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Hey there, Steven 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 Goleman.
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.
What 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, 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.
This is Better in Person with Stephen Dubner and Gary Goleman.
If you had 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.
Bank!
Bank!
He's also smart.
He enunciates beautifully.
He's got an amazing vocabulary.
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 Depresh.
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,
A 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.
Okay.
I know your first name is Gary.
That's all I got.
No.
You're an accountant, I understand.
I was an accountant.
That was what I studied in college.
So my profession is accountant.
But then I've taken this side...
Gig starting in 1993 where I tell jokes and I wrote a book and I act occasionally but it's just something if the accounting doesn't
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?
You did not.
I really said that.
And it's the...
It's the only time that somebody has read back to me a quote and it didn't make me happy.
Usually when somebody, 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 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.
Yeah.
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 taxes?
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
Than the average person.
So 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 wanna 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,
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.
That was the Sam Bankman-Fried model.
You remember him?
Yeah, but wasn't he disgraced?
Yes, he was.
Yeah.
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 on chalk.
And my wife, Sade, was drawing out the formula for the golden mean on...
On this table.
And also, she's this beautiful woman who knew a lot about physics and math.
And so I said, wait, are you an intellectual?
And she said, maybe.
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 we got- Lovers.
Yeah, 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, I think.
Right, because when you were sick, she was... Yeah, when I was sick.
Yeah.
We had been dating for about six months and then I went fucking crazy.
Yeah.
And...
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.
Wow.
To try and...
The statute of limitations, I'm assuming, is...
I hope so.
But the issue is that it's...
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, and it was...
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.
Thank you.
I'm so grateful, and everything is just so much easier from the other –
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, but...
But that's exactly what happened then, right?
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
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 and 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
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
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.
Like, 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
I could be much more compelling than I was in an interview.
And it's very hard to think when you're depressed.
My 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.
So getting out of the house and talking with people.
So that all sounds sensible, but... And then taking my medication every day.
Okay.
Yeah.
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...
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.
So the special that you made, right?
We call it a special?
Yeah.
It's a great title, by the way.
It's a great, 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.
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.
He didn't really get that far.
Right.
But but it's an amazing piece to me because it's very funny.
It'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, I 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 and 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
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.
And 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 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 with a...
In a particularly interesting way.
Didn't the guy say, are you Gary Goleman?
Or am I going crazy?
In a cynical way.
Did that actually happen?
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. and with socks with treads on the bottom.
And yet part of my relentless ego is like, oh, look at me getting wrecked.
He gave me a shot of dopamine.
And also, it was just funny that he said, am I crazy?
Now, when I was in the hospital, I remember...
But wait, then you would watch with this guy, the office.
Oh, yeah, the office would come on.
The office is always on.
And the office would come on, and I would...
I don't know why I said this, but again, my ego.
You know, I auditioned for 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?
And of course, the response to that always in show business is, 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 standup, 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.
I've heard that expression has been co-opted by tech bros and shame on them because...
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.
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 and 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.
They said, Alabama, AL, holy crap, this is easy.
We're gonna finish before they stop serving breakfast in the hotel restaurant."
And they got back to abbreviating.
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.
A production company paid for the special.
Nobody wanted it.
And I said, but this was the best I could 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
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 on the Avett Brothers movie and a couple of 30 for 30s and the 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, and David Brenner also.
Only Jewish comics?
It's interesting, because I also loved Richard Pryor and George Carlin, but the two that I saw myself in were Gary Shandling and Richard Lewis.
I loved Stephen Wright.
But I didn't think I could pull off that style.
It was too smart and too hard.
And so...
Did 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 with.
Pryor and Carlin and Richard Lewis types.
Yeah.
All right, sorry, I interrupted.
No, that's okay.
This is how a conversation works.
This is how a conversation works.
Yeah, 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
So 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?
Almost 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?
Yes.
For somebody who doesn't play basketball, I'm awesome.
Awesome.
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 layperson 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.
But if I play with a real basketball player, they're like, meh.
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, cool.
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.
Because it means you're stretching your comfort zone and you're... 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 Grandiloquent.
I did it off-Broadway.
I did Grandiloquent 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 in this show.
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.
And
I was able to figure it out and memorize it.
It required staying up way, 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...
