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

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0:13Hey there, it's 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 Gullman. 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.

0:44We 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.

1:15You'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. 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.

1:45He'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, 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.

2:12I 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. Goleman's honesty makes his fans love him even more. And now I also love Gary Goleman. 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 over-prepared, and I get a little paralyzed.

2:51So for you, I've done zero. Okay. 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. But then I've taken this side gig starting in 1993 where I tell jokes, and I wrote a book, and I act occasionally.

3:22But 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. I'm glad. I mean, I'm glad. It worked out. Years later, the woman from HR and her husband came to my show.

4:19So 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. 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.

4:48Funny 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?

5:00Period. 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. 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?

5:33It'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 – That was the Sam Bankman-Fried model. You remember him? Yeah, but wasn't he disgraced?

6:04Yes, he was. Yeah, such a bummer because it's a great philosophy. It's a great philosophy. Effective altruism, we 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.

6:35And the comedy cellar at the back table has – the tables are made out of slate, so people draw in chalk. And 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, 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.

7:09And then we became friends, 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, 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 sometimes I would beg her. I would be like, you've really got to get out of this.

7:39It'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 did – 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 – because she had – 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.

8:18Michael Pollan wrote that book, How to Change Your Mind, and it was – Yeah. 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 – I always used to say this. I would say, if I could – 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 inevitably – 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 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.

9:31Yes. 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.

10:02And 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.

10:34I 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.

11:04But 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. 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.

11:35But 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. 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'm lucky to have a really good therapist. I didn't always have a therapist because I, in some cases, I couldn't afford it or I didn't have the insurance for the medication.

12:41So it happened to – 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. Right. So the special that you made, right? We call it a special? Yeah. It's a great – HBO's special, the great depression. It's a great – 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 – The title is – 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.

13:14Like, you said at some point that you are excellent at monetizing mental illness.

13:20And 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. 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.

13:56I 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. Oh, thank you. And I want to know how you made it, really.

14:12Okay. 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 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.

14:49And 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. Yeah. 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, I would, one of the things I started saying was how I had been recognized in the psych ward.

15:22And 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. Right. 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 6pm and with socks with treads on the bottom.

15:55And yet, part of my relentless ego is like, oh, look at me, getting recognized. Like, he gave me a shot. He gave me a shot of dopamine. Right. And also, it was just funny that he said, am I crazy? And 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.

16:29You 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 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,

17:02if 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 it was so helpful that even when I was bombing on stage,

17:40I 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, what's the, 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, about abbreviating the states.

18:42How are they going to make a 98 minute documentary about a task that couldn't have taken more than six minutes to complete? It 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 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 I, that also was very popular about me role-playing with my wife and I'm a professor, but I take it way too seriously.

19:19And, 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, why is she a senior in the intro?

19:34And the, they couldn't sell it. They, a 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's, it was much easier to sell specials back then. And, and, and it just devastated me and, 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, from getting out of the house and getting out of bed a lot of days.

20:07So my, my manager, Brian said, what if we did a hybrid of a special with a documentary? I just worked for the documentary and his name is Mike Bonfiglio and Mike had just worked with Judd Apatow in the Avett Brothers movie and, and a couple of 30 for 30s and the Gary Shandling, the Gary Shandling documentary. And he later did the, the George Carlin. You like Gary Shandling, I'm guessing. Yes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. He was, he was one of my heroes. Him and Richard Lewis, I think were the two and David Brenner also, but.

20:39Only Jewish comics.

20:42It's okay. It's, 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. Stephen Wright, you liked a lot as a kid, I remember. I loved Stephen Wright. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I didn't, I didn't think I could pull off that style. It was too smart and, and too hard. And so. Did you like Lenny Bruce a lot? No, I didn't, I didn't understand, I didn't understand the context. I think Lenny Bruce is all about the context and how brave he, 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.

21:22Pryor and Carlin and, and Richard Lewis types. Yeah. All right. Sorry. I interrupted. So you're, you're. This is how a conversation works. This is how a conversation works. Yeah, I agree. I agree. But I must've 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.

