When Robin Williams died I was very upset. Actually, I was annoyed. I said in a group chat: “This is completely annoying.” At that point in technology, you could feel when everyone was bracing themselves, and it was into that atmosphere I let the warning settle before carrying on.
“For years,” I finally typed, “all I have heard is ‘Don’t be like Robin Williams,’” and now, I exclaimed, everyone was pouring over themselves to praise him. “I remember,” I typed, without functionally real italics but they were clearly felt, “when he showed up one night as Assscat, and no one knew what to do with him.” No one else typed anything back. “Don’t you remember?” I typed to the emptiness. “It was so sad,” I added, and I meant it very seriously. Back then, with technology, you could tell when someone did.
That is not what I thought you were going to say, one friend finally replied. And this I remember because it wasn’t what I thought I was going to say either. I had no ties to Williams, he had never been a hero of mine, outside of Dead Poets Society, I had no favorite movies starring him. No one had ever had to tell me not to behave like Williams in an improv class because I never would have; I did not like his style. When he did arrive at the famed weekly showcase of the best teachers, it was a surprise that I felt just as uneasy as everyone else about. At that period, the idea was that everyone in an established improv group was a genius and doing things with their minds that it took years - specifically enough years to pay for at least five rounds of classes, if not more - to learn. His brash, loud, fast takes were simply not what we were about. In fact, he was going against everything we were paying to be taught to do. And on stage that Sunday night, our teachers confirmed it, flailing at Williams’s flails, jumping at his jumps, screaming at his screams.
I remember only one person on that stage who did well with him. At one point another actor was being a person, and Williams came in, hands fluttering together towards the actor’s shoulder, to be a bird. It was abrupt, and it made no sense, and it was clear that the actor being a person had no idea what to do with Williams the bird. The silence of a Choice the Improviser Hates seeped in, until, suddenly, Zach Woods - or someone else who was tall and gentle, but in my memory it’s Woods - appeared from the wall. He, now an absurdly secondary bird, glided to the shoulder of Williams’s bird. Suddenly, we could all see it: one bird, on one shoulder, that was chaos. But a second bird, on a first bird, on one shoulder - that was actually very funny.
*
Sometimes I run into comedians I used to know in my neighborhood, where people in their thirties and forties who haven’t made a lot of money still live comfortably. On occasion, I see them in commercials, in bit roles of TV shows and streaming service movies, in the credits of an awards ceremony that went on too long. Mostly, though, I see them walking down the street, standing on a train platform, in line at the merch table of a small concert, or, once, at the DMV. In that last case, we spoke, not because I wanted to, but because a small man jerked at my arm, and when I looked down he said “I know you. Why do I know you?” The answer is that I used to serve drinks at a monthly show that he and so many others frequented, and also that we’d done some other gig job together, but all I said then was, “My number is being called.”
The truth is that it really isn’t any use to tell a comedian where they know you from. His grasp of my arm, wholly unwanted, came from the fervor he felt when he thought I might be someone. Trapped with him inside the Department of Motor Vehicles, I could have been the very someone he needed. But I was really just a bartender, just someone’s friend, just a girl who hung around for no real reason other than what else was she doing. Had I told him this, he would have released me, but whoever I could have been will never be safe. If he does meet her one day in a federal building where no one’s allowed to leave, he will not ungrasp her arm. He would sooner break it off and carry it home with him, I think, than let that someone - that someone he believes in far more than himself - get away.
I did try, once, to become a someone like that. I wrote out a set about what was happening in my life at the moment - no real job, crashing with friends, not eating meat, very typical stuff. I had been miserable in improv, absolutely torturous to pull off the back wall. When I began improv classes, I’d had a grand idea that comedy would make me a better writer, but I had not realized how much I would hate performing. Telling jokes at an open mic was easier, but as soon as I left the stage I felt hot and I shook and I knew right away that I would die. I went home and threw up for 24 hours. In every moment I saw myself back on stage, I felt it completely, I was there again, it was hell. I had done the mic at the urging of a friend, and I remember that when I was okay again and met him at a bar, having texted him constantly throughout every moment of vomiting, he acted like I’d been through war. “Never again,” he said, and he meant it sincerely. “I’ll never make you do that again.” He hadn’t made me do anything, of course, but I was grateful anyway. I did not want to do it again, ever, ever again. It was nice to hear out loud that I wouldn’t have to.
Had my friend not been so concerned that this perfectly normal experience was literally going to kill me, I wonder if I would have tried to go back. I wonder how long it would have taken me to stop vomiting. Because what I know now is that what I felt in those 24 hours of vomiting was intense, thrashing memory. I wonder when I would have realized that the thing I needed to kill to carry on wasn’t fear of the unknown, like I’d always assumed in my improv days, but the deep imprint of what I had already been through.
Still I think that in that moment I began finally to recognize how much memory killed comedy, because after that I didn’t think comedy was going to help me write anymore. My entire life, actually, was about memory, had always been about memory, in many ways revolved around sitting and thinking not only about things that had already come to pass, but how exactly it had felt to be passed by them. I did not understand how detrimental this was to the nature of performance until it was far too late. Once, in high school, when I was still supposed to become an opera singer, my voice teacher had spent an entire lesson teaching me how to act. It was not enough to sing, I was to walk into a character like I was her entirely, like I had never been me at all. Why not, I asked, just sort of put her on like a glove, and then I’ll act the way I would have in these situations, underneath.
