How Gary Gulman Turned Depression Into Comedy Gold | Better in Person

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0:13Hey there, Stephen Dubner. This is the third episode of a new video interview show we're making called Better in Person. Today's guest is the comedian Gary Gulman. You are going to love him, I guarantee. If you want the full video experience, go to the Freakonomics YouTube channel. It looks good on your phone, but it looks great on a bigger screen. You can also watch it on Apple Podcasts. Just search for better in person. But we also made this audio version for the Freakonomics feed in case you don't want to be distracted by the video. We aim to please. As always, thanks for listening. And now, thanks for watching, too.

0:57What do you have to understand about show business is the hyperbole is at such a high level that if they love you, it means they don't want to work with you, but they think you're pretty good. If they're obsessed with you, then they'd like to work with you. But if this fails, it's all over. You'll never hear from them again. And then I don't know what the next level will be. I want to chop you up in a Cuisinart and drink you like a smoothie. And that will mean that they would like to make your project.

1:31This is Better in Person with Stephen Dubner and Gary Goleman. You've got to choose one word to describe the comedian Gary Goleman. It might be kind, which is not a word you associate with comedians very often. He's also tall, 6 '6", which helps make him good at basketball. He's also smart. He enunciates beautifully. He's got an amazing vocabulary. Larry. And he wrote a really nice memoir called Misfit, Growing Up Awkward in the 80s. And yes, he is wickedly funny. Consider his first HBO special, The Great Depression. I still see a therapist. I believe I broke him on Monday. Yeah, I was leaving his office and I was shutting the door and I heard him go.

2:19A show about one man's depression should not be funny, but this one is. And it's also deeply human. Goldman's honesty makes his fans love him even more. And now I also love Gary Goldman. I mean it. That's not hyperbole. So I make this podcast, Freakonomics Radio, which is very research intensive. And my producers for this show have been telling me that I need to back off, that I get overprepared and I get a little paralyzed. So for you, I've done zero. I know your first name is Gary. That's all I got. You're an accountant, I understand? I was an accountant. That was what I studied in college. So my profession is accountant.

3:06But then I've taken this side gig starting in 1993 where I tell jokes and I wrote a book and And I act occasionally, but it's just something if the accounting doesn't pay off. Did you ever do any accounting? Yes. Yes. I worked for two and a half years for what is now PricewaterhouseCoopers. And I was fired for saying, what are they going to do? Fire me?

3:46You did not. I really said that. And it's the only time that somebody has read back to me a quote and it didn't make me happy. Usually when somebody said, you said this, oh, that's really great. But this was like, and I will say this. I just said, yes, I absolutely said that. And that was that. They said, okay, well. I'm glad. I mean, I'm glad. Years later, the woman from HR and her husband came to my show, so all was forgiven, but it was... Was all forgiven? Are you a grievance holder or a grievance flusher? I've been grinding certain axes with people over the years, and it's really something I'm reading.

4:36I'm reading the autobiography of Nelson Mandela right now. One reason, because I admire him, but also this has to be one of the most forgiving. Such a great comic. Funny man. But he's got to be like the most forgiving man in history. And you're thinking, what am I doing with my axes? Yeah, what am I doing with my stupid things? Do you punish yourself, period, question mark? Do I punish myself? No, but I have a lot of guilt over, for instance, my wife would love a bigger apartment than we have, but I see how certain people are living and I think, well, it's not right that I should have so much more than the average person.

5:22So I think we do need a bigger place because now I have three storage units, which is way too many. It's insane, like just filled with – one of them is just a library, right? It's just all these books that I don't have room for. And also my childhood baseball card collection. I want to get a bigger place, but it has to fall within this range of not too ostentatious where I would feel guilty. because I read this book by Peter Singer, The Most Good You Can Do, where if you live within certain means and give away a certain amount, you can save lives. And so there's a lot of arithmetic involved in my consumption.

