even though in my gut, I didn’t feel like anything was fine. Laughter’s the universal sign for “Everything’s cool! Let’s keep it light!” The tenser things got, the more we laughed. My family also used passive-aggressive jokes to communicate what we couldn’t say honestly. Conversations at our holiday gatherings were peppered with insults wrapped in jokes of the “I don’t care that we had to sell the house to pay for Marcy’s divorce! We hated that house anyway!” variety. These way-too-close-to-home backhanded “jokes” were always followed by uproarious laughter. It was around then that my brain’s wiring was custom-designed; I learned never to tell anyone how you really feel and not to take people at face value. Kids, do not try this at home. Later in life this mentality morphs into a sort of emotional dyslexia. In my case, my brain always got things backward: When someone was nice to me, I’d get suspicious and wonder what their motives were, assuming they were trying either to manipulate me or to recruit me into a cult. And if people were mean to me, I’d immediately fall in love with them.
Since we communicated in loaded jabs, nobody was safe from a Cummings family roast. I remember being the target of ridicule at eight years old, around the time I became notorious for having a perpetual case of head lice. (What can I say? My scalp is delicious.) After I was sent home from school for the fifth time, my parents’ only option was to cut my hair as short as possible so the lice were more easily exterminated by whatever Rite Aid poison was being marketed as lice shampoo. This resulted in a terrible bowl cut à la Jim Carrey’s character in Dumb and Dumber. I was lambasted by my family for months for looking like Moe from the Three Stooges, a Shetland pony, and a wet poodle, in addition to some probably racist Polish jokes I was too young to understand.
• • •
I’m sure most kids would have been embarrassed or cried, which is of course the healthy reaction, but I learned pretty quickly that the best tactic was to just go numb and laugh along with them. That’s the American way, right? Be strong, man up, pretend to not have feelings if you aren’t lucky enough to be a psychopath. I developed the survival skill of giggling when I was uncomfortable. You should see me at the gyno; it’s a goddamn laugh riot.
To avoid getting hurt or being vulnerable, my brain hatched the perfect plan: When people make fun of you, laugh. When people hurt you, laugh. When you feel unsafe, laugh. It tricks everyone into thinking you don’t care, which is the best defense. One day when my family was ripping on my hair, I started making fun of it as well. I figured out that if you just make fun of yourself first, you can beat people to the punch. And if you can’t beat them to the punch, just punch yourself. Anything for a laugh.
Of course we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously, but there’s a difference between having a healthy perspective and emotional self-flagellation
. For the first thirty years of my life, self-deprecation was my main approach, although I now feel that a little piece of you dies every time you put yourself down. Even as a joke. Seemingly meaningless quips like “God, I’m such an idiot” or “Of course I forgot my keys, I’m such a mess” are death by a thousand cuts to your soul. If anyone spoke to me the way I used to speak to myself, I would file a restraining order. Why am I so nice to complete strangers, who could be sociopathic murderers or felons, but when it comes to myself, someone I know is not a murderer or a felon, I’m Ike Turner. I’m sure there’s a fresher domestic violence reference than Ike Turner, but I feel like he’s oddly evergreen. His assholery really is timelessly classic. He’s like the Audrey Hepburn of emotionally abusive dickheads.
Once I was in therapy with Vera, and per usual, I had done something self-defeating and inane as a result of my lack of self-awareness and self-respect. As I recounted the mistake, I kept saying, “I know, I’m a moron.”
She got silent. Things got awkward and she genuinely asked, “Why would you say that about yourself?”
I thought hard about the question, wanting to come up with the perfect answer that would impress Vera and justify my habitual mindless behavior. Finally I came up with what I thought was an incredibly incisive and true answer: “I’m a comedian and being negative about myself is a comedian thing. Self-deprecating is funny.” The only issue with my brilliant answer about how funny it was was that Vera was not laughing.
“It’s actually not funny,” she said.
The fact that Vera said this was literally shocking, which is in itself shocking, given whenever I’ve said “I’m an idiot,” nobody has ever laughed. I should not have needed a professional to explain that an absence of laughter indicates when something’s unfunny, but I guess my negative, fictitious inner monologue was too loud for me to even hear what was going on in real time. Now that I’m mentally awake, I can see that being negative about yourself actually makes people not only not laugh, but get uncomfortable. It really weirds out the vibe. When we’re mean to ourselves, the people around us don’t know whether they’re supposed to agree, disagree, argue, or call a suicide hotline. Sarah Silverman has the most perfect response to people being self-deprecating. When someone says something like “I’m so dumb,” she says, “Hey, don’t talk about my friend like that.”
Sometime in 2007, while self-deprecation wasn’t working out particularly well for me, the ability to write hard-core roast jokes was. I was watching the Comedy Central roast of William Shatner, and after each setup, I was able to guess the punch lines, often predicting the exact ones that were said. I realized I had a somewhat unsettling knack for writing incredibly brutal jokes. I also realized my rent had been late for five years, so I asked my manager if I could apply to be a roast-joke writer for Comedy Central. He e-mailed me back saying the same five guys had written for the roasts since they started and that they generally don’t take on new writers. So, no. Oddly motivated by the rejection, I decided I’d just have to prove myself. I refused to take no for an answer and I wrote eighteen pages of jokes for the impending roast, which was for the great who-knows-what-he-actually-does-for-a-living Flavor Flav. If you know anything about him, you know that coming up with premises for insulting him isn’t rocket science, but I banged out as many as I could. I begged my manager to send them in.
From what I was told, the joke that got me the job was: “Flavor Flav, you look like what Magic Johnson should look like right now.” So much for good karma.
