David Wong says it’s almost always a result of a shitty childhood:
You ever have that funny friend, the class-clown type, who one day just stopped being funny around you? Did it make you think they were depressed? Because it’s far more likely that, in reality, that was the first time they were comfortable enough around you to drop the act.
The ones who kill themselves, well, they’re funny right up to the end.
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The medium has nothing to do with it — comedy, of any sort, is usually a byproduct of a tumor that grows on the human soul. If you know a really funny person who isn’t tortured and broken inside, I’d say either A) they’ve just successfully hidden it from you, B) their fucked-uppedness is buried so deep down that even they’re in denial about it, or C) they’re just some kind of a mystical creature I can’t begin to understand. I’m not saying anything science doesn’t already know, by the way. Find a comedian, and you’ll usually find somebody who had a shitty childhood.
Here’s how it works for most of us, as far as I can tell. I’ll even put it in list form because who gives a fuck at this point:
1. At an early age, you start hating yourself. Often it’s because you were abused, or just grew up in a broken home, or were rejected socially, or maybe you were just weird or fat or … whatever. You’re not like the other kids, the other kids don’t seem to like you, and you can usually detect that by age 5 or so.
2. At some point, usually at a very young age, you did something that got a laugh from the room. You made a joke or fell down or farted, and you realized for the first time that you could get a positive reaction that way. Not genuine love or affection, mind you, just a reaction — one that is a step up from hatred and a thousand steps up from invisibility. One you could control.
3. You soon learned that being funny builds a perfect, impenetrable wall around you — a buffer that keeps anyone from getting too close and realizing how much you suck. The more you hate yourself, the stronger you need to make the barrier and the further you have to push people away. In other words, the better you have to be at comedy.
4. In your formative years, you wind up creating a second, false you — a clown that can go out and represent you, outside the barrier. The clown is always joking, always “on,” always drawing all of the attention in order to prevent anyone from poking away at the barrier and finding the real person behind it. The clown is the life of the party, the classroom joker, the guy up on stage — as different from the “real” you as possible. Again, the goal is to create distance.
The comments are bang on. As Smokey Robinson once sang “The tears of a clown, when no ones around”.
I strongly feel that Robin suffered from ADHD and all the co-morbidity baggage that goes along with it (depression, substance abuse, bi-polar disorder et al). I read that back in the 90’s Robin stated cocaine had a calming effect on him. If that was the case, can you imagine what it would be like to go to rehab and not receive a replacement medication for your disorder? It would seem that fame and fortune didn’t provide the answers he really needed. If his depression was caused by “not knowing” the only thing it would lead to is frustration and then depression. “I think I’m doing things the right way but why are the results so wrong?”. It would be similar to a classically trained guitarist attempting to play a guitar that was out of tune. Even though his/her fingers are correctly placed on the fret board the outcome will always sound bad.
Comment by Russ Le Blanc — August 12, 2014 @ 10:05