Waiting for the Punch Read online

  JIM GAFFIGAN—COMEDIAN, WRITER, PRODUCER, ACTOR

  Four boys and two girls and I’m the youngest of six. The oldest in my family is my sister Kathy, and she’s, I don’t know, she could be like a hundred and I wouldn’t know. My brother, Mike, is, I don’t know, fifties. It’s all a blur. It’s like, who cares? I kind of know that there’s six kids over seven or eight years, they’re just old.

  Marc

  You saw them all leave, I imagine.

  Jim

  Yeah, yeah, it was a little bit difficult. You’re leaving me here with these people that are crazy. A little bit of the enthusiasm wanes in parents, right?

  “You’re still here?”

  “Yeah, I’m still here.”

  So there was some of that, but there was also such an amount of distrust that develops in parents of that generation. They had been lied to by so many teenagers, by the time I got there, they were just like, “You’re guilty!”

  And I was like, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  They were like, “Just go to your room.”

  JOHN OLIVER—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR, TELEVISION HOST

  When my dad first started taking me to football games, to Liverpool games, I would make him let me wear my full Liverpool kit, so this was me at eight, nine years old. My full Liverpool kit, underneath whatever I was wearing, because there was a part of me as a child that felt if someone got injured on the field, they would just turn to the crowd and say, “Does anyone have a kit so that we can carry on?”

  And I would say, “Yes, my name is John. I’m eight years old,” and clearly somewhere in me, I think that this is going to turn out well. That this eight-year-old is going to physically compete with these twenty-nine-year-old super-fit athletes.

  I wore cleats. You could hear this clip-clop of this eight-year-old kid going, “Let’s do this.”

  MARIA BAMFORD—COMEDIAN, ACTOR

  I used to play the violin and I used to be very good at it because, you know, I started when I was three. It was forced on me in a way that I was not conscious of until I was around eleven and then I said, “Oh, I think I’d like to quit.”

  They said, “No. Oh, no. You cannot. Because we have put in a lot of time and money, and you’re freakishly good at it, so why not continue?” I was good at it, but I did not enjoy it at all.

  PAUL SCHEER—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR, PODCAST HOST

  My mom took my “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3D album and broke it over her knee because a song on there was called “Nature Trail to Hell.” It was on one of the devil worship lists that the church had given out. If your children have any of these albums, and one of them is a “Weird Al” album, you must find it and destroy it. That and my LL Cool J album. It was terrible. I was crying, like, “Nooooooo! My ‘Weird Al’ album!”

  I got to tell “Weird Al” that story, which was awesome. There’s nothing satanic about “Weird Al” Yankovic.

  Marc

  Actually, that might be Satan. You never know. He’s very cunning. He’s charming.

  Paul

  Satan comes in Hawaiian shirts.

  My mom took all my action figures away and gave me Ten Commandments figures. I had Moses. Literally a Moses action figure, and he had two tablets in his hand, like the Ten Commandments. I would play with them, like I would play Batman or G.I. Joe. I’d make Moses swing down a pole and get into a Batmobile. I still had the Batmobile, so Moses would drive a Batmobile.

  CONAN O’BRIEN

  We were hardcore Catholic growing up. Church every Sunday. The whole nine yards. It’s in my bones. I mean, as much as I’ve tried to evolve past it in certain ways, it’s in my bones.

  Marc

  What are the liabilities of it, carrying it with you in your mind?

  Conan

  Body shame. I’ve been accused over the years of, “You’re self-deprecating and that’s your act.” You know what? It really comes from finding myself very flawed. I think that’s at the root of Catholicism. We’re all just flawed. There’s nothing we can do about it. I grew up just having a very dark self-view.

  Marc

  Why? Because you were too tall, or too what?

  Conan

  Too skinny, too tall, you know, my dick’s too big.

  I hate to get that out there as a rumor, but do you know what I mean?

  My dick is huge, and it’s got a lot of girth.

  Marc

  Yeah. Don’t want to hurt people.

