by Guy Branum
When Babette presents Martine and Philippa with her letter of introduction from the famous opera star, the final line of the letter is the simple, magnificent understatement “Babette can cook.” Our world is a constant, glorious understatement of miracles we did everything and nothing to earn. One evening every spring, I remind myself to notice them.
* * *
1. I will make you read an actual joke I actually wrote at that actual job about the Hebrew calendar: There are twelve months in the Hebrew calendar, usually, but since we have a lunar calendar, we have to periodically find a way to catch up with you kids on the solar calendar. We accomplish this through a leap month seven out of every nineteen years. A leap month seven out of nineteen years: My religion is a bad episode of Star Trek. The coolest part of this leap month is its name. It comes right after the month of Adar, so the rabbis, in their infinite wisdom, named it Adar II. You really have to be impressed when the calendar is so successful it gets a sequel. I just think it needs a subtitle. Like Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo or Mannequin 2: On the Move. I think it should be called “Adar 2: Enter the Boredom of Discussing the Hebrew Calendar.”
2. In a classically Jewish bit of hyperlegality, it is celebrated for eight days in all places outside of Israel just to make sure you celebrate all seven days that occur IN Israel.
3. Cobbler: Pre-heat oven to 350. Place a stick of butter in a cast iron skillet or Pyrex 8-by-12 dish. Put the dish in the oven. Combine 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1 cup heavy whipping cream, 1 cup sugar, 19/2 teaspoons baking powder, 10/4 teaspoon salt, and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract in a bowl until it forms a stiff batter. In a separate bowl, combine 3 cups blackberries (fresh or frozen) or peaches (fresh, don’t fuck with me) with 11/2 cup sugar. When the butter in the dish begins to brown, pull the dish out. There should be a good-size pool of butter at the bottom of the dish. Pour the batter into the butter pool. It will try to rise above the batter, coating the outside of the dish. Pour the fruit over the batter. Bake until done. What? You don’t know what done is? Get your shit together.
4. You cannot believe the side-eye I received when I referred to one such job as “a rustic chop.”
5. The entrée at my first seder was an Italian Jewish salmon with artichoke sauce. I also started my habit of making huevos haminados for the boiled eggs. It’s a Sephardic recipe where you leave eggs in simmering water with onion skins and coffee beans overnight and they turn brown and delicious. Try it. You will thank me.
6. “Hey, asshole, I got you something.” Then she’d throw it at me.
7. This is the Hebrew word for yarmulke. I don’t say yarmulke because I’m from California, and California Jews don’t fuck with Yiddish.
8. Talk Show the Game Show lead judge Casey Schreiner’s query of “How much money do you have in your primary checking account right now?” is still the benchmark for what “moderately invasive” really means.
THE RULES OF ENCHANTMENT
IF YOU WERE BORN after the year 1980, you cannot possibly understand how my household was changed by the advent of the videocassette recorder. Sure, VCRs existed in the 1970s, I guess people had them, but no one I knew. The VHS recorder, and its short-lived brethren the videodisc player and Betamax, really overtook America in 1983. It was quite a year for me.
The winter of ’82/’83 was the greatest depth of the Carter/Reagan recession. Unemployment was at 10.8 percent, and my dad’s industry, construction, was one of the fields most reactive to economic slowdown. Construction is a sketchy field in the winter, anyway. Rain means no work, and no work means no money. No money means fighting. On so many gray mornings, I would wake up to find my dad still at home. That was never good. It meant anger was in the air. I knew the word “recession,” and it meant I needed to play quietly.
Then came the spring of ’83. Maybe it was Reagan’s tax cut on the rich, maybe it was global oil supplies stabilizing, maybe it was just Friedrich Hayek’s cycles of boom and bust, but the economy started moving again. This was the beginning of the glory days of 1980s prosperity and consumerism that would crash so miserably in the 1990s. Concretely, for me, a seven-year-old, it meant my life started getting better.