5:59That was the Sam Bankman-Fried model. You remember him? Yeah, but wasn't he disgraced? Yes, he was. Yeah, such a bummer because it's a great philosophy. It's a great philosophy. Effective altruism, if you like to call it. Effective altruism, yes. Your wife's name is Sade. Yes. How did you meet? But she's not the Sade. I wouldn't have a small apartment if I was the heir to the smooth operator royalty stream. We met at the back table at the comedy cellar. She was visiting her friend who was a hostess there, or a host. And the comedy cellar at the back table has, the tables are made out of slate, so people draw in chalk.

6:42and my wife Sade was drawing out the formula for the golden mean on this table and also she's this beautiful woman who knew a lot about physics and math and so I said I said wait are you an intellectual and she said uh maybe and and then she would come in every other Friday and I would make it so that I would work every other Friday and then we became friends and then and And then we got - Lovers. And then, you know, and then we became lovers. I took her on as a lover. And that was in, we got married in 2020 during the pandemic. But we'd been together since 2014. Right, because when you were sick, she was - Yeah, when I was sick.

7:28Yeah. We had been dating for about six months. And then I went fucking crazy. Yeah. And sometimes I would beg her. I would be like, you really got to get out of this. It's not going well. I've heard you say that in your act, that you begged her to leave you because you didn't want that for her because you were that sick. Yeah, because I didn't think I would ever get out of it. But she believed, and she would do research, and then at one point she grew psilocybin mushrooms. She tried to get me into a study, and I wasn't able to get into the study. And then she just sent away from mushrooms and made them in our apartment, risking it like a felony.

8:04Wow. To try and— The statute of limitations, I'm assuming, is— I hope so. But the issue is that I don't think it's legal now, but they are still in tests of psilocybin mushrooms. Michael Pollan wrote that book, How to Change Your Mind. It's very influential. So I would love to talk about, if you feel like it, you're being sick. I mean, it's a lot more fun to talk about now that you're – because you seem awesome now. I feel awesome. You look great. You seem great. Thank you. I'm so grateful and everything is just so much easier from the other side. And I always used to say this. I would say if I could stop getting depressed every six to nine months and losing three to six months of productivity, I could really be good at this thing that I've put all my time into.

9:00But that's exactly what happened then, right? And that's what happened. And then finally, for the past seven years, I've had uninterrupted mental health. And I've written, I think, three specials, a one-person show, and a book, a memoir. And yeah, so I— So your engine, your creative and comedy engine, it seems, was running as hot then, before you were sick. Like, you'd always been hardworking, disciplined, productive. Yes. But it's just like when you would get sick, then everything is back to zero or minus. Is that the way it would work? Yeah, because I would lose momentum. I couldn't, for instance, if somebody had come to me in 1998 and said, we want you to make a one-person show, I would say, well, that's going to take about a year.

9:54and at some point within the next six to nine months, I will fall apart and I will be out of communication and I won't be working. And then I'll spend time trying to get back on track through medication and exercise and everything else so that I wasn't dependable and I couldn't trust myself to make such long-term plans. We worked together in, I think it was 2017. And looking back now, I think you were not well then. No, no. But I would accept offers all the time because I didn't want to give in. And so I could put it together, but if you knew me, you knew I was not myself. I just remember thinking, like, he's really not very fun.

10:36Like, you didn't seem like you were having fun at all. Yeah, that makes sense. I was probably incredibly anxious. I thought that was just who you were. But then I would watch your comedy, and it seemed like a different human. Yeah. So did I just catch you on a night where you were feeling, like, how many nights were there like that? that you were just not? I mean, it was every night from the spring of 2015 through the fall of 2017. So it was two and a half years. But also when I was working off a script of jokes, I could be much more compelling than I was in an interview. And it's very hard to think when you're depressed.

