Sick In The Head: Conversations About Life And Comedy Part 35

Judd: It's like Archie Bunker going on tour as a stand-up.

Roseanne: I'm going to do whatever it takes and I'm not going to let them-I'm not going to let this not make me funny-so I suffered the indignities. I see other comics going through the same s.h.i.+t. Once you make it, it's, like, well, you're not like hungry or whatever. What the f.u.c.k am I supposed to talk about now? My maid?

Judd: I think about that, too. Did I have a different point of view when I was broke? I don't think I did. I mean, obviously a lot has happened but I don't know if my point of view about things changed.

Roseanne: Define broke.

Judd: Well, I shared an apartment with Adam Sandler and the rent was four hundred and twenty-five dollars a month and I was just trying to make enough money to eat and go to the Improv.

Roseanne: How old were you then?

Judd: Twenty-two, twenty-three.

Roseanne: What did you guys do to make each other laugh-or were you just depressed all the time?

Judd: It was very different because Sandler-it was clear that he was going to be a big star from the second you met him. It was fun because he had the charisma of a worldwide comedy star but he had no outlet for it, so his outlet would just be hanging out with you at Red Lobster. He had all that power and energy, and he would try to be that funny with you all day long because he had no one else to do it with.

Roseanne: Oh, s.h.i.+t. That's what's worth it all. That's what I miss: There are no comics to hang with and make each other laugh. I miss that a lot.

Judd: I went to the Comedy Cellar in New York recently. You go there and there's this group of people working hard, making each other laugh, hanging out all night long and-you know, when you have kids and a life, it becomes hard to say, "Honey, I'm going to go hang out at a club for a few hours...."

Roseanne: That's why you need to have a screening room. That's what I used to do, but then I couldn't do it anymore because I had to home-school my kid. So I had no life.

Judd: How did that work, homeschooling?

Roseanne: Argh.

Judd: Leslie and I always talk about that. Wouldn't it just be easier? School ruins everything. You're stuck in their schedule. The schedule doesn't make sense because the kids have to get up too early. They're too tired. They have too much homework. They have no life. Was homeschooling better?

Roseanne: It was a f.u.c.king ball. I'd be like, "We're going to Paris and we're going to go to the Louvre to study art," you know. We did awesome s.h.i.+t like that.

Judd: But it's a full-time job.

Roseanne: Yeah. But I had two tutors because I can't f.u.c.king read. I'm blind.

Judd: How old is your youngest?

Roseanne: He's eighteen and he graduates, please Lord, in three weeks.

Judd: And he's homeschooled?

Roseanne: No, he was. He went back to school in eighth grade because he got over the hyperactive stuff. He was so hyper, they wanted to put him on drugs.

Judd: He just pulled out of it? Some kids get over it.

Roseanne: The thing is, they've got so much focus it's like they're not focused. I have it, too. I'm so focused but I have my choice of a thousand things that I'm interested in-you know, too many options. I try to do too many things at once.

Judd: And then you melt down and get nothing done. It's just that your brain is trying so hard getting so much done and then you realize you're not getting anything done. I actually was diagnosed a few years ago with obsessive-compulsive thinking. That's probably from childhood trauma-from being hypervigilant. But I think it makes you a good producer and performer and writer. The thing that ruined your life makes you good at your work. And then you get rewarded at work, so you don't bother to fix it in your life.

Roseanne: That's exactly right.

Judd: So what did you do about that?

Roseanne: Things happened to me that-you know, I got pregnant with my son and I had to have a fifth baby. But let's talk about the obsessive-compulsive thing for a minute. I was told when I was a girl that every Jewish woman has to have five children to replace three-fifths of our people that were killed. That's how I was raised.

Judd: Wow.

Roseanne: In an apartment building with survivors from concentration camps. So I had trauma because I couldn't even talk.

Judd: Parents don't realize that when they teach you about the Holocaust too early, it ruins you for life.

Roseanne: It ruined me for life. I remember the exact moment well-I was like three and they had the TV on and they were of course enjoying the Eichmann trial. When they weren't talking about Eichmann, they were talking about babies on meat hooks. They used to say it in front of me. I was so horrified by the world but I looked at the TV and it showed the piles of bodies, and I was like, I don't want to be on this f.u.c.king planet. This ain't for me. f.u.c.k it. And I went in the bathroom, in my grandma's house. There was this black b.u.t.ton on the door, and I turned it. I had to stretch real hard to turn that lock. So then they were all like, "She's locked herself in the bathroom," and then it was like all this screaming. I was never-the only time they talked to me was to tell me that the n.a.z.is used to shoot little girls right through the head in front of their parents. That's how they talked to me. Other than that, it was like, "Pick that up." They were all traumatized. Everyone was traumatized.

Judd: I didn't go to Hebrew school. My parents went the other way-everyone in the family became atheist. No one was religious. That was their way of dealing with the Holocaust.

Roseanne: G.o.d is dead, that's what they said.

Judd: But I remember I went to Hebrew school once with a friend, just visiting. And they showed the Kristallnacht doc.u.mentary and it definitely messes with you. That, and a fear of Russia.