  Conan

  No. The thing is I was so worried for a long time. I actually had doctors say, “You’re going to hurt someone with that.” Then it was only later in life that I found out that this is a great gift. For years I lived with the shame of this, “My penis is too big. I hope no woman ever finds out.” You live with these things, and then you eventually learn to work with them.

  I was not a hypochondriac, but I probably feigned illnesses to get my parents’ attention. I didn’t believe I had the illness. When you’re one of six kids, you’ve got to do anything to get some face time, so I was not beyond trying to just have something.

  I remember I read Death Be Not Proud, the John Gunther, Jr. story. It’s about a boy who’s fourteen, and he gets a brain tumor. It’s really touching. Everyone is supposed to read it when you’re thirteen, fourteen years old, and you’re supposed to just feel so terrible for the boy. I read it, and I thought, “Man, that guy is getting so much attention.” I remember envying a kid with a brain tumor, and he dies at the end of the book. I remember thinking, “Man, brain tumor. That’s the way to go.”

  NORM MACDONALD—COMEDIAN, WRITER, ACTOR

  When I was very young, I was very, very, very shy and very afraid of everything. I mean, people say they’re shy when they were kids, but it was a pathology for me.

  This weird thing happened to me when I was young. I don’t know if this means anything. It wasn’t religious or anything, but it transformed me to some degree. I was so fucking afraid of everything, and if I went to a store, I’d have to walk around forever before I could even face a person in the store to buy a pack of gum. I don’t know why the fuck I was like this.

  Anyways, when I was nine, we lived in rural Ontario, and there was a blind friend of my dad’s. My dad said, “Take him to the store.” I was like, “What the fuck? I have to take this blind fucker and I’m already shy and shit?” I’m taking him to the store and then the fucker wants me to explain everything, describe everything to him, so I’m like, “There’s some grass over here, and now there’s a lamppost,” and this guy’s all happy. What is it about the lamppost? I mean, it’s just a lamppost. It goes on and on, but something happened to me during this. It sounds bizarre, but something happened to me where I was actually, instead of always looking inward, which I think I’d always done before that one time, I was looking outward. Anyways, while I was talking to him, I suddenly had a sort of hysteria, like I was laughing. I started laughing, and I don’t even know why I’m remembering this, but I started laughing about everything, and everything seemed very, very funny to me.

  A couple weeks later, I saw a homeless guy and he started talking to me, and he was talking to me about John D. Rockefeller. He was like, “I was at John D. Rockefeller’s funeral!” and all this shit, and I was laughing at him. And then he started laughing, and I was like, “It’s all fucking crazy shit.”

  Now I find everything funny except really serious stuff.

  MOLLY SHANNON—COMEDIAN, ACTOR

  I was raised by my dad from the time I was really little. He was very Catholic so he was repressed in a lot of ways, but he was also really charismatic and fun and would do anything and was real wild. We would do crazy stuff, like we would go to the airport and we would be like, “Let’s take a mystery trip.” We would have no suitcases or anything and it was when they had those airlines where you could pay right on the airplane. Do you remember that? People Express. We would go to the airport, pick a city, and just fly to the city and then borrow clothes when we got there or b
uy clothes. Like crazy stuff and my dad would call in sick for me to school.

  Then I hopped a plane when I was twelve. We told my dad, me and my friend Anna, “We’re going to hop a plane to New York,” and he dared us. We went to the airport and we had ballet outfits on and we put our hair in buns and we wanted to look really innocent and this was again when flying was really easy, you didn’t need your ticket to get through.

  Marc

  Apparently you didn’t need an adult either.

  Molly

  We told my dad and we saw there were two flights, we were either going to go to San Francisco or New York and we thought, “Oh let’s go to New York, it’s leaving early,” and so we said to the stewardess, “We just want to say good-bye to my sister, can we go on the plane?” She was like, “Sure.” Then she let us on. It was a really empty flight because it was out of Cleveland, Ohio, and we sat back there and then all of a sudden you just hear “Woosh!” The plane takes off and we had little ballet outfits and buns and I was like, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women.” Then the stewardess who had given us permission to go say good-bye to my sister came by to ask if we wanted snacks or beverages and she was like, “Can I get you ladies something to eat?” She was like, “Oh, motherfucker!” We wondered if we were going to get in trouble, but she ended up not telling anyone and then when we landed in New York City she was like, “Bye, ladies. Have a nice trip.”