Uncle Ray’s family acquired a VCR before we did. This was part of an ongoing cold war between our families, which, unlike the actual Cold War, would not end with a peaceable breakdown of tension and dismantling of walls. No—wall construction or, rather, fence construction, would serve a major role in the late stages of this conflict, as my uncle Ray was, by profession, a fencing contractor.
Uncle Ray was and is my mom’s brother. My family represented the following philosophies:
1. Personal discipline
2. Domesticity
3. Observant religion (Jewish and Christian)
4. Good cooking
5. Waterfowl hunting
6. Financial responsibility
7. Book learning
His family represented the following philosophies:
1. Drinking
2. Masculinity
3. Godlessness
4. Good times
5. Deer hunting
6. Conspicuous consumption
7. Stupidity
Ray was a beer-swilling, gun-toting, pickup-driving redneck of the highest order. The sort of man who bragged because he’d never read a book in his life. The sort of man who couldn’t read a book because he was pretty dyslexic. The kind of man who bragged about things he once was ridiculed for. The kind of man who bragged and fought and blustered his fears away until it seemed they became too strong and it took beer or bourbon or something stronger to make them go away. Such was Ray. He hated me.
Ray and his wife, Dinah (who my mother would like you to know is an inferior-quality cook), had purchased a plot of land in the orchard from my paternal grandparents and built a house on it. Ray, like my dad, worked construction, so, like my dad, he built the house himself on weekends with the help of friends. Unlike my father, Ray drank a lot, so he had famously designed his house with a sunken living room and then forgotten to sink the thing during the construction process. My parents found this hilarious and brought it up frequently, much to my aunt and uncle’s consternation. No one is saying my parents didn’t fully participate in the escalation of tensions.
Ray and Dinah’s house was directly back from ours through the orchard. Their attempts to directly mirror my parents’ lives were further cemented by their production of an older daughter, Tori, and a younger son, Robby. These were the primary playmates of my childhood. On summer days, my sister and I would trek through the magic and danger of the orchard to Tori and Robby’s house or, more dazzlingly, for a party or event, traverse the distance in the night, when bats or a random dog could present real or imagined threat.
These were the early days of the cold war, when it was still barely forming, but as in any cold war, proxy wars were being fought. In our case, the puppet states were dogs. Neither Ray’s property nor ours had fences at this time, so our dogs ranged the orchard unchecked. Our dog was a German shepherd/Chesapeake Bay retriever mix named Charlie, after my mom’s other brother, I believe as a slow-burn shade in which my mom implied his wife was a bitch. Ray’s dog was a yellow Lab named Seger, I believe after Bob Seger, though possibly it was Seeger after Pete Seeger. I do not care about heterosexual men’s music enough to know the difference.
Charlie would accompany me on my many treks through the orchard, mostly occasions when I would find a stick, decide it was my staff, wand, or sword, then engage in something midway between creative play and Lord of the Rings fan fiction. At some point, Seger would arrive, and the dogs, coached by their masters to be territorial and hate each other, would growl and snarl and, about half of the time, end up getting in a fight.
Managing dog fights was like 30 percent of my childhood. In our yard or Ray’s, it was a basic game: You got the hose and turned it on them. In the orchard, plumbing was but a memory. I was instructed to flee such situations but also understood
that turning one’s back to a dog and running would indicate I was prey. Thus, I spent a great chunk of my childhood slowly backing away while Charlie tore Seger’s neck open. A key design flaw in the yellow Lab is this very floppy, poorly defended neck which Charlie opened up like a Sprite every time he got near Seger. It was a major point of pride for my father that Ray had paid hundreds of dollars to vets to have that neck stitched up. Everyone here was an asshole.
This has been rather a long digression to explain my most 1983 memory of all time. I have a memory of being at Ray and Dinah’s house on a weekend morning. I was eating C-3P0’s cereal, a promotional tie-in for Return of the Jedi that is, to this day, the single finest cereal I have ever experienced. My sister, cousins, and I were watching Gandhi on a top-loading VCR. Many of you barely know what VCRs are, let alone top-loading ones. A lot of you don’t understand why four children, all twelve years of age or younger, would be watching a three-hour epic about Indian independence. You don’t understand the resounding sensation that Gandhi was. It was in the press so much that we all thought we needed to be watching it a lot. And you can never then put together the intensely dated experience of using this anachronistic technology to watch this zeitgeisty Oscar movie, eating a cereal that existed for less than a year while hanging out with people I’d essentially never speak to after 1986. I call it my most 1983 memory out of a sense of humility and discretion, but I understand that it is truly the most 1983 memory possible for any human being.