11:14My psychiatrist said that a lot of people have called it faux dementia, where depressives are having a hard time making memories and keeping memories and also accessing words. And so your brain is telling you while you're in it that you'll never get out of it. And then when you're out of it, that you'll never go back in it. But then you learn and you realize that, or in this case, this final case, that I need to stay so vigilant and prevent the relapse because the relapse is actually part of this entire conundrum. What does vigilant mean? Exercising every day, eating right, getting enough sleep, taking on projects that keep me busy and accepting invitations.

12:07So getting out of the house and talking with people. So that all sounds sensible, but... And then taking my medication every day. Okay. All good. But I'm wondering, weren't you trying to do all that stuff before when you were cyclically getting sick? I was not as disciplined about the exercise component. And I'm lucky to have a really good therapist. I didn't always have a therapist because in some cases I couldn't afford it or I didn't have the insurance for the medication. So this last one happened to come at a time when I had insurance and enough money saved up that I could take a few months off to go into the hospital and get my head straight.

12:54So the special that you made, right? We call it a special? Yeah. HBO's special, the great depression. It's a great title, by the way. It's a great, no, I'm sorry, I meant to say it's a great show, but the title is also, it's a great title. Yeah, thank you. And what's so interesting about it to me is that it is the only hybrid I know. Like you said at some point that you are excellent at monetizing mental illness. And I think you're the world champion. Like, I can't think of anybody, like, Proust, if he had had the movie made or something. Right. But he didn't really get that far. Right. But it's an amazing piece to me because it's very funny.

13:33It's very moving. It's a great biography. It's like a documentary. It's not just a stand-up. But it's also a public service announcement about how to treat mental illness. Yeah. I never started telling anybody about my mood difficulties back then. And I didn't start telling people close to me until this past year when I started talking about it on stage. I mean, it really is. You go through science and some segments of it are not at all entertaining or funny. Right. So it hit me hard. I just thought it was a great piece of work. And I want to know how you made it, really. Okay. So I was recovering from my hospitalization in Massachusetts.

14:21I was living in Massachusetts. Living at home. With my mom. In your childhood bed. In the house, in the childhood bedroom. I would go to this club in Cambridge in Harvard Square called the Comedy Studio. And it served two big things, which was to get me out of the house and around people. and then to eventually, and it wasn't right away, but a few months after I got out of the hospital, I would go there and I would do jokes. And it became clear to me that everybody who was familiar with me would know that something was off. And also that if you didn't know me, you might think that I looked disheveled and I didn't look well.

15:07And so I felt that I had to address it. and it was most comfortable for me to address things by being funny with it. And so I would, one of the things I started saying was how I had been recognized in the psych ward. And I would say, has that ever happened to anybody? Which is kind of an old formula of comedy. But you were recognized in a particularly interesting way. Didn't the guy say, are you Gary Gallman? Or am I crazy? Yeah, yeah. In a psych ward. Yeah. That actually happened. Yeah, it was so great because it's the lowest you can get, really, in my lifespan, which is to be in pajamas at 6 p.m.

15:51and with socks with treads on the bottom. And yet part of my relentless ego is like, oh, look at me, getting recognized.

16:04It gave me a shot of dopamine. and also it was just funny that he said am I crazy and and now when I was in the hospital I remember but wait then you would watch with this guy oh yeah the office would come on the office is always on and the office would come on and I I would I don't know why I said this but again my ego you know I auditioned for that that part Jim I auditioned for the role of Jim and the man said, and he had to have been joking, but it was a perfect joke. He said, did you get it?

16:43And of course, the response to that always in show businesses, I haven't heard back yet. They never tell you that you didn't get it. You just see the show in syndication. But the interesting thing is that in the moment, I had to, I recognized if I ever get back to doing stand-up. If I'm ever able to talk about this, these are things that I will say, and God willing, people will laugh. And so I had to realize, and it was a quote that I put on my bedroom wall at my mom's house from Beckett that said, ever tried, ever failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better. So fail better became my mantra.

