From Flying
George Lopez is rolling now. There are 3,000 people in front of him, and their laughter fills the auditorium. The audience has turned out because they love his act, love his hit television series "George Lopez" -- love him. He tells jokes about men and women, husbands and wives, ethnic groups and ethnic differences, about names in the news, and about himself. He tells jokes about a time when he wasn't surrounded by 3,000 people who love him, a time when it seemed he couldn't find one person who loved him at all.To the audience, Lopez recounts once being at Disneyland and asking his grandmother for a Mickey Mouse hat -- an individualized one with ears and his name embroidered across the front. One, you're lucky we brought you. Two, you want a souvenir, save your ticket. Three, your ears stick out more than the hat. Here, I'll just write your name across your forehead.
They roar at the image of such over-the-top meanness. Lopez has conjured up a modern Miss Hannigan whose nastiness to children would be deplorable if it wasn't so funny. Of course, it wasn't so funny when young George was living it.
George Lopez is a unique talent, but he's hardly a unique comedian -- at least in one respect. A surprising number of comics have faced hardships in their youth, yet managed to find their personal salvation -- and provide our entertainment -- by making us laugh.
George Lopez never knew his father. His mother, who was a scam artist, suffered epileptic seizures, and permanently disappeared when George was ten, leaving him in the care of his grandparents. His kindly grandfather worked long and hard but turned to the bottle for escape. And his grandmother was gratuitously cruel. Not only did she show George little love or encouragement, she seemed to take great pleasure in insulting him. "I don't think there was ever a moment in my childhood," Lopez says, "when I felt it was great to be part of a family."
In the few photos that exist of young George, there's no trace of the smiling, deep-dimpled entertainer we know today. Instead, we see a morose boy, turning his eyes away from the camera. "I never smiled," he says, "because no one made me feel like I was alive. Forget about being important, forget about being a contributing person -- no one made me feel like I was alive."
But comedy did. In 1974, when George was 13, he watched the charismatic Freddie Prinze on TV and began to think that maybe he, too, could become a comedian. "My buddy Ernie knew a guy who was a stand-up who was getting all kinds of publicity," George remembers. "Ernie said, 'Man, you're funnier than this dude. Let's go to the clubs and figure out an act.' "
The third time Lopez took the stage, when he was just 18 years old, he cracked up the crowd. "Afterwards, I literally felt like I was flying," he recalls. "That was the first time I ever felt complete acceptance and love."
Never Cry Again
Before Jim Carrey became the star he is today, he, too, was a little boy who confronted hardship. His mother spent much of Carrey's childhood in bed, suffering from a series of illnesses, some real, some psychosomatic. Young Jim spent countless hours trying to lighten her day, putting together many of the same kind of funny routines that eventually would make him world-famous. Despite his mother's warning that his face would freeze, Carrey would stand before a mirror mastering his impersonations of John Wayne, Don Adams and the Riddler from "Batman." Later on, when his father lost his job and the family wound up living in a camper van, Carrey sometimes slept in his tap shoes, in case his parents needed cheering up in the night.Rita Rudner, who has become a mainstay on the comedy-club circuit, also had a less than ideal childhood. She was 13 when her mom died of cancer, and Rita's father had little time for his daughter between work and caring for his wife. "If you are the most popular person in school, you don't grow up to be a comedian,'' Rudner once said. "I was insecure and had to lose myself in something fun." In doing so, she found her comic voice. When I was a kid, I had two friends, and they were imaginary and they would only play with each other.
G. Neil Martin, a professor of psychology at Middlesex University in the U.K. who has studied the psychology of comedy, says, "The ability to provoke makes the person who provokes the laughter belong. Laughter makes the person seem wanted; it provides the acceptance he or she never had."
And for some comedians, the laughter offers comfort not just to them, but to their family. After Ellen DeGeneres's parents divorced, she helped combat her mother's depression by making her laugh. "I found I could make her happy, and she wouldn't be crying anymore," says DeGeneres, presently the host of a popular daytime talk show. "When you're a kid you don't usually have that kind of control over your parent, but I could change her emotion, and that was amazing."