Except for, like, Mr. T. He had a really big year in 1983. I’m sure he has some more 1983-ish memories than that.
We got a VCR in 1984. It was a really important step in ending resource dependence on Ray and Dinah. These moments when conduits of culture got added to our house were strangely empowering to my mom. I was an idiot playing with He-Man when the VCR came, but I remember my mother’s ecstasy when she first discovered cable TV was coming out to where we lived. It would be the 1990s before that happened. I do not remember her reaction to the VCR, just her steadily growing power. She and my dad would bring home videocassettes, and videocassettes were art, which enriched her. Sure, some of them were nice broad-market comedy that my dad could get behind, a Caddyshack here, a Police Academy 3: Back in Training there, but all entertainment was, to some extent, anathema to him. It was wasted time.
And oh, the wasted time she brought into our house! Movies we never would have seen at the theaters, movies that never would have played in theaters within two hours of us. I never asked to see A Room with a View or Hope and Glory; Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel just told us to watch them, and my mother complied.
Our Saturday nights got better. Diff’rent Strokes was great, but now we had the option of major motion pictures, each funnier, cooler, and more explosive than the last. And then there were those Sunday-afternoon movies, ones my mom would watch after the lion’s share of the work was done. Merchant Ivory. Jessica Lange feeling too much. Holocaust survivors in a dark but lovely sex comedy? My dad didn’t always watch; he didn’t have to. My mom was working a job now, and she deserved some little bit of relaxation in her week.
Soon my mother’s hunger for culture had run through the backlog of film offerings at the video store, and she started ranging further afield. Having mowed through blockbusters, also-rans, British movies we didn’t realize were British until we got them home, and Eddie and the Cruisers, she finally, on one fateful day, brought her hand to rest on a video that wasn’t a movie at all. It was a moment that continues to echo in my life.
I feel like the first one was George Carlin, though one can hardly be certain. The point is that the stand-up boom that was bringing monologuizing men in sweater-vests to strip malls, cable stations, and network sitcoms all across the country had found its way into my house, and I was rapt. Stand-up was more laughs per minute than anything I’d ever seen. I loved to laugh, I loved being entertained, but stand-up was something more. It was perspective and philosophy. Could someone with as many punch lines as George Carlin really be wrong about anything?1
This is all my highly circuitous way of saying that in the mid-1980s, in a living room in the Sacramento Valley, during the hottest part of the middle of the day, after my mother had drawn the curtains to keep us as cool as possible as cheaply as possible, we watched a video and I fell in love with stand-up comedy, the thing I make my living from today.
The stand-up comedy special that had the biggest impact on me was undoubtedly Eddie Murphy: Delirious. Before I’d even seen it, I’d heard my uncle (ten years older) and sister (five years older) detailing its coolness. When the video entered our home, it was with a tinge of awe. Finally, we were going to get to see this. My early-thirties parents, made conservative by parenthood, often felt the need to guard us from or caution us away from racy content, especially when said content came from “urban”2 voices. Not this time; they were as excited to see the special as we were.
For sixty-nine minutes, Eddie strutted onstage in a red leather suit and told the world how it was. He danced back and forth between biography and cultural commentary, simultaneously tracing a story of his very specific life and analyzing universal touchstones to assure his audience that he wasn’t so unlike them. I wanted to be like that.
The most powerful force in Eddie Murphy: Delirious is his certainty. Eddie’s intellect, sex appeal, and wit are all palpably present, but they draft behind the powerful force of his certainty. Eddie isn’t asking permission, and he’s not calling out for collaboration or validation from his audience. He is laying out a worldview and communicating it with merciless brutality. In the decade and a half that would transpire between my first blush of love for stand-up and me actually trying it, I consumed vast amounts of stand-up from numerous sources. Women, men, deadpan, prop, absurdist, and one-liner. I watched it all and loved almost all of it, but I always understood that what Eddie Murphy had done was most powerful.
