To avoid getting hurt or being vulnerable, my brain hatched the perfect plan: When people make fun of you, laugh. When people hurt you, laugh. When you feel unsafe, laugh. It tricks everyone into thinking you don’t care, which is the best defense. One day when my family was ripping on my hair, I started making fun of it as well. I figured out that if you just make fun of yourself first, you can beat people to the punch. And if you can’t beat them to the punch, just punch yourself. Anything for a laugh.
Of course we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously, but there’s a difference between having a healthy perspective and emotional self-flagellation. For the first thirty years of my life, self-deprecation was my main approach, although I now feel that a little piece of you dies every time you put yourself down. Even as a joke. Seemingly meaningless quips like “God, I’m such an idiot” or “Of course I forgot my keys, I’m such a mess” are death by a thousand cuts to your soul. If anyone spoke to me the way I used to speak to myself, I would file a restraining order. Why am I so nice to complete strangers, who could be sociopathic murderers or felons, but when it comes to myself, someone I know is not a murderer or a felon, I’m Ike Turner. I’m sure there’s a fresher domestic violence reference than Ike Turner, but I feel like he’s oddly evergreen. His assholery really is timelessly classic. He’s like the Audrey Hepburn of emotionally abusive dickheads.
Once I was in therapy with Vera, and per usual, I had done something self-defeating and inane as a result of my lack of self-awareness and self-respect. As I recounted the mistake, I kept saying, “I know, I’m a moron.”
She got silent. Things got awkward and she genuinely asked, “Why would you say that about yourself?”
I thought hard about the question, wanting to come up with the perfect answer that would impress Vera and justify my habitual mindless behavior. Finally I came up with what I thought was an incredibly incisive and true answer: “I’m a comedian and being negative about myself is a comedian thing. Self-deprecating is funny.” The only issue with my brilliant answer about how funny it was was that Vera was not laughing.
“It’s actually not funny,” she said.
The fact that Vera said this was literally shocking, which is in itself shocking, given whenever I’ve said “I’m an idiot,” nobody has ever laughed. I should not have needed a professional to explain that an absence of laughter indicates when something’s unfunny, but I guess my negative, fictitious inner monologue was too loud for me to even hear what was going on in real time. Now that I’m mentally awake, I can see that being negative about yourself actually makes people not only not laugh, but get uncomfortable. It really weirds out the vibe. When we’re mean to ourselves, the people around us don’t know whether they’re supposed to agree, disagree, argue, or call a suicide hotline. Sarah Silverman has the most perfect response to people being self-deprecating. When someone says something like “I’m so dumb,” she says, “Hey, don’t talk about my friend like that.”
Sometime in 2007, while self-deprecation wasn’t working out particularly well for me, the ability to write hard-core roast jokes was. I was watching the Comedy Central roast of William Shatner, and after each setup, I was able to guess the punch lines, often predicting the exact ones that were said. I realized I had a somewhat unsettling knack for writing incredibly brutal jokes. I also realized my rent had been late for five years, so I asked my manager if I could apply to be a roast-joke writer for Comedy Central. He e-mailed me back saying the same five guys had written for the roasts since they started and that they generally don’t take on new writers. So, no. Oddly motivated by the rejection, I decided I’d just have to prove myself. I refused to take no for an answer and I wrote eighteen pages of jokes for the impending roast, which was for the great who-knows-what-he-actually-does-for-a-living Flavor Flav. If you know anything about him, you know that coming up with premises for insulting him isn’t rocket science, but I banged out as many as I could. I begged my manager to send them in.
From what I was told, the joke that got me the job was: “Flavor Flav, you look like what Magic Johnson should look like right now.” So much for good karma.
Working for the roasts was my literal dream job. I loved being in the roast writers room, where sharp comedy writers sat around all day eatin’ crap and talkin’ shit. We threw around insults all day, pertaining to the talent on the show, but also to each other. Maybe I felt so at home because I was able to re-create my childhood circumstances of dodging emotional bullets and using caustic humor to avoid intimacy. It also distracted me from my inner monologue, which heckled me with even worse insults than we wrote for Flavor Flav.
Eventually I became one of the go-to people for roast jokes, which I now realize is something of a dubious honor. But Mommy had bills to pay, and it was better than getting paid forty bucks for doing focus group tests in which I would take pills that had not yet been approved by the FDA and probably never would be approved by the FDA. So when I got a call to write roast jokes for a variety show hosted by Carmen Electra, who wanted to perform self-deprecating stand-up, it was a no-brainer.
I spoke with Carmen on the phone, and she was as lovely as she is pretty. She seemed fearless to me at the time, because this is back when I thought fearlessness was a thing. She said that she really wanted to be edgy and that I should “go for it.” This was music to my ears, given her colorful dating history. I Googled “Carmen Electra dating,” and it not only gave me fodder for jokes, it instantly made me feel better about the pathological liar I was dating.
I wrote about fifteen pages of jokes about Carmen’s personal life, professional life—you name it. In preparation for a meeting with her and the producers of the show, I printed ten copies at a local Kinko’s. I got dressed in my comedy uniform of hoodie, vintage-looking New Balance sneakers, and wacky nail polish so there was no confusion in the meeting about who the comedian was in the room. Carmen showed up with what seemed to be a manager as well as a boyfriend who seemed to think he was her manager. I remember being perplexed by how pretty she was. I put a lot of energy into trying to figure out how she radiated a golden glow. It was either what they call star quality or the perfect self-tanner/body glitter–blending skills. Either way, it was titillating and slightly frustrating. I also noticed that she lined her lips slightly outside of her lip line. I immediately regretted not having written jokes about that and not having lined my lips that way all my life.
Once the small talk and nervous laughter subsided, I proudly handed out the packets of jokes. Everyone began to read over the first page of roast jokes about Carmen. On that page they found some of these zingy zings:
(CARMEN ELECTRA)
Things are going great for me. I had a really big audition yesterday. Don’t worry, we used protection.
I’m in a great mood because I had sex this morning. But enough about my acting career.
I’m really glad they thought of me to host this show. It’s kind of perfect, because right now I actually have some downtime between divorces.