  Marc

  It’s such an exciting story but the irresponsibility of all the adults in this story is somehow undermining my appreciation of it. You were twelve-year-old girls in fucking ballet outfits and everybody’s sort of like, “Have a good time.” What world was that?

  Molly

  It was crazy. It was a crazy world.

  We called my dad. “We did it!” He was like, “Oh God, Molly, oh jeez!” He didn’t know what to do. He said, “Try to see if you could go find a hotel where you could stay and me and Mary”—my sister—“will come meet you, we’ll drive there.” Basically we were like, “All right, we’ll try to find a hotel,” but he was kind of excited because he liked crazy stuff. Basically we didn’t have that much, we had just our ballet bags and a little bit of cash, so we went to a diner and we dined and dashed and we stole things. We were like little con artists.

  We made it to the city. We just asked people, “How do you get to Rockefeller Center?” because I had just seen it on TV.

  Marc

  Nobody said, “Are you girls lost?” Nothing like that?

  Molly

  No, nothing. We did try to go to hotels and my dad would call and ask, “Could they just stay there until we get there?” and none of the hotels wanted to be responsible. He was like, “All right, you’ve got to come home, but I’m not paying for it, so try to hop on one on the way back.” The flights were all so crowded, so we ended up having to have him pay for it and he made us pay it all back with our babysitting money.

  He loved that kind of stuff. Like I said, he was wild. In his drinking days he would go to bars and if somebody didn’t let him in he would be like, “Damn it!” He would go into the bar and knock all the glasses down. He was the kind of guy who could, maybe, get arrested. It was crazy.

  Marc

  I love the strange nostalgic excitement you have for this borderline child abuse.

  Molly

  It was complicated. He was also a very loving parent. I think it’s complicated. He was also really supportive and made me feel like I could do anything, and so in that way it felt really free and wild, but then in other ways I had to learn the rules of how regular people live. From other people. Like, professionals. Like, people you pay.

  JOHN DARNIELLE—MUSICIAN, WRITER

  I want you to think about wherever you were when you were five. The place I grew up seemed big to me in my mind. The hallway. I remember running all the way to the end of the hallway, and running all the way back down and being exhausted. I’m running all the way to the heater at the end and back. In reality, that’s two steps. Now that I’ve been back in the house, it’s two paces. I remember running down that hallway. The distance between my room and my parents’ room, which I remember being a walk, as if I have to go see Dad to talk to him about something, I’m going to walk down the hall. That’s also two steps.

  We had added a room while I lived there, and it was called the front room. I remembered it being a cavernous, big room with a very high ceiling. It’s a fucking garage. It’s where the students live now because now it’s a rental unit. There’s a fucking poster of Biggie and Tupac on the front door.

  I went there. I was like, “These people won’t mind if I knock on their door,” so I knocked. They had never heard of me. I was glad, that would have been really awkward. “Hey, it’s Johnnie. Really, this is my old house. Can I come in and make you feel sad about shit?”

  I walked in and looked around and just went, “Whoa. We had a piano in there and a stereo.” I looked at the backyard, I looked at my old room, and I nodded and said, “Thank you,” and then told my therapist about it when I got home. It wasn’t too traumatic. It was interesting. It was sweet in a way. It was good to see. When you feel like you’re okay with where your life is at, it’s good to see the smaller place it came from.

  AHMED AHMED—COMEDIAN, ACTOR

  My parents immigrated to the States. I was a month old, I was like the Lion King. “Aaah, we’re going to America.” Then we ended up in Riverside, California, where I was raised. We were the only Arab family, not only on the block but in almost the whole city, really.

