As far as trying to stay friends with somebody that you have a hard time thinking about what they’re doing against what you’re doing, focus on them needing a friend. It takes a good friend to stay with you in hard times. It takes a good friend to stay with you in good times. Everybody needs support, everybody does. So you’re letting me down, if you see me doing something and you have a hard time coming to terms with it because of how you’re feeling about your own life. What’s really happening is you’re letting me down as a friend. You’re being a shitty friend by being jealous.
I coulda used you. I got divorced. I got a show canceled. I could have used a friend. Those times that were making you jealous, I was struggling. But you shut me out because you were having a hard time. And then I did it to you, out of resentment.
Marc
Well, can we get back on track or what?
Louis
Yeah. I think we can.
Marc
You understand me. Not a lot of people do. You were always able to give me a great deal of relief.
Louis
We understand each other’s flaws really well. We share some, and we’ve known each other long enough. That’s why we’re able to tell each other things that we don’t want to tell anyone else.
Marc
Well, I love you, man.
Louis
Yeah. Same here.
Marc
Let’s just try to be better friends.
Louis
Okay.
PARENTING
“I Was Doing It the Wrong Way”
I think anyone who knows my work at all knows I am not too happy with the way I was parented. It’s okay. You can’t choose them. It’s random. I’m not mad at them anymore. It is their fault that I struggle in the ways that I do in certain areas of my life, but life does go on. How emotionally crippled you let yourself be does become a choice if you are self-aware enough. I believe it is difficult to unfuck yourself completely, but at the very least you can train yourself to act better and hope that it will take.
I really had no idea what people were talking about when they talked about self-parenting: what it meant and that it is necessary. Obviously, I know the basics, like living alone, paying bills, shopping, cleaning myself, how to get online, and mailing a letter. The emotional component is different. It’s not essential that you have to be emotionally healthy to survive. Sometimes the opposite is true. In the last decade or so it’s become very clear to me that the choices I’ve made with my life were weird, extreme attempts at self-parenting and self-acceptance. Most of my creativity is a corrective.
As someone who is not a parent, I wind up learning a lot from people who are. Ali Wong came into my garage and pumped breast milk in the middle of our interview. It was an important moment for me, seeing that level of commitment and devotion from a new mother. A similar thing happened when I was talking with Louis CK about his kids and he got choked up recalling the emotional moment of his first daughter’s birth. I’ve known Louis for decades, but I’m not sure I ever saw him cry. A big part of my brain is awestruck by people who put in the arduous work of parenting. It’s probably why it terrified me most of my life.
The one thing I have done for the longest in my life is stand-up. I wanted to be seen, heard, and to be myself. I wanted the audience to be my parents. I wasn’t looking for adoration or love because I didn’t trust either. I just wanted to be myself and be accepted. I fought with audiences for years because I thought they were judging me, and of course they were. That’s what they do. I would go out of my way for years to defy their liking me and I thought it was just my style. If they liked me, I would alienate them, just like a kid fights with his parents.
I would exhaust my friends, girlfriends, and audiences with needs that could never be met because the time to meet them was gone and my parents had dropped the ball. I had to put the cap on my personality and accept that those old childish needs weren’t going to ever be met and that’s okay. I’m okay. I’m me. That is self-parenting. It’s painful. I don’t think I fully processed the grief of not getting my needs met when I was a kid. I had to be humbled by life, accept that, get sober, stop yelling at girlfriends and wives, stop draining my friends, treat myself better, and be proud of what I do.
I have self-acceptance now. Age helps. I didn’t really grow up until I was in my late forties. I brought myself up pretty well. I’m glad I never had kids. I just didn’t want to put them through my own selfish struggle with being a grown-up. It wouldn’t be fair. I have cats. They don’t talk and they barely like me. It’s perfect.
AMY POEHLER—COMEDIAN, WRITER, PRODUCER, ACTOR
I don’t like anyone else’s kids. You think having kids makes you like all kids, but it doesn’t. You just like your kids. Especially if you’re by yourself because you’re like, I don’t have my kids now. This is the time where I’m supposed to pretend like I’m twenty-four and traveling the world by myself.
LESLIE JONES—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
Children are crazy. We are crazy because we’re full of hormones, we’re full of new beginnings, we’re full of veins that are being developed. We are crazy. I hate to say it like this, but they are like pets, because you have to train them. That energy goes somewhere. It’s either going to go for the positive or is going to go for the negative, and my mom knew that about me because I was that kid.
My first comedy special is named Problem Child because my mom used to call me that. She sat me down one day and she was like, “You know you are a problem child, right?” It wasn’t even like I was doing things on purpose, I was just a clown and I did not know it. I was just always in trouble.
ALI WONG—COMEDIAN, WRITER
So many people discouraged me from having a kid because they were like, “Why are you going to have a kid? We’re never going to see you again.” It’s true. It’s very rare to see a female comic who has a kid or is pregnant. Female stand-up comics don’t get pregnant because once they do have a baby, they disappear. They become a martyr and then they stop doing stand-up, but that’s not the case with male stand-up comics. Male stand-up comics, they have a baby and they get up onstage a week after the baby’s born, talk about it, and then they’ll complain about how the baby’s shitty and they’re boring and annoying and all these other shitty dads in the audience are like, “That’s hilarious. I identify.”
Then their fame just swells because now they’re this relatable family funny man all the sudden, and they get an HBO special and a sitcom deal, and the mom is at home suffering with bloody nipples, broken pussy, career over, and so, for me, I had a lot of anxiety about it being over once I had a kid, and I was like, “I’m not going to let that happen. I don’t want even being pregnant to slow me down.” I planned it that way because I was like, “I need to know for myself that this is not the end.”
LAKE BELL—ACTOR, WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER
I birthed at home. It was very important to me. I would do it again, even though if you asked me right after, I’d be like “Fuck you.” It’s just a massacre.