A few years later, when one of DeGeneres's best friends died suddenly in a traffic accident, hardship acted as a catalyst again. Sitting in her flea-infested New Orleans apartment, she found herself wondering why her friend was gone and yet the fleas were still around. The tragedy inspired her to write a routine in which we hear her side of a phone call to God. She says to the Almighty, No, I didn't realize how many people were employed by the flea-collar industry. I guess you're right. Of course you are, you being who you are. It was her first big bit, and it helped make her a star.
Today, DeGeneres says, "Life can be a bummer -- full of hurt and pain and sadness. It's part of it, and important to put it in perspective. Have a sense of humor as much as you can."
When Bernie Mac was very young, he came upon his mother, sitting in the living room, quietly crying. "I climbed on her lap," he says, "and started wiping her tears, asking, 'Mom, why are you crying?' And she kept saying 'Nothing, nothing.' My mother had breast cancer -- she died when I was 15 -- but she never said a word about it to anyone. Soon I began to cry, too, and there we were, both of us, crying.
"She had the TV tuned to 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' Bill Cosby came out and began doing his routine about snakes in the bathroom. Soon my mother was laughing -- crying and laughing at the same time. Then I started laughing. When Cosby got done, I asked my mama who he was. She told me, 'He's a comedian.' I told her, 'That's what I'm going to be when I grow up. I'm going to be a comedian, and maybe you never cry again.' "
Granted a Voice
Little Bernie soon became an irrepressible entertainer, telling jokes in the neighborhood and at school. At eight, he was asked to entertain the congregation one Sunday after church. My family -- you don't want to mess with my family. My grandpa, he says everything four times -- four! Pass me that gravy, woman. Don't be hoggin' that gravy. How many times I got to ask for that gravy? I'll bonk the top of your head you don't pass me that gravy now.These revelations earned Mac a smack on his bottom from his grandmother, but also lots of laughs from the congregation. That laughter -- of friends, of audiences in small clubs -- sustained Mac for years as he struggled to establish himself as a comedian. "I couldn't get the laughter out of my head," he says. "It wasn't a career. It wasn't even a choice. It was a calling."
It was a calling for Carol Burnett too. The great comedian was raised by an eccentric grandmother who was something of a petty thief. They lived on welfare, and her parents, who divorced when she was young, were alcoholics. Still, Burnett rejects the idea that she grew up in hardship. She insists there was also fun and love and a certain security. Yet when she describes how she felt the first time she heard an audience laugh while she was performing, her response suggests an affirmation she had never before experienced. In her autobiography, she writes: "What was it exactly? A glow? A light? I was a helium balloon, floating above the stage. I was the audience, and the audience was me. I was happy. Happy. Bliss. I knew then that for the rest of my life, I would keep sticking out my chin to see if I could ever feel that good again."
But some comedians turn to laughter for more than just acceptance. "Humor is a great defense," says Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Art Buchwald. Shortly after his birth, his mother was institutionalized for mental illness; he never saw her again. His father placed Art and his sisters into foster care. At 16, Art had lived in seven homes. Along the way, he made a discovery. "For reasons that I can't explain, I found I could make kids laugh, and I liked that very much.'' The defensive value of laughter was more than emotional, but quite practical for Buchwald. "When you make the bullies laugh," he says, "they don't beat on you."
Comedy can be a defense, but it's also a way of asserting power. Bill Cosby was raised in a housing project. His father drank, beat his mother and was absent for long stretches. Cosby used comedy to remake his world -- to rewrite his universe. Drawing on his fundamental optimism, he spun tales about kids who were active and imaginative, and parents who drew on deep reserves of patience and wisdom.
George Lopez has obviously learned a trick or two at Cosby's knee, but he's more direct about confronting the issues that caused him so much pain. There's no grandmother in his show, but the character of his mother is that hard, acerbic woman. In one episode, Lopez attempts to win her praise by redoing her bathroom. In an emotional scene, he blurts out that he did the work just to get her to say thank you. But first he acknowledges that it was hard raising him alone, and that he never really thanked her for her sacrifices raising him. Thank you for all the things I don't even know you did for me. Now, do you have anything to say to me? The mother responds, It's about freakin' time.
It's a small joke, but in that moment, a fearful boy has been granted a voice, a man has tamed his monster, and an audience of millions has been given the powerful gift of laughter.