17:27I've heard that expression has been co-opted by tech bros and shame on them because it was so helpful that even when I was bombing on stage, I could feel, no, I'm making progress because I'm talking about this thing in depression and treatment that isn't easy to get laughs off of. So my manager who kept in touch with me - What's the manager's name? Brian Stern. And at no point did he say, when are you going to get back on stage? But when I did start to get back on stage, he said, what if we did a hybrid of a documentary and a special? Had you done a special before? Yeah, I had done three specials.

18:10And it was actually the previous special that I had done that I felt was a trigger. It was a trigger for this episode of depression. I don't think it was everything. But the fact that I had made a special in like 2014 or 15 that I felt was the best work I could do. What was that special? It was called It's About Time. And it had a joke that's since gone viral about abbreviating the states. How are they going to make a 98-minute documentary about a task that couldn't have taken more than six minutes to complete? Started off, they thought it was going to be easy because Alabama lulled them into a false sense of security.

18:52They said, Alabama, AL, holy crap, this is easy. We're going to finish before they stop serving breakfast in the hotel restaurant. And they got back to abbreviate, and they said, what's next? They said, Alaska. Everybody cool with AL? And it had a joke that also was very popular about me role-playing with my wife, and I'm a professor, but I take it way too seriously. And she's a student who's failing my class. So I'm a professor at a prestigious New England university, and my girlfriend is a senior in my intro to Western Civ. I know, why is she a senior in the intro? And they couldn't sell it.

19:37A production company paid for the special. Nobody wanted it. And I said, but this was the best the best I get and I can't even sell it. And it was much easier to sell specials back then. And it just devastated me and was sort of a part of a number of different things that happened to me. I lost my dad. And so all these things sort of came together to keep me from getting out of the house and getting out of bed a lot of days. So my manager, Brian, said, what if we did a hybrid of a special with a documentary? I just worked with a documentarian. His name is Mike Bonfiglio. And Mike had just worked with Judd Apatow in the Avett Brothers movie and a couple of 30 for 30s.

20:23And then Gary Shandling. The Gary Shandling documentary. And he later did the George Carlin. You like Gary Shandling, I'm guessing, yes. Yeah, right. Yeah, he was one of my heroes. Him and Richard Lewis, I think, were the two. And David Brenner also. So, but. Only Jewish comics. It's okay. It's interesting because I also loved Richard Pryor and George Carlin, but the two that I saw myself in were Gary Shainer and Richard Lewis. Stephen Wright you liked a lot as a kid. I loved Stephen Wright. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I didn't think I could pull off that style. It was too smart and too hard. And so.

21:03Did you like Lenny Bruce a lot? No. I didn't understand the context. I think Lenny Bruce is all about the context and how brave he was. There were certain Lenny Bruce jokes that I liked, but for the most part, I just think of him as somebody who other comedians were standing on his shoulders prior and Carlin and Richard Lewis types. All right, sorry, I interrupted. No, that's okay. This is how a conversation works. This is how a conversation works. Yeah, I agree. I agree. But I must have at some point read somebody saying that you should write the book you want to read. And I extrapolated that to being the comedian I would want to see.

21:44So Emerson, in self-reliance, said that the specific is universal, which seems impossible. But I have found that the more specific an art is, the more it resonates with me. What's your mental state before a show? Are you excited? Are you anxious? Yeah, I'm really excited. I'm anxious in the same way that I used to get excited before a basketball practice or a game. I can't wait to go out there and play. Although there were times in basketball where my confidence was so lacking that I was nervous, anxious, afraid. And that's happened in comedy, but that's very rare. Is the anxiety or the loss of confidence in sport, you think, greater than or less than performing?

22:31Almost identical. It's so interesting. It's almost paralyzing. Yeah. And in sports, it affects your fine motor skills. So it can really affect your shooting. And in comedy, the audience can sense that the comedian is nervous. And you're a good basketball player, we assume. Yes? For somebody who doesn't play basketball, I'm awesome. But you were good when you were... Oh. If you don't play basketball, you'll think, it's like magic. Like a magician can tell whether a magician is good, but a lay person can't tell. So you would say, like sometimes I'll play with people and I'll make so many shots, they'll be laughing because they think it's absurd.