21:55But 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. Excited. I'm anxious in the same way that I used to get excited before a basketball practice or a game. I can't, I can't wait to go out there and, 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, in comedy, but that's very rare.

22:25Is the, is the anxiety or the loss of confidence in sport, you think, greater than or less than performing? Almost identical. It's so, it's so interesting. It's almost paralyzing. Yeah, and, and in sports, it, it affects your, your fine motor skills. So, it can really affect your, your shooting. And in comedy, the audience can sense that the comedian is, is nervous. And you're, you're a good basketball player, we assume. Yes? For somebody who doesn't play basketball, I'm awesome.

22:55But you were, you were good when you were, oh.

22:59If you don't play basketball, you'll think, I'm, it's like magic. Like, like, a magician can tell whether a magician is good, but a lay person can't tell. So you would, you would say, like, sometimes I'll play with people and I'll make so many shots, they'll be, they'll be laughing because they think it's, it's absurd. But if I play with a real basketball player, they're like, eh, slow and can't jump. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and, uh, if I, 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, so. Oh, we should definitely play. Yeah, we'll play. I would love it. Okay, cool.

23:32Gary 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, and, and I was able to, to finish it. And so, and, 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, you're stretching your comfort zone and you're, you're.

24:03What are you, what are you doing now that's stretching for you? The one person show was, was something that I wrote. I probably finished writing a year ago and now I'm touring it and I did it. This is Grand Iliquid. I did it off Broadway. I did Grand Iliquid 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, this opening night is going to be a disaster. I can't memorize all these things that I, that I wrote. And, and, but then I thought, oh, well, failing is, is part of the whole thing.

24:39And there's really no artist who's never failed at anything. And I was able to figure it out and memorize it. It requires 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 the, a lot of the Pomodoro method. And, and also. Setting the timer for whatever. Yeah, and writing it out and, and a lot of mnemonics so that there was a, there was a story on stage. And then there was this weird story in my head that connected all these things.

25:10And there's, 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, 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, from solid gold, like the Waylon Flowers puppet with that long

25:43chin in the, and she had a bun in 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. Good it wasn't a grapefruit. Yeah, I have this, so I have this image of my grandmother and that relates to the high cost of, of, of babysitting in the 1970s.

26:16My mother bringing me everywhere and then that. So yeah, it was, it was interesting to, 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 Eloquent. You smile so much. Is it strategic? Yes, because it's part of a, it's part of certain punchlines and it, and it relieves some, 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

26:54like 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, when Badlands is next. I'm like, oh, you like that one? Wow. What 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. And so that's where, 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?

27:2630 hours is, no, I, 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 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? You'd have to do it. I could listen, I could listen to it on a subway ride and be able to remember it.

27:59Yeah. Yeah. Do you, 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, their elementary school teachers. And I'm like, I remember the custodians and the nurse and, and the teacher's aides. Yeah. But because of my depression, I lost a lot of memories. 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.

28:34It, it, it astonishes me that people, this average could be so critical about every aspect of every and judgmental. My mother, I brought a girlfriend home one time and within a minute, the, the woman made the mistake of being far enough away from my mother where she couldn't hear what my mother said. My mother said, oh, so homely. Oh. And it just, was your mother pretty?

29:06No.

29:08There were pictures of every old lady where they were young and they, their wedding pictures. She was a beautiful bride and, but she was, she had no right to be, to be denigrating anybody's appearance. And it's just such a tacky, gross thing to be as somebody who comments about, about people's physicalities. And there were, there were, 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.

29:38And, or sometimes she would go, ugh, like that when somebody would come on, like she, 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, a big head. But it was just, it was, it was diminishing and belittling and it, and it just, it, it got to the point where I, and I could never put it into words until this sentence that, 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.

30:11So did you cut your family off? How'd you, how'd you deal with it? I cut them off from time to time or, 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, that anything really in the book, except that I had told these stories of her stealing Hallmark cards in the, in the 1970s from a, 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.

30:41I 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, a burglar that we had, 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, had a gumball machine from a grocery store in my bedroom and nothing we had in our house that cost more than a hundred dollars

31:15had 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, it's delicious.

