A Creative Misfire

A Blessing and a Curse

The creative side of the brain must be preciously fragile. There must be a danger in the delicate connections, some requirement for a fine tuning of the synapses firing. When the creative side works, and is running at high speed and full production, it can produce the greatest art known to us all. But should it misfire, should the connections become frayed, things can become unhinged quickly, and the engine creating all that creativity can shut down, cease, fail.

The creative side must be more Ferrari and less Ford truck.

Now when you think of creativity and art, perhaps your mind goes to the great painters, or great musicians. Artists who have produced works that inspire and have inspired for generations.

But my own thoughts on troubled artists run to comedy.

I was thinking about comedians, from outside looking into their world some are of a fragile nature, and many have suffered under the weight of their creative mind.

Perhaps the first to come to mind is Robin Williams, a man whose gifted mind was running at warp speed compared to us all. His manic nature was on full display on stage and there were times watching him on screen you could see that he had physically lost control over his own brain, his creative side was firing on all cylinders, and his mouth and body were merely playing “catch up”.

He was clearly trying to interpret for the world the very vibrant thoughts his brain possessed. He would strut, prance, run across the stage, back and forth, to and fro, a word salad exploding from his mouth, in front of an audience that appeared to be operating seconds behind. As if Robin Williams had entered a time warp, where he and he alone in the room had time travelled a few seconds ahead of all humanity and was giving us a humorous glimpse from what is out in front of us all.

Before Robin Williams, for the older readers, there was Jonathan Winters, who possessed the same gifts, but also suffered when the creative side tended to misfire, and he required some repair and downtime in the human garage known as a mental hospital or asylum. Winters would admittedly check himself into a hospital regularly, to ease the pain of having a mind that worked overtime on creative thought.

Many others have suffered.

Comedian Mitch Hedberg tried to ease his pain with drugs, as so many comedians have. He was clearly afflicted, you could almost feel his pain radiating offstage, some measure of discomfort living in that body with that mind. The way he hid behind a flop of long hair, and sunglasses, and told jokes staring at his shoes, or even with his back to the audience, his angst was on clear display. But his simple observations spoken in a stagger and halting staccato, could be devastatingly funny. Thinking of his observation that rice is the perfect food when you want to eat two thousand of the same thing, I smile. For people who enjoy comedy, he is missed.

Drugs took John Belushi, and Chris Farley, two comedians who obviously felt a strong need to self medicate to ease their racing minds. While it is easy to say they had drug problems, even a casual view of their lives lived in the public eye yields a perspective that they had trouble controlling minds that raced beyond the comprehension of almost all. Belushi could make you laugh absent saying anything. Just standing there onstage in a bee costume, antennae bouncing, he would make you laugh.

And Chris Farley doing his motivational speaker “living in a van down by the river” is a classic. Watching the other actors in the scene break character from his antics makes me laugh. Farley was too funny to ignore, even for the professionals on stage who should know better than to give in and laugh themselves.

When you begin to look at the genre, you realize that the gift of a comedic mind, a creative mind bent on a realization of the absurdities of life, and being able to express those foibles to the masses, can come at a high price.

When the Ferrari misfires, the agony can be all too real.

One of the greatest of them all Richard Pryor, melted down into crack abuse before our eyes. He had as agile a mind as any comedian in history, and could slay an audience, but his troubled youth always seemed to haunt him and he had trouble keeping his demons at bay.

And the more obscure but devastatingly funny Greg Giraldo, a lawyer by training before moving into comedy, a man who had everything to live for, a wife, a family, a moderately successful career also succumbed to drugs. If you go back and watch some of his roast material he is just incredibly funny. Hold your side and cry funny. Unless you are someone who enjoys comedy, and tries to follow them online, or see them live, perhaps you have never heard of Greg Giraldo. He was a man who never got the accolades he deserved.

There is a current comedian, a favorite of mine, Ms. Maria Bamford, who is very public about her own demons. She is very frank about her struggles with mental health, and bouts with depression, even suicidal thoughts.

I think she is one of the funniest people alive today, and to see her suffer, or speak about her issues, it pains me from afar. She is so gifted, so talented, and in my opinion has such a superior mind, that I wish to see her survive and thrive for many more years to come.

There are times when I am scrolling through “Youtube”, which curates selections, and since I’ve watched Maria Bamford there before it will show me selections of her performances to view, and so I do. I get a sense of unease when I see those clips where her struggle is more readily evident than in others. Where you can almost feel that whatever solutions she is seeking aren’t working well, and I want to give her a hug through the screen. Tell her how valued she is, how talented, and needed in our world gone astray.

I stopped on a podcast she did with a fellow comedian and was dismayed, I think it was Neal Brennan, a writer for Dave Chappelle, and a stand-up in his own right.

The way he forced her to confront her issues, discussed them openly, as if viewing an open wound. I wanted to stop the interview, change the direction of the interview, make it stop. I felt as if he was picking at her scabs and scars unfairly, and exploiting her vulnerabilities. Watching this very talented woman treated this way pained me to view. Given the history of the genre I would have much preferred to see her actual talents celebrated, and not her struggles emphasized.

What he should have been saying to her is that she possesses a superior mind, that her creative side is working at speeds that we mere mortals cannot comprehend. That she is gifted, gifted beyond others, and that though this gift can cause her some measure of pain when the cylinders get out of sync, that when her mind is firing on all cylinders and she shares those thoughts with us all she is sharing a genius we all appreciate and admire.

He should have been building her up, expressing to her the debt we owe to her, that she is pursuing a life on stage and sharing her gift with others, even at great expense to herself of needing to heal in between.

The comedy field is littered with too many gifted and talented who have succumbed to the pain to see Ms. Bamford suffer publicly, and open the wound for all to see.

Don’t you too marvel at those who have a creative ability, who can convey thoughts on what is all around us that we didn’t see, we missed, we failed to identify the ironies in life they hold right up to our nose?

I do wonder why, that at the same time these people are given such a gift, that it has to come with a cost. Why does the creative side tend to have such a fragile nature?

I wish that the troubled and gifted in the world of comedy would stop a moment to realize for themselves that the pain they feel is a burden of the gift of being given a superior brain. One that operates at speeds superior to most. And so when the darkness comes, and the thoughts turn ugly, that this is the price for a mind that can also creatively produce thought that amazes, and elevates us all. In times such as these that we are living through comedians help us all get through. I would hope we don’t have to lose another, that they could realize this pain too shall pass.

We shouldn’t have to lose so many gifted and talented people to the pain that accompanies their talents.