by Jessi Klein
But the truth is—sometimes I do miss miss.
But there are also things I don’t miss about being miss.
I don’t miss being so vulnerable. I don’t miss not knowing anything about anything. I don’t miss not knowing it’s better to have your clothes tailored. I don’t miss people talking to me like I’m a full-on idiot, even though I often deserved it, because that’s pretty much what I was. I don’t miss not being able to see the most obvious red flags that silly narcissistic men were waving.
I don’t miss feeling so horribly unsure about what my path should be in life and feeling deathly afraid of what making the wrong turn might mean. I didn’t decide to take a leap with my life until I was thirty. I threw away a boyfriend and a steady job and my parents’ way of life and went after what I wanted.
It was right when I turned into a ma’am that I finally put up my dukes.
1 You will probably only get that reference if you’re old enough to be a ma’am.
How I Became a Comedian
1. Joan
The thing I am sitting down to write, I started trying to write the day after Joan Rivers died. Not to get all meta on you, but I’d had some good momentum writing and then I got a little stuck and started doing the kinds of things you do when you’re avoiding writing, like looking at bags online. The avoidance of writing, like the avoidance of most things, is almost always about fear. (Okay, to be honest, even in the middle of writing that sentence I looked at a bag again.)
I felt it but didn’t want to admit it. I was feeling afraid.
And then Joan Rivers died.
It had seemed for a few days like this might be coming, so it wasn’t a shock in that sense. What was shocking to me was how much I cried when I found out. It felt like the death of a friend whom you haven’t spoken with in a long time, but who always feels close.
I never got to meet Joan Rivers, but I adored her. I adored her because she was such a badass, and because she was a woman in comedy before there were enough women in comedy for anyone to bother counting them. I adored her because once you see A Piece of Work, the documentary about her life, it’s pretty much impossible not to love her. You see her filing her jokes on index cards in an enormous metal cabinet that spans a hallway of her hard-earned Upper East Side Versailles-style mansion and you think, I need to work harder, because this seventy-something lady is lapping me by the minute.
I saw her perform live once, about eight years ago, when I was living in Los Angeles. She was a force. Dressed in black pants and a black tunic and some blingy scarf/boa accessory, she was onstage at least ninety minutes, if not more. And I remember that words kept pouring out of her, with force and lust. Her performance was the difference between banging on a typewriter and pecking at a keyboard. It was all forward decisiveness, and no going back, no hesitation. Fearless.
When I tell people I do stand-up, they often say to me, “You must be so brave,” but that’s not really true. What bravery exists is sort of a secondary symptom to an underlying problem: desperate, aching need. In fact, I am so not brave that it took me years and years of therapy and arguing with myself and justifying why I was not doing stand-up, to try stand-up. Over the course of more than a decade, it is performing that has led me to possess some small amount of bravery, not the other way around. Which is why Joan’s utter fearlessness is so inspiring to me.
Every now and then some person younger than me wants to talk to me about how I became a comedian. So here it is.
2. Groucho
At age nine, I saw Duck Soup on TV. The Marx Brothers’ movies used to pop up occasionally on late-night PBS, back when we had a television that still required you to get up to manually turn the channels. I had a love-at-first-sight thing with Groucho. I felt like somehow he was the male me, or that I was perhaps the female him. In either case, an outside observer would strain to see a similarity (although in a few years I would grow a little mustache); I was shy and quiet with no friends. But Groucho was constantly lobbing sarcastic asides and witty observations into the air, to no one in particular, and I thought: This is what I do all the time, but in my head, thinking these things to no one. I watched Animal Crackers, The Cocoanuts, A Day at the Races, and even the movies considered lesser works because they featured the unfortunate Zeppo, who was clearly kind of glomming on.