23:14But if I play with a real basketball player, they're like, slow and can't jump. And if I get too close to him, he'll miss. So since I don't really, I haven't played basketball since I was probably 16. Oh, we should definitely play. Yeah, we'll play. I would love it. Okay. Gary says that over time, he has developed a strategy for when he loses confidence in himself, whether it's in basketball or in comedy. Whenever I'm working on a project, I think of another project where I was ready to throw in the towel and I stuck with it and I was able to finish it. And that goes with this other thing that I've learned, that any project, it's a pretty good sign if at some point you feel over your head.

23:59Because it means you're stretching your comfort zone. What are you doing now that's stretching for you? The one-person show was something that I wrote. I probably finished writing a year ago, and now I'm touring it. This is Grand Iliquan. I did it off-Broadway. I did Grand Iliquan off-Broadway, I think 36 shows. and about three weeks into rehearsal, I said to my wife, I've bitten off more than I can chew and this opening night is going to be a disaster. I can't memorize all these things that I wrote. But then I thought, oh, well, failing is part of the whole thing and there's really no artist who's never failed at anything.

24:42And I was able to figure it out and memorize it. It requires staying up way past what I am comfortable with. How do you do that? Just yourself or do you have Sade run lines with you? Just by myself. I use a lot of the Pomodoro method. That's the setting the timer for whatever. Yeah, and writing it out and a lot of mnemonics so that there was a story on stage and then there was this weird story in my head that connected all these things. And there's one line where I say my mother would use Yiddish in the house to heckle me. And so it felt like I was being heckled by my ancestors. And then that went into the next joke, which was about babysitting.

25:28So I pictured an ancestor, which is this. When I tell you my mother's mother was one of the most unattractive people I've ever seen in my life. She looked like Madam from Solid Gold, like the Wayland Flowers puppet with that long chin, and she had a bun on her hair. And so I picture her babysitting, which if you grew up in my house, you knew this woman would never be allowed to babysit. She had babysit my brother Max once when he was two or three, and he had swallowed an entire bowl of grapes whole, and they had to rush him to the ER, so she was never allowed to babysit. Good it wasn't a grapefruit.

26:07Yeah, so I have this image of my grandmother, and that relates to the high cost of babysitting in the 1970s. My mother bringing me everywhere, and then that. So, yeah, it was interesting to memorize it so that next time, and there will be a next time when I'm over my head, I will say, yeah, you said the same thing about Grand Eloquine. You smile so much. Is it strategic? Yes, because it's part of certain punchlines, and it relieves some tension. They say it's also good for you. Yes, but also, I can't tell you. Jeff Garland asked Bruce Springsteen, what does it feel like when you know Badlands is next in the concert?

26:59How does that feel? I thought that was such a great question. And with most of my jokes, I feel the way Springsteen must feel when Badlands is next. I'm like, oh, you like that one? What do you hear? This one. Because I really worked this one. That's a great feeling, I would imagine. It's such a great feeling. And so that's where the smile comes from. It's also a great feeling that you get for two seconds that reflects 30 hours of working on your own earlier, right? 30 hours is, no. I mean, the abbreviating the states joke started when I was six years old and found a book in which they listed the abbreviations for the states.

27:35And because there was no internet, I just memorized it. Because it was something I occupied. Can you still do that joke? Do you still do it? I don't do it anymore. Because comedy, fortunately and unfortunately, isn't like music where you want to hear the hits. How long would it take you to get it back if you had to? I could listen to it on a subway ride. and be able to remember it. Yeah, yeah. Do you feel your memory is freakish? Yeah, it's unusual to remember so much from a childhood because I was reading something today where somebody was saying that they couldn't remember their elementary school teachers.