31:46It's not painful, but it's very, very specific. So I feel like, 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. Ah, 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 who, there are so many people who will tell me how the Great Depression resonated, how,

32:23I mean, 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

33:00about feeling 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, but amongst, but for comedians, I guess, I just, 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

33:32had been. 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

34:08say, well, I thought I would be happy because I was a comedian and I was successful, but it wasn't, it wasn't like that. And, 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, is such a great, a great service that comedians can provide, but it works the other way too, I always think, because

34:38they let you off the hook also for being racist and sexist and, and homophobic. So, so the, you gotta be, you gotta be careful. I think. You have some show and tell, it looks like you brought with your brain. But before I go to show and tell for the, for the people watching who are obsessive compulsive, I want to 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.

35:08And I said, yes, yes, yes, you, you may. It's a hard decision. Right. And then I did an audition where I did the whole show and a couple of days later, but I will say one interesting thing was that I had to be very careful because I knew a rejection could, 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 am going to have to live with their decision.

35:44But I had said, I will be disappointed. I will keep touring the show. And if it doesn't wind up on HBO, I'm, I'm fine with that. And, and that, and of course then it happened. So I never had to, to really live with it, but, but that's the, that's how it, 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, I, I've had, I was able to write a book based on people who watch that.

36:16And then I've had great success in touring my act since then. So the, the three hours that I've written since then, I've been able to tour every year or two. Is 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 a 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?

36:47Well. 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, the following that I have now. So you're saying you became known. I became better known. As the depressed comic. Yeah. But now grown beyond it. Yeah. To some degree. Yeah. Although many people I'm sure still know you for that. Yeah. But there were people before that who just knew me as a, as an observational. I knew you as the, the two letter state.

37:19Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was the state 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. I'm so glad you're back. I'm so glad you're back. I'm so glad you're back. This episode of Better in Person is presented by ChatGPT. ChatGPT work moves beyond answers into getting real work done. It's a new experience in ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects across web, mobile, and desktop. You can give ChatGPT work a goal and have it gather context, choose an approach, create

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38:35On 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 want to 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.

39:08Boston Celtics. Nice. What about for you? What does it do for you? Oh, basketball is good for the heart.

39:21Basketball is an anti-anxiety.

39:25Gary Gullman! 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

40:01than basketball scholarships. Bigger teams. 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,

40:39I immediately was hooked 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 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 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.

41:12Like, 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.

41:42I 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. So, but if you can, but that's also a great lesson, which is to curb your ego.

42:07I'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 Goleman 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.

42:38What is that? And the first thing is I make a collage. Yes, you do. Of the stickers and photographs. This is my favorite actor, comedian, Chris Elliott. Oh, yeah. The back is a lot of set lists and transcription. Can I see a set list? Yeah, so here's a set list. Yeah, just walk us through that. August 27th. Gen X wave traffic. Gen X is the last generation that will wave to you for letting them into traffic.

43:05Microwave. Popcorn button was a diversion from the microwave company's inability to get it to make toast. 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 connected. And so that's very fun.

43:36The 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, 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 the states,

44:10but the man who runs the toast consortium says, we'll always have bathtub suicides.

44:18Like that's, and to me that's the, that's the bottom line of capitalism. That's the way they think. I don't know.

44:36We'll always, we'll always have bathtub suicides. Yeah. Do you remember writing that line? I remember thinking of it on, 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. Like it was similar to what happened in here where people were like, ah, because it's really, especially for a depressive to talk about, to talk about bathtub suicides. Also, I could imagine you trying to have toast in the bath.

45:07Yeah. Somehow. Right. But then I also followed up with, because this is, this is where the real writing comes in. So you have that line. Yeah. 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, then I'll start panicking. Because as long as there's despair, we will, we will sell toasters. The man was a psychopath.

45:39Really. 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, well done, man. Oh, that's so nice to hear. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Gary Gullman.

45:58I 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.

46:28And if you can, someone else too. It's so decadent to have somebody, to have somebody lint roll you. Oh my gosh. What a life. Thanks again to ChatGPT for sponsoring today's episode of Better In Person. ChatGPT can help teams move from goals to real outcomes. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects.

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