At that time, the atmosphere of our family dinner table was always somewhat strained. Even on the evenings when we started out on a good foot, some little nick would always cut into the good feelings by the end; a rude comment from my tired, frustrated father to my tired, sweet mother; my little sister’s refusal to eat her food without a Kermit puppet goading her on; my older brother, increasingly withdrawn, burying his nose in a sci-fi paperback, tucking one side of it under his plate and holding the other side open with his hand. We were a weird group, like the Royal Tenenbaums if there was no Gwyneth and everyone had a cold.
It was in this environment that I remember, from a very early age, feeling the first little pings of need to lighten the mood. If I said something funny, my family would laugh, and the clouds might part a little bit.
When I was assigned a research paper in school, I decided to do it on the Marx Brothers. In support of my effort, my father bought me tickets to see Groucho: A Life in Revue, an off-Broadway show written by Groucho’s son about his father’s life. It was the first play I ever attended. I can’t vouch objectively for its quality, because to young me, it was the most important and greatest piece of art ever made. There was a scene at the end, which now would probably strike me as horrible schmaltz, in which “old Groucho” is being interviewed by a journalist, who asks, “Have you ever known sadness?” or something like that, and Groucho replies, “If I didn’t know what sad was, why would I spend my whole life trying to make people laugh?” My head exploded. It felt like everything made sense. I was trying to be funny because I was sad. Groucho and I really were the same. Yes yes yes. Yay, sad!
3. You’re Funny
In high school, after a brief friend-making renaissance at a small junior high, I once again struggled to connect with anyone. For four years, my Saturday nights ended with me alone, obsessively watching SNL on an old black-and-white TV I had dragged upstairs when a neighbor left it in the front entrance to be thrown away. Every day at school, I would walk past the cool kids, who were smoking and laughing on stoops right near the school entrance so the uncooler kids could see them and then they could be seen not seeing us. The alpha among them was a redhead named Masha, whose parents were from Russia and who had a cute Soviet hippie vibe, in jeans and old flannels and vintage wool Russian scarves. She was the sophisticated high school version of Charlie Brown’s Little Red-Haired Girl, while I looked like Marcie, but gayer.
I never said a word to her until senior year, when we ended up in the same painting class in a cramped room where all our easels were jammed up against one another. I was a good artist, a little morsel of identity that had never gotten exposure during my torturous four years at this math and science high school. We were doing self-portraits, and I was painting a decent representation of my body dysmorphia. I was next to Masha, who’d been chatting for half a semester with every other girl in her proximity but me. Then, as I added delicate blue undereye circles to my hawk-nosed image, she suddenly took notice. “That’s really good,” she said, breaking the ice as casually as if she’d been tapping open a crème brûlée. From that moment forward, I was welcomed into the circle of Masha’s art period chat. Maybe it was because we were just a few months from graduating and I knew pretty soon Masha’s judgment of my life would be meaningless; but whatever the reason, I opened up and relaxed and was some semblance of myself. I made sarcastic asides and witty observations, like Groucho, out loud.
A month or two into class, Masha turned to me and, with the confidence of someone used to being the last word on others’ value, said, “You’re funny.” She said it the same way she’d said my painting was good, like it was a discovery she had made that wa
s worthy of announcement. Like she was sticking an American flag in the moon. And it meant everything to me. Masha thought I was funny. I was a funny person. I had given up on competing for pretty. But funny felt like uncharted territory where there was a lot of land up for grabs.
4. Am I Dying Part 1
I was accepted to Vassar College. It was the school where my father wanted me to go1 so I obediently applied and was accepted. I graduated high school in June and teetered across the stage with the rest of my class at Lincoln Center, wearing an off-brand Laura Ashley–esque dress and heeled leather ankle boots that I had no idea how to walk in. I have a memory of my mother telling me that I was walking like a transvestite on their very first day in women’s shoes, but it seems impossible my eternally sweet and kind mother would say that. That said, it was an accurate description.
