Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(34)

As the date of my presentation loomed, so did my despair. Anything that could remotely be considered “my thing” was either too childish, too insignificant, or too dorky to say out loud in front of a room full of teenagers. What—collecting miniature ceramic cat families? Choir? Feminist young adult high fantasy? I might as well do my presentation on “my binky” or “calling the cops on Jeremy’s house party” or “[whatever style of jeans is most unfashionable during your era, deep in the future, in which scholars and kings are no doubt still reading this classic book].”

How are you supposed to choose what represents you as a human being when you have no idea who you are yet? When I asked myself the question honestly—what is my thing?—the only answer I could come up with was that I liked watching TV, eating hot sandwiches, and hanging out with my friends. Tragically, I was not enough of a visionary at the time to turn “Leah, Hester, Emily, Aditi, Tyler, Claire, and a panini” into an oral report, so I was like, shrug, guess I’ll go with “watching TV.”

I really did. I stayed up all night the night before my presentation, two VCRs whirring hot on the floor of our basement, editing together a montage of all of my top clips. I arranged them chronologically—not by release date, but in the order in which I’d loved them—from my favorite when I was a toddler (John Cleese guesting on The Muppet Show) all the way up to what my friends and I were having giggle fits over at the time (Mr. Show). Even though this was pre-YouTube, pre-torrenting, pre-home-editing-software, I had everything I needed on hand: Since sixth grade, I’d been obsessively recording off the TV, and had amassed a mountain of painstakingly labeled VHS tapes. I taped Letterman and Conan every night. I taped Talk Soup, SNL, Politically Incorrect, every stand-up special on Comedy Central, Fawlty Towers, Garfield’s Halloween Adventure, the earliest episodes of The Daily Show. Anything I thought was funny, I taped it, and watched it over and over, hoping to absorb its powers.

I don’t remember everything that ended up in my montage, but I know I used the part in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (favorite movie, 1989 to present), when Bill’s trying to keep his stepmom from noticing that he and Keanu Reeves are forcing six kidnapped historical figures to do his chores: “These are my friends… Herman the Kid, Socrates Johnson, Bob Genghis Khan…” There was this Conan clip I thought was so fucking funny—a character called the “Narcoleptic Craftsman,” where the entire bit was that the Narcoleptic Craftsman would fall asleep during a woodworking segment and cut all his fingers off. “See,” Andy Richter deadpanned, “have a craftsman on, OR have a narcoleptic on. It’s when you combine the two that you get something like this.”

I cut all my treasures together on one tape, wrote up some hasty trash about how my “favorite pastime is laughing,”* claimed that this was a highly academic audit of “the evolution of my sense of humor,” and sped to class. As I floundered through my speech and the tape rolled, I could see disappointment solidifying on Ms. Harper’s face. She liked me—she said I was smart, and a good writer—and this was such an obvious cop-out. My tape was too long, and the bell rang before it was over. People wandered out without finishing it, bored. For years afterwards, thinking of that presentation made me a little sick.

The following year, just months before graduation, I met a girl named Meagan in Shakespeare class. We ran in overlapping circles, but somehow had never connected. From afar, I found her intimidating, and she never noticed me at all. I had that effect on people. In close quarters, though, assigned to the same group project, we were platonically, electrically smitten—both of us, I think, relieved to finally meet someone else who was “a bit much” for people in all the same ways. Too loud, too awkward, too boisterous, too intense. Meagan is aggressively exuberant. She doesn’t say anything that isn’t funny, which sounds like an exaggeration, but isn’t. She was bold in ways that I had never imagined, even though I’d shrugged off most of my shyness years before: Meagan was honest. She wasn’t nice to people she didn’t like. She talked back to authority figures if she thought they were feeding her bullshit. She delivered hard “no”s and didn’t waver.

I discovered that Meagan was an obsessive comedy archivist, just like me. It was uncanny: Her bedroom was stacked with fat loaves of VHS tapes, also painstakingly labeled (in her handwriting weirdly like mine), that she’d been recording off the TV for years, just like me. We’d drive around for hours in my Volvo, listening to Mitch Hedberg and David Cross; with the advent of Napster, we could make each other entire mix-CDs that were just audio clips from The Simpsons. Meagan spent fifty dollars on eBay—an exorbitant amount of money at the time—to get a bootleg VHS copy of every Tenacious D episode. We wore the tape out. Within months, our vocal cadence merged, until even we couldn’t tell our voices apart, and sometimes we went so long without saying anything that wasn’t a reference or an inside joke that we might as well have been speaking some feral bog twin language. We won “funniest” in the senior class poll.

We were fucking unbearable.

Comedy has always been a safe harbor for the “a bit much”es of the world. The things that made Meagan and me horrible to be around—the caterwauling, the irreverence, the sometimes inappropriate honesty, the incessant riffing—aren’t just welcome in comedy, they’re fundamental. For me, as a kid who felt lonely, ugly, simultaneously invisible and too visible, comedy felt like a friend. That’s its greatest magic—more than any other art form, it forces you to interact with it; it forces you to feel not alone. Because you can’t be alone when someone’s making you laugh, physically reaching into your body and eliciting a response. Comedy is also smart. It speaks the truth. It was everything I wanted to be. Plus, if you’re funny, it doesn’t matter what you look like.