Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (43 page)

Judd:
Because he loves you.

Roseanne:
I’d be like, “Well, you’re biting yours.” And then he’d laugh. But sometimes he wouldn’t. You never knew when it was coming. He’d sneak up behind you while you’re biting your nail and crack you in the back of the head so hard that your knuckles would go straight up your nose and stuff. He hit me in the head constantly. He’d hit us all in the head. And hard, too.

Judd:
We can’t get our kids to do anything.

Roseanne:
Maybe because we don’t hit them.

Judd:
Did you go to therapy and try to fix yourself, to learn how to not do it to your kids?

Roseanne:
Yeah, but by then I had already done it.

Judd:
To your first few kids?

Roseanne:
Yeah. So then I’d correct it. You go to each one of them and let them curse you out and say all the shit that they want to say to you. And just go, “Oh, honey, I did it and I’m sorry.” That’s hard.

Judd:
And how do they do after that?

Roseanne:
Thank God, they are all functional and brilliant, creative people.

Judd:
Well, almost no parents do that. Own up to their mistakes.

Roseanne:
It’s the hardest thing.

Judd:
My mom could never do that. Well, right before she died, very briefly she said she was sorry for anything she might have done wrong. But for the most part—I once begged my mother to go to therapy and then sent her to my therapist. When she came back, I said, “How did it go?” And she said, “He told me that I’m right about everything.”

Roseanne:
That’s a good one.

Judd:
We have to have those conversations sometimes with our kids, where we say, you know, “We’re not perfect people. We make mistakes and we have issues.” And we try to explain what they are as they’re happening. Like, “This is my issue and maybe that’s why I did that. Sorry.”

Roseanne:
Well, I took all the shit off my kids because I knew they needed to say it. I was lucky enough to be able to say it to my parents, too, and do some healing.

Judd:
And it somehow got you here. That’s the hard thing, too, which is: If your childhood didn’t happen, nothing else would have happened.

Roseanne:
I don’t know about that. My shrink says, “Don’t say you’re funny
because
of abuse; it’s in
spite
of.” But my whole thing is, like, I’ve had severe mental illness my whole life. A devastating, dissociative identity disorder—MPD, it used to be called. I had to heal from that, and that was like fifteen years of intense daily therapy. I look back and it’s fucking crazy. It’s nothing you can explain to people. You can’t explain to people waking up in a mental institution in Dallas, Texas, with a shrink screaming in your face, “You don’t have a penis!” I mean, it’s like, how are you going to—

Judd:
Were you high school age?

Roseanne:
No, I was in my forties. It’s real deep mental illness shit, man. But I got over it. Not over it, but I live with it.

Judd:
Where do you think it comes from?

Roseanne:
I think both of my parents and my grandparents were divided people, too. I mean, who’s going to live through the Holocaust and not be fucked up? I can’t blame my parents. I had a good teacher, too. I had a good rabbi. He’s on the other side now, too, but he helped me put it in perspective and that was all while I was doing pretty deep therapy and I just put it all back together, all those fragments which I kind of remade the world in my mind so that it made sense. It’s like, you know, this is hell.

Judd:
What is hell?

Roseanne:
This planet.

Judd:
Can you experience reality with MPD? Do you still experience reality where you feel like different sides of your personality are handling different situations?

Roseanne:
Less than in the past. I used to never sleep more than three hours a night because I always was—you know, the whole comic thing was a big thing in my head. The comic, the writer who did stand-up. That
was a separate state and I’d just get into it and, fuck, I don’t want to know anything else. I’d neglect my health and my life. Once it started, there was no fucking way out. It was too much. Your head’s like—you have no balance at all.

Judd:
Because getting successful and being a performer, it feels like safety, but it’s a safety that you can’t maintain because you’re abandoning everything else to achieve it.

Roseanne:
You can’t ever be how you are. It’s like, Oh you’ve got to do these interviews, you have to go talk to the press and stuff—which is a scary thing.

Judd:
They want to set you off.

Roseanne:
They do, because they’re just evil.

Judd:
And you
will
go off if you have things to say.

Roseanne:
Yeah, and that took me a while. That’s what I wanted to do. Plus I have Tourette’s.

Judd:
How does that show itself?

Roseanne:
I have to be the one who barks out what I had conceived as the thing that must be heard. And sometimes I didn’t even fucking believe it, but, you know, in my head it was the perfect state of freedom. I have to say it. Because I have all that Jew Holocaust shit, you know. I mean when I used to play Barbies with my Mormon neighbor friend, it was always, “Oh, we’re going to go on a date. Ken’s taking us out and we’re going with Ken on a date.” And I was like, “We’re parachuting behind enemy lines to save the Jews.” That’s how I played Barbies. It was just otherly.

Judd:
Were you doing stand-up before you were married?

Roseanne:
No, I had three kids when I first started stand-up.

Judd:
Who did you see doing stand-up who made you think,
I have to find the courage to get up and do this?

Roseanne:
When I was little, my dad and I would watch
Ed Sullivan
together. I saw all those comics on
Ed Sullivan.
I saw Myron Cohen. My grandmother loved him.

Judd:
Alan King.

Roseanne:
Alan King, oh my God. And Jackie Mason, Jack E. Leonard, and Leonard Barr—my dad said maybe we’re related to him. And then I saw Richard Pryor and that was it.

Judd:
So you’re a housewife and it’s floating around the back of your head somewhere that it would be great to do this?

Roseanne:
I always knew since I was three. When I was little, that was one thing that I was told in a vision: I was going to have my own show when I grew up. And it’s going to be funny and it’s going to be like Danny Kaye, who was another one of my idols.

Judd:
So you always had a vision—

Roseanne:
I was always into TV. I knew I could get in the business somehow and find a place. I don’t think I thought of what I could accomplish in the larger sense of it.