  It was very middle class and a little bit lower-middle class, mostly white families, but then our high school was really racially diverse, with black, Mexican, Asian. And we were sort of considered the “thug” high school. Athletes would come and do really well there, but there was also some gang violence and that sort of thing. When I was in high school, I blended in perfectly. When I’d say my name, they’d hear “Egypt.” They were always sort of mystified by it. I’d get the little jokes, like “Did you come in on your flying carpet?” And “Did you climb a pyramid?” And “Do you have camels?”

  Marc

  Those jokes have changed now.

  Ahmed

  Yeah. Now it’s like “Do you fly planes?” “Are you good at chemistry?” “Do you use fertilizer every day?” “How many wives do you have?”

  CONAN O’BRIEN

  I remember when I was a kid thinking, “My family is weird. We’re just weird.” I don’t know how to put my finger on it. Maybe everyone grows up that way, but I remember thinking, “We’re kind of like an Irish Catholic Addams Family. There’s something off with us.” That was the feeling that my brothers and sisters all had, that we’re an odd family. We never quite knew what we were.

  AHMED AHMED

  The kids would come over to my house and one of my friends walked in and my parents were praying, and he looked at me and said, “What are they looking for?” And I go, “They’re praying.” And he’s like, “To who?”

  I always had to explain what Islam was and talk about the belief of it all behind it. We were like the Arab Munsters. The weird family on the block. My mom was always cooking, stuff with spices that Americans weren’t used to, like cumin, stuff like that. All these weird fumes and aromas. They’re like, “Hey, what’s your mom cooking? Cow brains?” Whatever. And my dad, he was a night owl, so he’d sit up ’til three, four in the morning, watering the grass, smoking cigarettes, watering by hand. So the neighbors were always like, “What are you doing out there at four in the morning?”

  On top of that, because my parents ate only halal food, or kosher food, they didn’t sell it back then in the 1970s in the stores, so my dad had to drive to Fontana, California, with our station wagon, and load up. He’d go to a farm and load up the station wagon with chickens, ducks, rabbits, and he’d bring it back. We had a live meat locker, basically, in our backyard. Every day around five or earlier, my mom and dad would
go out to the backyard and they’d pick out a chicken, my dad would hold it down and say the Muslim prayer “Please bless this soul and let our family have sustenance,” and my mom would do it. There’s a way you sacrifice so the animal doesn’t suffer. And it’s like Clash of the Titans. She’s holding up this head, she’s got blood all over her, it was like “Aaaaah!” We were eating dinner by 9:00 p.m.

  The funny thing was, the kids would come over during the day, from the neighborhood, and play with the rabbits or the chickens or whatever, and they’d come back to find that their favorite rabbit they were playing with was gone. They’re like, “What happened to Fluffy?”

  “We ate him. We’re eating his sister tonight.”

  DAVE ATTELL—COMEDIAN, ACTOR

  I used to work for my dad. My parents had a bridal dress, tuxedo rental shop, and I worked there from the time I was sixteen ’til I was, I guess, nineteen, which is slave, underage, whatever, right? No, I guess not.

  I did everything. I cleaned the store. I was head of shipping and receiving. I sold shoes. It was me and my grandpa, so I was his boss.

  My dad was a man. I one time saw my dad, with full-blown diabetes, lift a hundred-and-fifty-pound cash register, like one of these old cash registers, just by himself. I was the guy who was working out. Back then every kid in Long Island lifted weights and practiced karate. I couldn’t lift it, and he just fucking lifted it, put it over there, lit a cigar, and said, “What next? What do we have to do next?” I’m like, “Only a man can do that because he knew it had to be done.”

  RUSSELL PETERS—COMEDIAN

  My dad was a meat inspector. He worked in a chicken plant. He would come out stinking every day. My mom worked in the cafeteria at Kmart. With the Salisbury steak, you know? A great day for us would be when there was Salisbury steak left over and my mom would bring it home. Or hot dogs, we’re like, “Yes!”