Roseanne: Yeah, no s.h.i.+t-the Russians. I remember having dreams of black airplanes hovering over the house, and it was Russia. Russia was coming in black airplanes and they were going to kill us all. In school, we had to practice getting under the desk for air raids and s.h.i.+t like that. It was drilled in-that fear, was always there.

Judd: The next holocaust, the nuclear holocaust. I used to have nightmares all the time about it. I don't know the first comedy that you were interested in, but I didn't understand how I was processing any of that. I just knew that I liked the comedy figures who told everybody to f.u.c.k off. So I loved George Carlin and the Marx Brothers. I loved that the Marx Brothers were saying that all of the rich people and the leaders were idiots. I was obsessed with them. I bought every book. I was looking for somebody to say, "Isn't the world crazy? This all makes no sense."

Roseanne: I loved the Stooges. I thought they were G.o.ds. And I still do. It was f.u.c.king G.o.dly. Because it was like, you know, one's making fun of Einstein, one's making fun of Hitler. They're making fun of the politics of the world. They were f.u.c.king deep thinkers, and their subject matter was deep, too.

Judd: It's a survival mechanism, when you're a kid, to like that stuff. When did that interest turn into being funny for you?

Roseanne: My dad was a big fan of comedy. He wanted to be a stand-up, so he made me that way. My dad loved Lenny. He also loved Lord Buckley and jazz and stuff. He was a hipster. My parents were kind of beat-nicky, you know, for Salt Lake City.

Judd: Did people in Salt Lake know you were Jewish?

Roseanne: They knew. I mean we never lied about it but it's a real weird place. Like, when I was three, I fell and I got Bell's palsy in my face. My mom said the first day she called the rabbi and they said a prayer for me but nothing happened. The second day she called the Mormons and they said a prayer for me and my face was healed, so my whole life was going around as a Jew who was giving talks in Mormon churches about being healed by the Mormons. That was my life.

Judd: It's interesting that when you get older and you've raised kids and you've had your life, you look back at things that your parents did and you think, It was just so crazy-a whole other level of crazy. When my parents got divorced, my dad would never talk to me about how I was feeling. And that affects your whole life.

Roseanne: I think parents don't know what to say and, like, Jews-it's better to say nothing so that the kid comes and parents you.

Judd: That's exactly it.

Roseanne: I think we know-as Jewish parents, or maybe it's all parents, ethnic parents-that our kids are frigging way smarter than we are.

Judd: And they're supposed to make us happy. And that makes kids insane.

Roseanne: Kind of.

Judd: That's what makes you a comedian. I'm a big self-help freak and I read all those books and they're always about mirroring, that when you're with your kids, they're supposed to see themselves. They're not supposed to see your need. If they see your neediness then they just try to please you and they lose the sense of who they are because they're trying to please you. And that's what seems to create a comedian, too: How do I make other people happy?

Roseanne: Yeah, a people pleaser kind of thing. But my humor, I think, came from wanting to disarm people before they hit me. My family were hitters. And if you made them laugh, they didn't hit you. My dad wouldn't hit me if I got him with humor right between the eyes.

Judd: What age were you when he would hit you?

Roseanne: Always.

Judd: Even into like high school?

Roseanne: Oh, yeah. He'd walk over and smack me upside the head for whatever. I used to bite my nails a lot-I learned it from my dad, who bit his nails to where there was no f.u.c.king nail at all and he couldn't bend his fingers and he's like this all the time, just like anxiety, you know. And so I'd sit there biting my nails and he'd look at me and he'd go, "Stop f.u.c.king biting your f.u.c.king fingernails."

Judd: Because he loves you.

Roseanne: I'd be like, "Well, you're biting yours." And then he'd laugh. But sometimes he wouldn't. You never knew when it was coming. He'd sneak up behind you while you're biting your nail and crack you in the back of the head so hard that your knuckles would go straight up your nose and stuff. He hit me in the head constantly. He'd hit us all in the head. And hard, too.

Judd: We can't get our kids to do anything.

Roseanne: Maybe because we don't hit them.

Judd: Did you go to therapy and try to fix yourself, to learn how to not do it to your kids?

Roseanne: Yeah, but by then I had already done it.

Judd: To your first few kids?

Roseanne: Yeah. So then I'd correct it. You go to each one of them and let them curse you out and say all the s.h.i.+t that they want to say to you. And just go, "Oh, honey, I did it and I'm sorry." That's hard.

Judd: And how do they do after that?

Roseanne: Thank G.o.d, they are all functional and brilliant, creative people.

Judd: Well, almost no parents do that. Own up to their mistakes.

Roseanne: It's the hardest thing.

Judd: My mom could never do that. Well, right before she died, very briefly she said she was sorry for anything she might have done wrong. But for the most part-I once begged my mother to go to therapy and then sent her to my therapist. When she came back, I said, "How did it go?" And she said, "He told me that I'm right about everything."

Roseanne: That's a good one.

Judd: We have to have those conversations sometimes with our kids, where we say, you know, "We're not perfect people. We make mistakes and we have issues." And we try to explain what they are as they're happening. Like, "This is my issue and maybe that's why I did that. Sorry."

