Bob
Emptiness. Utter emptiness. Right? Complete loneliness and emptiness. I do think having a family and having kids is a really, really deeply rewarding thing, but I don’t think it’s the sole hole-filler. It is not. You absolutely are on your own, man. I don’t care if you have kids and you are a wonderful dad and mom, that’s great and you should be happy, but you still have your own journey and you have to fill that hole yourself and figure it out.
I think one of the big things I’ve done in the last year is just allow myself to just change. Just really stop getting on the same treadmill every day, it just isn’t getting anywhere. Whatever that is, do some things with yourself, with your day, that just are not what you’ve always done. Whatever that thing is, just move on from it.
CHELSEA PERETTI—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
When I was young, I used to tell everyone everything, and then as I got older, I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to keep more to myself.” If I used to have a project in the works, I never would tell anyone about it. I used to be like, “If it doesn’t go, I don’t want anyone to ask me about it at a party.” I really had this fantasy for a while of printing up a bullet point list of what’s going on in my career so when I go to parties I have these little slips that I can just hand to people.
If I meet a confident person, I’m just searching for where they’re not confident so I can relate to them. Are they human? If someone just seems really together and confident, I’m like, “Come on.”
TOM SCHARPLING
Once in a while, my father would say, “Look, if you would have been a garbageman and that’s what you wanted to do, that would have made me happier than anything as long as it’s what you wanted.” Look, I’m not putting down garbagemen, but I kind of had a skill set that was making itself pretty clear at an early age, and it should have taken garbageman off that list.
DAVE ANTHONY—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I’m a self-sabotager because my father was an alcoholic and he wanted me to succeed and the way to get back at him is never succeed.
In San Francisco, one of the club owners was like, “You’re the next Jon Stewart, I’m going to give you the fucking keys to the city here, I’m going to give you all this time onstage, blah blah blah,” and I moved to New York. That’s the kind of shit I did, like, “Hey, you know what? We’re going to set you up.” Thanks, see ya.
Marc
You say the sabotage is to disappoint, I really think it’s to protect ourselves, I think that our parents were so emotionally inconsistent, that the risk was actually to get into the situation where they either said we were doing a good job or they took it away from us. I feel like we’re programmed to sort of make sure that we don’t just do a great job. Then the risk is that the old man is going to go, “Yeah, it’s not as good as I can do,” or some version of that. “Oh, you think you’re good?”
Dave
What’s crazy about my dad is, he’s still alive, he’s really, really drinking now, but over the years I would just think, “Well, he doesn’t really give a shit about my stand-up career,” but I would find out he would tell other people that he thought I was awesome, and the comedy was great, and he’d watch this and watch that, never a word to me. “Hey, how about some acknowledgment? This is why I can’t succeed!” It’s crazy-making.
And here’s the worst part, I found this out like two years ago. I was at my sister’s and we always talk about my dad when we get together and she was like, “Don’t you remember wit training?” and I was like, “What?” and she said, “We had wit training.” When my parents were divorced, we would go over there on Sundays, he would sit us down at the end of the night and give us wit training. He would throw out something and we were supposed to be funny back, and my sister would just sit there and I would engage with it because I just wanted my daddy’s love. Yeah, so I had wit training. How creepy is that?
SUE COSTELLO—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR
I have a fundamental belief that a lot of people have an aversion to love and to niceness. We take ourselves down, the self-sabotage. That is the key to life, I think. I think the key to life is realizing you are going to get fucked over, because as kids we’re all vulnerable. I don’t ever want to feel vulnerable again. I don’t ever want to be hurt again. Well, part of the maturation process is to understand it is going to happen, so suit up.
TOM SCHARPLING
I liked Pink Floyd when I was fifteen. Then there was a point where I had no use for it. I liked all the Syd Barrett stuff, but then something happened and I just started getting fascinated. There was this weird stretch with them where Syd Barrett freaks out and—maybe it’s a career thing for me, I’m just relating—but those guys were like in the wilderness for years. The guy that wrote the songs is gone, and now they are just kind of looking at each other like, “I think we’re going to keep this thing going.” They are writing songs that are vaguely like his. They have to start over, and they are doing all these things like Atom Heart Mother and Ummagumma and these weird albums.
It’s kind of fascinating to see them have to learn how to be a band publicly. They are failing wildly sometimes in front of everybody. I think maybe I relate to that part of it. I feel like I’m that right now. I feel like I’m in my Atom Heart Mother phase of my career where I kind of had a job that paid for a long time, and now I kind of don’t. I’m figuring out what my future is going to be. I’m hoping I come up with Dark Side of the Moon at some point.
I started listening to Wish You Were Here. I think it might be the most depressing album. If you think about it like this, I can probably make a case it’s the most depressing album ever. Their lead singer flakes out, they go like four years struggling to succeed, and then they come up with Dark Side of the Moon. It’s beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. It succeeds. They’re enormous now, bigger than they ever were with Syd Barrett. Then, the album after that, Wish You Were Here, is about how it’s all just worthless. They are just like, “This is all garbage. Everything we fought for is meaningless. We’re all miserable.”
Just imagine you hit the lottery twice. They hit the lottery the second time, and they are playing these sold-out shows across the world and everything. They look in the mirror and are like, “This is all just garbage. Our lives are garbage.” They write this album about how fame is worthless and meaningless. “Have a Cigar.” These songs about how it’s all corrupt and it’s a joke. No one actually knows who we are. That’s the most depressing thing ever. To get all the success, they got everything they wanted, and then they realized it was just nothing.