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.
So 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 Madame 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 me 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 like take him they had to rush him to the er
So she was never allowed to babysit
It wasn't a grapefruit
Yeah, 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 Delacroix.
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 Garlin asked Bruce Springsteen...
What does it feel like when you know Badlands is next in the concert?
How does that feel?
And 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?
When do you hear this one?
Because I really worked at this one.
That's a great feeling, I would imagine.
It's such a great feeling.
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.
And because there was no internet, I just memorized it.
Because it was something- 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.
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.
And I'm like, I remember the custodians and the nurse and the teacher's aides.
Yeah.
But because of my depression, I lost a lot of memories.
You did.
Yeah.
Do you want to just quickly describe your family that you grew up in?
I mean, some of the most unimpressive people and yet so critical.
It astonishes me that people this average could be so critical about every aspect of everyone, judgmental.
My mother, I brought a girlfriend home one time and within a minute, the woman made the mistake of being far enough away from my mother where
She couldn't hear what my mother said, and my mother said, oh, she's so homely.
Was your mother pretty?
No!
No!
There are pictures of every old lady where they were young and their wedding pictures.
She was a beautiful bride.
But she had no right to be denigrating anybody's appearance.
And it's just such a tacky, gross thing to be as somebody who comments about people's physicalities.
Anytime somebody came on TV with bad teeth, which is half the people who want to be interviewed for the nightly news, my mother would say, ugh, get your teeth fixed.
Or sometimes she would go, ugh.
Like that when somebody would come on, like the most critical.
And then my brother's big thing was to criticize me, everything about me under the auspices of, well, we don't want you to get a big head.
But it was just, it was diminishing and belittling.
And it just, it got to the point where, and I could never put it into words until this sentence that came to me one day.
And it's so simple.
I don't like how I feel about myself when I'm around these people.
So did you cut your family off?
How'd you deal with it?
I cut them off from time to time, or my mother didn't speak to me after the book came out.
She didn't speak to me for six months.
Yeah, she doesn't come off so well.
Well, the thing is, she didn't mind that...
Anything really in the book except that I had told these stories of her stealing Hallmark cards in the 1970s from the greeting card store she worked in, and she was just devastated by that.
I didn't do it for any kind of revenge.
I just thought it was really funny.
That we had a lot of things in our house between my mother and her twin brother who was a burglar that we had.
We were poor people.
We were on food stamps and free lunch and welfare and public assistance.
And yet one time we had a pinball machine in our house.
I had a gumball machine from a grocery store in my bedroom and nothing we had in our house that cost more than $100 had a receipt.
You're well now.
Yeah.
And that's awesome.
And I'm just wondering if...
When you're working now, if you think about being not well one day, and if anything you're doing in your work may kind of lead you to that by the specificity, because you're just bearing, to me it feels like you're really bearing your soul.
But because you're funny, it's delicious.
It's not painful, but it's very, very specific.
So I feel like you've x-rayed yourself from every direction and put it out there.
And I just wonder how you feel about living with those specificities down the road, perhaps.
It's an interesting question.
One thing, and I think this maybe is just a corollary to this, is that part of the reason I am so vigilant about staying well is that I am concerned that I will let certain people down.
There are so many people who will tell me how the Great Depression resonated.
One of the best things that I can hear is that
They were able to watch it with a family member and the family member was able to understand better what it's like.
Because that was always the most frustrating part of life in general, but specifically depression was being able to describe what was going on
Inside you.
And the fact that this special was able to allow people to share how they were feeling, that was a great compliment to me.
So I feel there is something above just feeling well for myself
Tied up in me being vigilant about failing well.
That I don't want people to feel like, oh, what hope was there for me?
Gary was my...
I mean, do you feel like you've become a standard bearer?
Not just for comedians talking about their own mental health, but like for all humans who... No way.
No, but for comedians, I guess.
It was always a fantasy of mine that my suffering, I would be able to make people feel a little bit better in the way that I had.
But isn't that a little weird to use your suffering to make other people feel better?
Well, I guess what I'm saying is that
When, for instance, quarterback Terry Bradshaw and Bruce Springsteen, these man's men came out and said, we are suffering, we've been depressed.
Somebody said to Terry Bradshaw, but you're Terry Bradshaw.