Early in July, I woke up to a dull ache in the center of my pelvis. I waited a few days for it to pass, but it remained, steady. More upsetting than the level of pain was its location. Although I was a virgin who knew nothing about my own anatomy, I decided that I most likely had cervical cancer and was going to die before I left for college. The tragedy of it, of my parents having sacrificed everything to be able to get me to this point, and then me rudely expiring before they could see their dreams realized through me, was too much to bear.
I finally told my mother about the pain I was having, and after asking me if I always made sure to wash my vagina with soap (I didn’t, usually water only) she took me to a gynecologist at a city hospital. My parents, both city employees, had excellent insurance that would have allowed us to see a private doctor, so I’m not sure why she chose an underfunded government institution for my very first gynecological exam, but that is what she did. I remember sitting in a sad dirty plastic chair with the nurse as she filled out my paperwork. When she asked me if I was sexually active, I answered truthfully, no. She looked at me. I was seventeen. “C’mon, seriously?” she said. I was being reverse slut-shamed. There were so few virginal seventeen-year-old girls in New York City that she literally did not believe me.
The exam went badly. The doctor was as much of a husk as the nurse. I remember lying on the table with my feet in the stirrups for the first time, terrified of someone going near my cervix. She tried to insert the speculum and every muscle below my neck went into shutdown mode. After wrestling with my vagina for a minute or two, she tossed her instrument on the table. “I can’t do this,” she said, frustrated with me for being such a virginal pain in the ass.
In pursuit of someone who could diagnose my symptoms, my mom shepherded me to a few more doctors in different fields, including a Greek neurologist with the thickest black beard I’d ever seen. Even though it was closely cropped, you could not see a centimeter of his skin. He could not figure out what was wrong with me, either.
As a result of this medical mystery, I sank into a deep depression. Normally an early riser, I would lie in bed till almost noon, thinking about my impending death and the fruitlessness of beginning any endeavor. I didn’t want to tell my parents I was dying, wanting to save them from this devastating news as long as possible, or at least until I was too weak to care for myself. Suffering with this news alone was often more than I felt I could bear. Twenty-two years later, I still remember one sunny morning when the depth of my sadness had me wanting to writhe out of my own skin. Since that was impossible, I got out of bed, went to our bathroom, and crawled into the dry bathtub, where I curled into the fetal position and cried silently in my pajamas.
I took to lying in my parents’ bed (which also served as our family’s couch) during the day while they were at work, and watching Comedy Central. At the time, their programming was still a heavy serving of Benny Hill reruns, punctuated by long stretches of back-to-back stand-up specials. I watched the stand-up. The shows were filled with all the emerging greats of the 1990s—Louis CK, Chris Rock, Paula Poundstone, Elayne Boosler, and, most inspiring to my seventeen-year-old mind, a young Janeane Garofalo in tights and pajama shorts standing onstage with a notebook. I wanted to be her friend, and more than that, I also felt a vague stirring of wanting to just be her. Under the covers, still in a ball, I would smile and occasionally laugh out loud at the TV. Watching them became a comfort, like being curled up next to a fire. I felt a growing warmth, a leaning toward the light. Maybe I would live to go to college. Maybe I could just make it through freshman year, before succumbing to my imaginary illness.
5. Am I Dying Part 2
My freshman year in college, I tried out for the school’s popular sketch comedy troupe, the atrociously named Laughingstock. I had to write a sketch that the group would read and perform with me during the audition, and I came up with something about a blind mime. I recall nothing about it except how funny I thought it was when I wrote it and how certainly I would die of shame if anyone were to see it now. Still, when I went to go peek at the paper that was posted the next day with the names of the four new accepted members, mine was one of them.
I had never been onstage before in any capacity. A few weeks before the show, we got access to rehearse in the black-box theater where we would actually perform. I can still remember the smell of the space, a dark smoky smell of wood and handsaws. I felt like I was now in that sacred inner sanctum of theater kids; you know (theater kids are the same everywhere), the kids who would sit in a tight circle on the grass or sing really loud in the middle of a crowded room or cry in public, tears falling down their beautiful cheeks and landing on an artfully knotted scarf.