Judd:
So in your head you knew it was going to happen and then you’re having kids. At some point, you have to make the move to do it. What was the trigger?

Roseanne:
I was a cocktail waitress and this guy—I got tips because I made them laugh, plus you had to have half your ass hanging out. I made them laugh so they’d give me big tips and this one guy one time, he said, “Hey, you’re so funny you should go down to this comedy club downtown.” And I was like
BONG, BONG, BONG, BONG.
It was literally like that. And so I’m like, “Okay, where is it?” And he’s like, “It’s the Comedy Works in Larimer Square in Denver.” So I go down there and I watch all the comics. And I went home to write my five minutes of material—and then I just kept perfecting it. That took a fucking year.

Judd:
That’s incredible.

Roseanne:
It was almost a year and then I went down there and did my five minutes. I look back on it now and I’m like, it was pretty ballsy that I said the things I said. They immediately banned me and said don’t ever come back here.

Judd:
Do you remember what was in the five minutes?

Roseanne:
I made fun of male comics. I was very political.

Judd:
Did you talk about being a housewife also?

Roseanne:
No, it was radical, feminist politics.

Judd:
Did you get any laughs?

Roseanne:
The first time, I got killer laughs. And people came up, and they were nice to me. So I couldn’t wait to go back the second time, and then I got way over-cocky. And I ate it like a dog’s death. The indignities.

Judd:
What did your husband say when you told him you were going to be a stand-up?

Roseanne:
He wanted to be one, too. He helped me write. We’d sit down and we’d write jokes—my sister, too. I’d be sitting in a restaurant with her, and—when I was little my mom used to read this book
Fascinating Womanhood.
There was a character who would tell you how to get your husband to buy you a blender and shit. And it disgusted me that my mom and her friends were like that, so that’s kind of why I became a feminist. But my act was called “How to Be a Domestic Goddess,” and me and my sister were eating eggs one day and I was like,
Fuck
—it just came in my head, one of those things that didn’t have nothing to do with me. It’s like: domestic goddess. And I went,
Oh fuck, that’s my door.
I just tailored it for a while and, you know, they let me on. They liked that act. Because I finally found my voice. I went to every kind of club to work it, too. I had to go to like the Episcopalian church and jazz clubs and punk clubs and biker bars. I remember performing on a punk stage with no mic in the middle of a mosh pit.

Judd:
How many years of this before you moved to L.A.?

Roseanne:
Five.

Judd:
It is interesting, if you watch the arcs of so many comedians. At some point, they just become themselves.

Roseanne:
That’s exactly it.

Judd:
And something amazing happens. Like everyone’s looking for their angle, looking for their angle, and then they just—they become powerful.

Roseanne:
You synthesize it all. You integrate it—like okay, this part of me wants to say this. This part of me is interested in that. I don’t want to be ordinary. I’m willing to do the work. I’m willing to suffer the indignities of comedy. Because I want to be great. I don’t want to just be good. I want to be great.

Judd:
So how long was it, between moving to L.A. and getting
The Tonight Show
? It was pretty fast, right?

Roseanne:
It was a dream. All these comics were coming to Denver headlining, and I’d open for them. There was a Denver “Laugh Off” thing and it was me and fifteen guys—and I won. Everyone was like, wow. That was a big accomplishment. It was an accomplishment that all the guys were rooting for me, too. That was fucking mind-blowing after all the shit I had to do. I forgot what you asked me.

Judd:
How long until you got on
The Tonight Show
?

Roseanne:
Oh, so everybody goes, “You need to let Mitzi see you at the Comedy Store.” And so, you know, I planned it with my husband, the whole thing. I went there on a Monday night. It was like a fucking dream. Came off the stage after my first five minutes and Mitzi was like, “Go do twenty in the big room.”

Judd:
Immediately?

Roseanne:
All the waitresses told me she had never done that before. So I went in the big room—this is all happening in one night—and I come offstage, and there’s George Schlatter. And he’s like, “I’m producing a show”—it was
Funny Women of Comedy
or
Funny Gals
or some shit—“and it’s for NBC and I want you on it.” And I’m like, “Fuck, I don’t even live here, but yeah, I’ll come back.” So I came back in a month to rehearse for that and a guy comes up to me and he says, “I’m Jim McCawley from
The Tonight Show
, and I want to put you on Friday night.”

Judd:
You didn’t even know he was in the crowd?

Roseanne:
No. You know, with my gruff thing, I was like, “Get in line.” And he’s like, “No, no, I’m Jim McCawley, and I want you on.”

Judd:
How did your husband handle your success?

Roseanne:
I was really a housewife. And then suddenly, I’m like eighteen weeks on the road without my kids and my husband—he didn’t know what to do. He slept in a lot of mornings and they missed school. You know, he’s a guy. I came home after like six weeks—

Judd:
He was working at a post office, right?

Roseanne:
No, he had quit. He quit after I started to tour. So I went and got the kids. They lived with me in a one-room apartment on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I’d bring them to the Comedy Store and they’d just have to sit up there. It was hard.

Judd:
How old were they at the time?

Roseanne:
They were all under twelve.

Judd:
So the two older ones kind of know what’s happening?

Roseanne:
Yeah, it affected them. I wasn’t there to crack down on them as much. So they went wild. We all fucking went wild. You know, it’s just so consuming, it’s eighteen hours a day, and you turn to your husband or your sisters or family to help you but nobody can do it as well as the mom. So it’s just suffering guilt every fucking minute until you’ve got to do drugs to handle the disappointment that you’re causing your kids.

Judd:
It’s the aspect of show business that most people don’t think about—the circus aspect of it. Whenever I see some famous person get married to another famous person, my first thought is,
How can that work?