And I'm sure I probably would have said, but wait, you're Bruce Springsteen.
And so I figured out that I was, in a way, a similar voice to certain people that they would say, well, I thought I would be happy because...
I was a comedian and I was successful, but it wasn't like that.
And I thought, oh, I just haven't gotten successful enough.
And then you hear Bruce Springsteen and Michael Phelps, for instance, and you realize, oh, it has nothing to do with achievement.
This is chemical and it lets you off the hook, which I think is such a great...
A great service that comedians can provide, but it works the other way too, I always think, because they let you off the hook also for being racist and sexist and homophobic.
So you gotta be careful, I think.
You have some show and tell, it looks like, you brought, what'd you bring?
Yes, but before I go to show and tell, for the people watching who are obsessive compulsive, I wanna fill in the last piece of how the,
How the special got made, which was in the meeting where I met Mike Bonfiglio.
And he said, do you mind if I ask my friend Judd if he would like to work on this?
And it was Judd Apatow, of course.
And I said, yes, yes, yes.
Yes, you may.
It's a hard decision.
Right.
And then I did an audition where I did the whole show and a couple days later.
But I will say one interesting thing was that
I had to be very careful because I knew a rejection could throw me off track.
And I remember my wife, in the interim between me auditioning and them saying yes, my wife said, this is really unfair because I'm going to have to live with
Their decision.
But I had said, I will be disappointed.
I will keep touring the show.
And if it doesn't wind up on HBO, I'm fine with that.
And of course, then it happened.
So I never had to
To really live with it.
But that's how it came to be.
And then we shot it in June.
It aired in October.
Where'd you shoot it?
Changed everything.
In Brooklyn at a place called Roulette.
Yeah.
And it changed everything meaning what?
Meaning I've had...
I was able to write a book based on people who watch that.
And then I've had...
Great success in touring my acts since then.
So the three hours that I've written since then, I've been able to tour every year or two.
Does any part of you think that, oh, if only I'd been well the whole time, that I could have elevated myself or advanced in an even different way?
Sometimes, but only because I sometimes tell myself, man, it's a good thing you went crazy.
Because you would have run out of material otherwise?
Well...
I mean, it's good material.
It's really good material.
And also...
Just doing really good observational jokes didn't really bring me the following that I have now.
So you're saying you became known as the depressed comic, but now grown beyond it to some degree.
Although many people, I'm sure, still know you for that.
Yeah, but there were people before that who just knew me as an observational comedian.
I knew you as the two-letter state post office abbreviation.
Yeah, that was my born to run.
Yeah, it was your born to run.
I'm so glad you're back.
Me too.
I'm so glad you're back.
Me too.
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On any day that it's above 40 degrees Fahrenheit in New York City, Gary Gullman plays basketball outdoors to help maintain his mental health.
One day when it was maybe 43 degrees, I tagged along.
He was shooting baskets on a court up in central Harlem.
There was no one else around.
Nice.
All right, I wanna ask, do you mind if I ask you questions while you shoot?
No.
All right, here's what I want.
Before every shot, I simply want you to tell me one thing that you love about basketball.
Okay, Larry Bird.
The Boston Celtics.
Nice.
What about for you?
What does it do for you?
Oh, basketball is good for the heart.
Basketball is an anti-anxiety.
Gary Goleman!
So you were very good at basketball when you were a kid.
Yeah.
But you ended up playing not college basketball, but college football.
What happened with you and basketball in there?
Well, I would say part of it was I didn't believe in myself and I didn't value the enjoyment of it.
I wanted to get a scholarship.
And I didn't value how much fun I had and how much I looked forward to it.
And at the time, they were giving literally 10 times the number of football scholarships than basketball scholarships.
Bigger teams, yeah.
Bigger teams, because they had 100 players at the time.
I had the intersection of a bad coach.
In my book, I refer to him as Ron Bitter.
He was a very short man who didn't teach us anything about basketball.
He was just, he took everything he had learned about Bob Knight
Except the skills and technique.
Chair throwing.
The cruelty, the chair throwing, the swearing.
And I was discouraged.
And when some football coaches showed me the type of enthusiasm that I deserved in basketball, I immediately...