A few days before the show, I was lying on my narrow dorm bed (which was on the floor, natch), reading Nietzsche (natch again) when I started to feel sick. My head hurt. Then my vision began to blur. I was overcome by nausea. And then, something scarier than any of the other things happened: My right arm went completely numb, from my shoulder all the way to my fingers. I tried to grab my coat off a hook on my door and found I couldn’t lift my arm. I ran to the campus medical center, where the night nurse hugged me while I cried that something was horribly wrong. As we talked, the feeling in my arm returned. After half an hour of observation, we decided I was okay. I was given some juice and sent back to my room.
But then it happened again, the morning after our next rehearsal. This time, I woke up to a headache so excruciating that I immediately projectile-vomited all over the room. In a moment of perfect irony, the vomit landed on my copy of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human. I called Penny, a girl I was friends with but didn’t always like, and she came over and cleaned up the vomit and wiped off Nietzsche. I felt a little guilty for knowing that Penny’s caretaker personality would not allow her to refuse helping me, but I was also glad my puke was gone.
This pattern of headaches accompanied by vision problems, throwing up, and bodily numbness was eventually diagnosed by the campus doctor as a series of migraine headaches, but not before I had to go home to Manhattan and get an MRI to rule out a brain tumor, which meant that for two weeks, as I rehearsed my first-ever comedy show, I was convinced, once again, that I was dying.
What was confusing about the sickness I’d been experiencing, to both me and the doctors, was I had absolutely no history of headaches whatsoever, and since that moment in college, I have never, ever had them again.
I was well enough to perform in the show. The moment I got my very first laugh, performing in a sketch I’d written about being a bad sport playing chess (wherein I got to knock pieces off a chess set over and over), I felt a wave of pleasure wash over me. And with the pleasure came an enormous fear. In retrospect, it’s clear to me that the headaches were a symptom of a reptilian terror I wasn’t even aware I had: a terror of finally taking a step toward knowing that what I wanted to do with my life was this uncertain, impossible career, completely unlike the previous things I, or my father, had ever dared to imagine for me.
6. Surf Reality
After college, unsure of what to do, I turned to my boyfriend Pete, who pointed me toward a temp agency called “Force On
e.” Force One was run by a mustachioed man named Jeff, who’d carved out a temping niche placing people at entertainment companies. It was the only temp agency in New York where you did not have to take a typing test or a Microsoft Office proficiency test, both of which I had failed at other agencies. At Force One, the only screening tool was an interview with Jeff, who would shoot the shit with you until he decided he liked you, at which point he’d ask where you wanted to work. I told Jeff I wanted to work at Comedy Central, and, after a brief assignment at Turner Publicity, where my sole task in two weeks was to call Asia de Cuba to inquire if my boss (a poor man’s Téa Leoni) had left a mink stole there, Jeff called to tell me he had a placement for me at my first choice.
I started temping for a woman in human resources who was herself responsible for calling in temps. I often described the meta-ness of this situation to my friends as similar to when you see a dog holding its leash in its own mouth, so as to walk itself. One afternoon, people from the development department called to say they’d just fired their assistant and needed a temp. In full “I’ll pay the rent!” hero mode, I requested a switch, took the elevator two floors up, and started a job I would stay at for the next seven years.
Working at Comedy Central was like college, except a million times more awesome and I was paid for it. I was in a small department where I worked for two people, one in talent and one in programming development. They were both fun and we’d do the sorts of things people do at fun jobs: going for naughtily long lunches, taking dirty quizzes on the (primitive) Internet to find out if we were perverts, and expensing the decadent dinners we’d have before going to stand-up shows. I read scripts that came bound in fancy agency binders, from CAA and UTA and William Morris. I felt like anyone who wrote anything that was bound in an agency binder was impossibly important.