Roseanne: Well, I took all the s.h.i.+t off my kids because I knew they needed to say it. I was lucky enough to be able to say it to my parents, too, and do some healing.

Judd: And it somehow got you here. That's the hard thing, too, which is: If your childhood didn't happen, nothing else would have happened.

Roseanne: I don't know about that. My shrink says, "Don't say you're funny because of abuse; it's in spite of." But my whole thing is, like, I've had severe mental illness my whole life. A devastating, dissociative ident.i.ty disorder-MPD, it used to be called. I had to heal from that, and that was like fifteen years of intense daily therapy. I look back and it's f.u.c.king crazy. It's nothing you can explain to people. You can't explain to people waking up in a mental inst.i.tution in Dallas, Texas, with a shrink screaming in your face, "You don't have a p.e.n.i.s!" I mean, it's like, how are you going to- Judd: Were you high school age?

Roseanne: No, I was in my forties. It's real deep mental illness s.h.i.+t, man. But I got over it. Not over it, but I live with it.

Judd: Where do you think it comes from?

Roseanne: I think both of my parents and my grandparents were divided people, too. I mean, who's going to live through the Holocaust and not be f.u.c.ked up? I can't blame my parents. I had a good teacher, too. I had a good rabbi. He's on the other side now, too, but he helped me put it in perspective and that was all while I was doing pretty deep therapy and I just put it all back together, all those fragments which I kind of remade the world in my mind so that it made sense. It's like, you know, this is h.e.l.l.

Judd: What is h.e.l.l?

Roseanne: This planet.

Judd: Can you experience reality with MPD? Do you still experience reality where you feel like different sides of your personality are handling different situations?

Roseanne: Less than in the past. I used to never sleep more than three hours a night because I always was-you know, the whole comic thing was a big thing in my head. The comic, the writer who did stand-up. That was a separate state and I'd just get into it and, f.u.c.k, I don't want to know anything else. I'd neglect my health and my life. Once it started, there was no f.u.c.king way out. It was too much. Your head's like-you have no balance at all.

Judd: Because getting successful and being a performer, it feels like safety, but it's a safety that you can't maintain because you're abandoning everything else to achieve it.

Roseanne: You can't ever be how you are. It's like, Oh you've got to do these interviews, you have to go talk to the press and stuff-which is a scary thing.

Judd: They want to set you off.

Roseanne: They do, because they're just evil.

Judd: And you will go off if you have things to say.

Roseanne: Yeah, and that took me a while. That's what I wanted to do. Plus I have Tourette's.

Judd: How does that show itself?

Roseanne: I have to be the one who barks out what I had conceived as the thing that must be heard. And sometimes I didn't even f.u.c.king believe it, but, you know, in my head it was the perfect state of freedom. I have to say it. Because I have all that Jew Holocaust s.h.i.+t, you know. I mean when I used to play Barbies with my Mormon neighbor friend, it was always, "Oh, we're going to go on a date. Ken's taking us out and we're going with Ken on a date." And I was like, "We're parachuting behind enemy lines to save the Jews." That's how I played Barbies. It was just otherly.

Judd: Were you doing stand-up before you were married?

Roseanne: No, I had three kids when I first started stand-up.

Judd: Who did you see doing stand-up who made you think, I have to find the courage to get up and do this?

Roseanne: When I was little, my dad and I would watch Ed Sullivan together. I saw all those comics on Ed Sullivan. I saw Myron Cohen. My grandmother loved him.

Judd: Alan King.

Roseanne: Alan King, oh my G.o.d. And Jackie Mason, Jack E. Leonard, and Leonard Barr-my dad said maybe we're related to him. And then I saw Richard Pryor and that was it.

Judd: So you're a housewife and it's floating around the back of your head somewhere that it would be great to do this?

Roseanne: I always knew since I was three. When I was little, that was one thing that I was told in a vision: I was going to have my own show when I grew up. And it's going to be funny and it's going to be like Danny Kaye, who was another one of my idols.

Judd: So you always had a vision- Roseanne: I was always into TV. I knew I could get in the business somehow and find a place. I don't think I thought of what I could accomplish in the larger sense of it.

Judd: So in your head you knew it was going to happen and then you're having kids. At some point, you have to make the move to do it. What was the trigger?

Roseanne: I was a c.o.c.ktail waitress and this guy-I got tips because I made them laugh, plus you had to have half your a.s.s hanging out. I made them laugh so they'd give me big tips and this one guy one time, he said, "Hey, you're so funny you should go down to this comedy club downtown." And I was like BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG. It was literally like that. And so I'm like, "Okay, where is it?" And he's like, "It's the Comedy Works in Larimer Square in Denver." So I go down there and I watch all the comics. And I went home to write my five minutes of material-and then I just kept perfecting it. That took a f.u.c.king year.

Judd: That's incredible.

Roseanne: It was almost a year and then I went down there and did my five minutes. I look back on it now and I'm like, it was pretty b.a.l.l.sy that I said the things I said. They immediately banned me and said don't ever come back here.