comedy can save you

As an adult, I’ve never been proud of being an artist. Calling oneself an artist, especially when the art isn’t providing a sole income, feels silly, almost embarrassing. It reminds me of a teenage girl writing bad poetry, a young man who finds emotional fortitude in his guitar, delusional people in an undergrad creative writing class believing they’re novelists.

I’ve never heard a comedian refer to what they do as art, but it is, isn’t it? Writing jokes, creating a persona, performing an act? My husband has said that one thing he likes about comedians is their aversion to pretension. Perhaps this is why we don’t call ourselves artists; it just sounds too extravagant. Art is careful, thoughtful, meaningful; we’re just telling dick jokes over here! But isn’t that, too, like an artist – to say they don’t want to be put in a box?

I do not go around telling people I’m an artist. Sometimes, I don’t even tell them I’m a comedian. I don’t view comedy as something I’m proud of doing but instead a compulsion I must continue satisfying. Recently, I had a bad set, and this bad set instantly soured me, its power so much greater than any good set. Isn’t it wild, I reflected with the other comics afterward, that a good set just keeps you neutral, but a bad set derails you? A bad set puts you in a tailspin, wondering, Why am I doing this? Am I even funny? What’s the point of all of this? Should I just quit?

Of course I love comedy, but I’ve often thought, wouldn’t it be nice if I didn’t? Wouldn’t it be nice if I had no impulse to do this? If instead of driving two hours to Green Bay, I was content watching White Lotus? If I never felt this anxiety in the back of my throat as I’m trying to fall asleep, telling me I need to write more, I need to get up more, I need to finish the script and think up a new closer and figure out how to post some goddamn videos to instagram? What if, instead, I went to bed thinking, Tomorrow should I try to make a black forest cake?

A month ago, I drove to Chicago to do a show at the Lincoln Lodge. There was another woman in the green room named Jeanie Doogan. Another comic was asking her about her kids - Jeanie’s a mom of four - and how motherhood must have changed her and her perspective. But Jeanie said it hadn’t. She’s the same person she always was. I chimed in and said that what changes is how you spend your time, and how tired you are, and she agreed. The conversation moved on, the show began, I left the green room.

Then a couple weeks later, at a playdate, I was talking to a couple other moms of young children, about the all-consuming nature of motherhood. “But yet,” I told them, “isn’t it crazy that we’re still us?” But these moms disagreed. “Who I am has been lost to motherhood,” one of them said. And then she said that I was lucky that I did comedy. I thought about Jeanie again.

I messaged her and asked if we could chat, and then, as my daughter napped and my son read books about ferrets (his latest obsession), I gave her a call. Often I think about how becoming a mother has impacted my comedy – how it led to us leaving LA, how it has slowed my progress, how difficult it makes traveling – and those things are true. I’m on a different timeline than people without kids. Of course I wouldn’t trade my kids for a better career, but their presence has altered my journey. This wasn’t why I called Jeanie, though. I wanted to hear what she thought about the inverse, how comedy impacts motherhood. She said, “I tried very hard to almost separate parts of me so I didn’t lose them to motherhood… Comedy helped me preserve a part of myself that otherwise I probably would’ve lost doing other things for other people… Comedy is the one thing that has solely been for me.” She said other women have other methods for maintaining balance, to keep them rooted to themselves - exercise, book clubs, moms night out – but comedy was even better than those, for her, because not only was it her passion, but it brought in money, which justified her being away.

I sometimes think of comedy as something I love but wish I didn’t love, like an abusive boyfriend I can’t leave. But it’s only now, after talking to those moms and to Jeanie, that I see comedy not as a burden or an embarrassment but as a support, as a source of grace, especially during this season of motherhood. I have things to think about that aren’t my kids, shows to look forward to, a reason to get out of the house, times when I am appreciated as someone besides a maker of lunch and reader of books and folder of laundry, the sense, once in a while, that I’m lifting people up, bringing them joy, shocking them. Jeanie said, “It is a gift, because it’s a passion you’re lucky enough to pursue.”

It might be too easy to say that comedy is making me a better mother, but comedy certainly is maintaining my self outside of motherhood, and for that, I am grateful.