Working for the roasts was my literal dream job. I loved being in the roast writers room, where sharp comedy writers sat around all day eatin’ crap and talkin’ shit. We threw around insults all day, pertaining to the talent on the show, but also to each other. Maybe I felt so at home because I was able to re-create my childhood circumstances of dodging emotional bullets and using caustic humor to avoid intimacy. It also distracted me from my inner monologue, which heckled me with even worse insults than we wrote for Flavor Flav.
Eventually I became one of the go-to people for roast jokes, which I now realize is something of a dubious honor. But Mommy had bills to pay, and it was better than getting paid forty bucks for doing focus group tests in which I would take pills that had not yet been approved by the FDA and probably never would be approved by the FDA. So when I got a call to write roast jokes for a variety show hosted by Carmen Electra, who wanted to perform self-deprecating stand-up, it was a no-brainer.
I spoke with Carmen on the phone, and she was as lovely as she is pretty. She seemed fearless to me at the time, because this is back when I thought fearlessness was a thing. She said that she really wanted to be edgy and that I should “go for it.” This was music to my ears, given her colorful dating history. I Googled “Carmen Electra dating,” and it not only gave me fodder for jokes, it instantly made me feel better about the pathological liar I was dating.
I wrote about fifteen pages of jokes about Carmen’s personal life, professional life—you name it. In preparation for a meeting with her and the producers of the show, I printed ten copies at a local Kinko’s. I got dressed in my comedy uniform of hoodie, vintage-looking New Balance sneakers, and wacky nail polish so there was no confusion in the meeting about who the comedian was in the room. Carmen showed up with what seemed to be a manager as well as a boyfriend who seemed to think he was her manager. I remember being perplexed by how pretty she was. I put a lot of energy into trying to figure out how she radiated a golden glow. It was either what they call star quality or the perfect self-tanner/body glitter–blending skills. Either way, it was titillating and slightly frustrating. I also noticed that she lined her lips slightly outside of her lip line. I immediately regretted not having written jokes about that and not having lined my lips that way all my life.
Once the small talk and nervous laughter subsided, I proudly handed out the packets of jokes. Everyone began to read over the first page of roast jokes about Carmen. On that page they found some of these zingy zings:
(CARMEN ELECTRA)
Things are going great for me. I had a really big audition yesterday. Don’t worry, we used protection.
I’m in a great mood because I had sex this morning. But enough about my acting career.
I’m really glad they thought of me to host this show. It’s kind of perfect, because right now I actually have some downtime between divorces.
Laughs. Whew. Carmen is loving it. We all flip the page.
People assume that all girls who are exotic dancers have daddy issues. I do not have issues with my dad. We have a great relationship: We talk a lot, I see him all the time, and the sex is great.
I was on Baywatch. All the women on that show were hot. They say women’s bodies are like a wonderland. Mine is more like a football field. Because I have a tight end and a lot of black dudes have been on it.
Gasp. The room went quiet. Everyone looked to Carmen to see how they should react. She forced a smile like a pro, which I’m sure she had a lot of practice doing from having to tolerate Hugh Hefner for most of the nineties. I recognized her awkward smile because I myself have forced it many times, but with way less perfect teeth. For example, I had forced this same smile when I got cheated on and found out the other woman was programmed in my boyfriend’s phone as “Sandylicious.” Realizing that this person was in pain and pretending she was fine, I thought to reach out my hand and take the stack of jokes from her. The only problem was that my body did not obey. I was too frozen in shock to do anything. Carmen held her head up high, took a deep breath, and turned the page. Fuck.
It’s sort of hard to date when guys can find naked photos of you all over the Internet. Seriously, if you Google me, your computer will get a virus.
Oof. Even as a desensitized comedian, I knew that one was rough. It managed to penetrate through whatever armor she had left and her eyes welled up, and the amount of eye makeup she had on indicated that she had not planned on c
rying that day.
This moment gave me compassion for guys when girls get mad at them and they’re confused about why. I truly had no idea what I did wrong or how to fix it. I could also tell that, like all women when we cry, some of the tears were new, but some were very, very old. “They’re just jokes,” I kept saying as I tried to manage the warm pang in my chest that felt like my heart was defecating into my stomach.
This was the first time I realized that not everyone had the same acumen for self-annihilation I had. All my life I used myself as a punching bag. Didn’t everyone? Wasn’t everyone willing to put their self-esteem on the line for a laugh? Once I stepped outside the confines of my family system and the dingy hallways of comedy clubs, apparently the answer was no. Plot twist—turned out Carmen Electra had way more self-respect than I did.
This incident taught me that the coping skills I had learned in order to navigate my family didn’t work in the outside world. I was wielding weapons I used to fight a battle that had been over for fifteen years. I was out of the boxing ring, sitting on the bench, but still had my boxing gloves on, jabbing at anyone who came near me like a half-blind kangaroo on Adderall.
Needless to say, Carmen quit the show. Before storming out, she barked rhetorical questions at me such as “Is this really what people think of me?” which led me to believe that she had some sort of awakening that day, too. Regardless, I’ll always be grateful to her for making me realize that we can use jokes to get closer to people or to push them away. Turns out jokes are like knives. You can use them to cook a beautiful meal or to straight-up stab people. Life works in mysterious ways: Some people learn from Gandhi, some from Osho, others from the Dalai Lama. My spiritual teacher just happened to have been a Playboy Playmate who married Dennis Rodman. How, well, funny.
I hope that, like me, Carmen is doing just fine.
I'm Fine...And Other Lies Page 7