My freshman year at Berkeley, my friend Lorelei laughed at something I said in conversation and said, “You’re so funny, we need to get you to an open mic sometime.” It was a simple aside, a throwaway compliment, but I took that compliment and treasured it in my head for years. I polished and contemplated that compliment, but I did nothing with it.
Because you guys should probably understand by this point in the book that I had and have no business being a stand-up comedian. For my entire life, my ability to communicate my perspective to the people around me has been a constant struggle suffused with folly. My use of “suffused with folly” is the best example of said folly. Why would I use that phrasing? Whose understanding is it clarifying? My life has been this weird uncostumed cosplay in which I’m trying to be a rural eight-year-old’s best estimation of what a Victorian cabinet member’s life should be while the people around me squint in confusion. I wasn’t a class clown. Most of the jokes I had growing up were just for me. If I wanted to be that, why not go into one of those self-congratulatory fields where the abstruse would be a merit? Why didn’t I become a person who writes for “Shouts and Murmurs” or McSweeney’s?
My column for the Daily Cal was the first verified proof that people, lots of people, could enjoy things I wrote. I remember walking into the main library on campus, and the person who looked at my ID3 said, “Oh, hey, you’re funny.” Though at that age I had never had wine,4 I drank that line up like wine. I know Berkeley isn’t exactly the unwashed masses, but it is a broad, diverse populace. I think I was mostly surprised and excited that I was doing, in a tiny way, the thing I thought I’d never be able to do.
My final semester at Berkeley, I started going across the Bay to watch comedy in San Francisco. In the early days of the Internet, figuring out when and how to go to these indie shows was complex, and I was terrible at doing things outside of my regular little routine, but I loved it. Going to those shows felt sexy and dangerous.
Around the comedy scene in San Francisco back then, you’d see ads for this guy who called himself “The Comedy Coach.” I should have been immedia
tely aware of the inadequacy of his comedy skills by the fact that he did not spell it “The Komedy Koach.” K’s are just funnier. His name was Neil Lieberman, and he had a very bad ponytail, and he assured you that he had the keys to the kingdom of the comedy world. Another point I should have considered: If he understood comedy so well, why wasn’t he a famous comic? I wasn’t thinking that critically; all I knew was I very much liked the world of stand-up comedy, and I’m a person who needs to do a lot of research before I can try something.
His services were eight hundred dollars for eight weeks of coaching. This sum was unimaginable to me. However, Neil was having an introductory three-hour class at the Punch Line Comedy Club in San Francisco for fifty dollars. I could barely afford BART fare to go to comedy shows; fifty dollars was a lot, and it certainly wasn’t a sum I could imagine asking my parents to give me. They would have considered it a waste of money to pursue a different waste of money.
I scraped the cash together and I went, and at that class, I got up and “did stand-up” for the first time. It was not a real audience; it was other comics who’d paid to be there. This was not stand-up comedy. It was a baby step. I did my very long, thinky bit about how there weren’t enough roles for older actresses, so we should make them go into professional wrestling because they could make it seem less fake. The entire time, my leg was shaking in fear.
Neil Lieberman laid out a few clear rules: Leave the mic in the stand, stand in one place, write three jokes each on four topics: this will be your first five minutes. These were valuable lessons, but the biggest lesson I learned from the class was “you shouldn’t take classes to learn to do stand-up.” The only way to pursue it, it seemed, was to do it.
Finally, one Friday afternoon in the spring, I steeled my nerves, marched down to the BART station, crossed the Bay, and showed up at a small, unassuming coffee shop in the Western Addition.5 I signed up on the list, lower than I would have liked, waited through the comics before me, then, terrified, took the stage. It was wonderful, it was everything I’d hoped it would be. It was a balm for my soul, it was a give-and-take with the audience.6 It was sublime. This is not really the first time I did stand-up comedy.