Was hooked on on that type of feeling and ultimately they were able to get me a four-year scholarship to college
So it worked out in some ways but I think I would have been happier had I had I reached my potential in basketball
But I will tell you that what I've decided to do is apply that type of love to my comedy and my writing and and and
That's been very satisfying.
I'm happy for you that basketball is, again, a fun part of your life.
Yes, yes.
But I also think it's a good lesson for anybody watching.
Like, the thing that you love, you've got to remember to keep the love in it.
Yes.
Or it turns into a different thing.
No, I know.
I know, it's just, and I feel so, so grateful that I was able to rediscover it actually after I started to feel better from my depression.
Yeah.
Was it a big part of your getting better?
Yes, absolutely, because I always used to take for granted that there were so many aspects of basketball that were antidepressants.
I think the thing that people get put off by is when they're not immediately good at it.
Or if they're not as good as they used to be when they were younger.
That was part of it.
I had to come to terms with the fact that I would never dunk again and that I would be shown up by much younger people frequently.
But that's also a great lesson, which is to curb your ego.
I've been asking my guests on Better in Person to bring some show and tell.
The architect, Bjarke Ingels, brought some synthetic moon dust.
As you'll hear later in the season, the rocker and writer, Warren Zanes, brought in a piece of Beatles memorabilia with a heartbreaking story attached to it.
So what did Gary Gullman bring?
A big notebook with stickers on the cover and every page absolutely crammed with joke ideas and much more.
All right, so this is my most recent notebook.
And the first thing is I make a collage.
Yes, you do.
Of stickers and photographs.
This is my favorite.
Actor, comedian, Chris Elliott.
Oh yeah.
The back is a lot of set lists and transcription notes.
Can I see a set list?
Yeah, so here's a set list from August 27th.
Gen X wave traffic.
Gen X is the last generation that will wave to you for letting them into traffic.
Popcorn Button was a diversion from the microwave company's inability to get it to make toast.
Yeah.
And the same thing happened to aliens where they were able to make the UFO, but they couldn't figure out how to manage the last 10 feet.
So they put out a ramp.
And so that's the interesting thing that I love about comedy is a lot of it is just trying to make connections between things that aren't.
That aren't connected.
And so that's very fun.
Now that you've said it, the toast failing seems large to me now.
Shouldn't it have been like, yeah, of course it can make toast.
And it cannot.
It can make a turkey in 11 minutes.
And it can't make toast.
But then it also has a diversion, not a diversion, a digression.
Yeah.
Where the toast people are frantic over the microwave oven's prospects for toast making and pushing them out of business.
But then the man who runs the toast, and the problem with this joke is it feels too much like the abbreviating of the states,
But the man who runs the toast consortium says, we'll always have bathtub suicides.
And to me, that's the bottom line of capitalism, that that's the way they think.
I don't know.
You always have bathtub suicides.
Yeah.
Do you remember writing that line?
I remember thinking of it on stage.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
So then I wrote it down afterwards.
Did it work the first time?
It got such a reaction.
It got such a reaction.
It was similar to what happened in here where people were like, oh!
Because it's really, especially for a depressive to talk about bathtub suicide.
Also, I could imagine you trying to have toast in the bath somehow.
Right, but then I also followed up with, because this is where the real writing comes in.
So you have that line where he says,
He says, well, I always have bathtub suicides.
But then I thought of something that he says after that.
You want to you want to frighten me.
Tell me they've outlawed dead end jobs and loveless marriages.
Then I'll start panicking because as long as there's despair.
We will sell toasters.
The man was a psychopath, really.
I'm so glad you came by.
It's great to see you and I'm so glad that you're doing well.
See each other and spend this time together.
Thank you.
And I think that you're, I really think you're an inspiration to a lot of people.
So well done, man.
Oh, that's so nice to hear.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Gary Goleman.
I hope you enjoyed this audio edition of Better in Person with Gary Gullman.
But remember, this is a video show and you can watch this episode on the Freakonomics YouTube channel or on Apple Podcasts.
Let us know what you think.
Our email is betterinpersonatfreakonomics.com or you can also write to us at radioatfreakonomics.com.
We will be back soon right here with more Freakonomics Radio.
Until then, take care of yourself.
And if you can, someone else too.
It's so decadent to have somebody lint roll you.
Oh my gosh, what a life.
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