I saw her eyes glare, I felt her loss of words. You’re not there, she finally heaved, utterly unable to deal with how much I did not understand this. She isn’t you.
*
Were I not me, I could be you. You could hear my jokes and you could think you’d said the same thing. If I had nothing, behind everything I said to you just now - you could take it easily. When I put my life behind it, we stop being able to share. Good comedy doesn’t come from one person standing on the back wall watching their life flash before their eyes. It comes from people who are able to share everything, and in return take everything too. That emptying out, beginning over and over and over each time, that’s how you clear the room, so everyone who walks in can fill it back up. When I was younger I called this bravery, and I still believe there’s bravery within it. But it’s a little pathetic too, isn’t it? And it’s a little callous. And more than anything, it’s false. And if my 21-year-old self were to hear me, yearning only for truth, I think she would have thought I was so full of shit. But she would have agreed with me too, late at night, after the shows, in the bar. We all did, back then. It was our greatest, stupidest secret.
Before Me Too, I was the only person officially banned from UCB. On the wall in the box office of the basement of Gristedes, there were two photographs. One of the original UCB 4, and one of my older sister and me, printed off my Facebook, presumably by the then-intern who told me about this a few years after it was hung. Underneath the photo was an arrow pointing to my sister, and here it read “She can come in.” The arrow pointing to mine: “She cannot.”
They had printed the photo off when it was discovered that I was using my sister’s expired ID to order drinks even though I wasn’t yet 21. I was getting very drunk off these drinks, like basically everyone around me, but I was underage, and it was upsetting. More upsetting, now that I’m a much older person who has seen a lot of young women like me, was the way it was handled, but back then the main devastation in my life was the end of my career in comedy, which I hadn’t really wanted, but also had wanted, stupidly, secretly, late at night, always in bars.
Like everyone else, I wanted to write, but I wanted to write something better than whatever was available. A dramatic but clever film, or a really excellent miniseries - nothing so gauche as a sitcom or sketch show. My friend Lana Schwartz wrote, accurately, that in this period of television everything was better than SNL, and everything felt like it would be that way forever. We would be stunned, now, to realize that SNL is celebrating its 50th anniversary mostly alone. The other shows, the places you went when you were much better, deeper, more indie, frankly funnier, those aren’t being watched, those barely exist. The websites where everyone made money that was still good then but presumably much less than what they’d make on TV are gone. I know of a few male comedians who essentially pivoted to becoming on-demand role models for hopeless losers on YouTube, and while you’re grateful that they’re at least keeping a few school shooters from finding their calling, it isn’t the landscape you’d expect to find yourself in so soon after such a boom.
Still no one is able to say exactly how it all happened. Was it Covid, was it Trump, was is the systematic breakdown of the arts that we’re all experiencing in one way or the other. Yes, of course, it’s all of these things, but you’d never know it if you tuned into SNL this weekend, or last weekend, or next weekend. How painful to watch a show attempt to relive fifty years of glory when to even remember last year, for Lorne Michaels and co., is impossible. They can look to the past, of course, but they can’t see anything. Michaels is obsessed with nostalgia, which is not so much the opposite of memory as its murderer. To see whatever you want most from the past, instead of what was - this is how you end up with a sketch tracing the history of New York City over the last fifty years whose soul concept is: crime. Crime outside, forcing you inside, where you yearn to be coddled by the joyful renderings of Lorne Michaels, a brilliant young man who in no way is very old and out of touch now.
The result of such selective remembering is obvious to anyone who’s tuned into not only SNL, but the creations of those churning things out with its blessing on their own time now too. This is a show that adapts to the moment in such a way that most sketches about current events consist of simply reading verbatim whatever a politician said that week. If you saw something on the internet, I hope you enjoyed it, because SNL has decided that it would actually be better on television. There is nothing they can’t reduce into something that Michaels is sure will appeal to the most faceless man in the world. In no way does this dull headache persist more than the show’s attempt to fix its own problems. Rather than meaningfully reckon with decades of lack of diversity, Michaels looks head on at each sketch with whatever minority he’s finally given a spot to and says “what if the joke here is that you aren’t white.” And then, every week, there’s the joke, brand new, faceless, never-before-seen, still shiny in its packaging. If you’ve never seen a person who isn’t white before, if you’re brand, brand, brand new, you’re in for a real treat.
Nothing has let me down in the last decade of our national ruin more than comedy, and this is not because I have been requesting anything of it. On the contrary, following my ban and subsequent vomiting episode, I vowed to never ask anything of comedy ever again. But still I am stunned at the cowardice of it. No group has been more silent on every pressing issue than those still hoping for a job on whatever the worst show on television is today. Now when I see a comedian, more than anything else, they are groveling. They are begging for someone, anyone, to let them in. In order to be let through, they’ll forget any beliefs they once had and and absolutely everything wrong in the world. If you can see it being right, so can they. If you can get the joke, they can make it. When you’re willing to become whatever’s standing in front of you, it doesn’t matter what sort of crowd you’re trying to make laugh. If you don’t believe in anything, nothing ever matters at all.
That’s kind of like the big line, right? From that one show?
What’s that guy like these days? What was he like back then?