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

Gary and Stephen talk about creativity, recovery, getting fired, and holding grudges. They also get outside and play basketball, which is a big part of how Gary stays well. If you'd like to see the video version of Better in Person, watch it on YouTube or Apple Podcasts.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  This episode of Better in Person is presented by ChatGPT. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new ChatGPT desktop app today.

• 0:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there, 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 Gulman. 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.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  This is Better in Person with Stephen Dubner and Gary Gulman.

• 1:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you had to choose one word to describe the comedian Gary Gulman, it might be kind, which is not a word you associate with comedians very often. He's also tall, six foot six, which helps make him good at basketball.

• 1:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 Depress.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  I still see a therapist. I believe I broke him on Monday.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was leaving his office and I was shutting the door and I heard him go.

• 2:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  A show about one man's depression should not be funny, but this one is, and it's also deeply human. Gulman's honesty makes his fans love him even more. And now, I also love Gary Gulman. 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. So for you, I've done zero.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  I know your first name is Gary. That's all I got. You're an accountant, I understand?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  I was, I was an accountant. That was what I studied in college. So my profession is accountant. But then, but then I've taken this, this side gig, starting in 1993, where I tell jokes and I wrote a book and, and, yeah, and I act occasionally. But it's just something, if the accounting doesn't, doesn't pay off.

• 3:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you ever do any accounting?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. I worked for, for two and a half years for what is now PricewaterhouseCoopers. And I was fired for saying, what are they gonna do, fire me?

• 3:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  You did not.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  I really said that. And it's the, 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 says, you said this, oh, that's really great. But this was like, and, and I will say this, I just said, yes, I absolutely said that. And, and, and that was that. They said, okay, well.

• 4:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, I'm glad. I mean, I'm glad.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Years later, the woman from HR and her husband came to my show. So all was, all was forgiven, but it was.

• 4:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Was all forgiven? Are you, are you a grievance holder or a grievance flusher?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Such a great comic.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Funny man. But he was, he's gotta be like the most forgiving man in, in history.

• 4:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you're thinking, what am I doing with my axes?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  What am I doing with my stupid things of?

• 4:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you punish yourself, period? Question mark?

• 5:02Speaker 01

  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, way too many. It's, 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, and also my childhood baseball card collection. I, I want to get a bigger place, but it, it has to fall within this, this range of not too ostentatious,

• 5:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was the Sam Bankman-Fried model. You remember him, the?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, but wasn't he disgraced?

• 6:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yes, he was.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, such a bummer because it's a great philosophy.

• 6:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a great philosophy. Effective altruism.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Effective altruism, yes.

• 6:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Your wife's name is Shadé.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  How did you meet?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  But she's not the Shadé. I wouldn't, I wouldn't have a smaller 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, the back table has, the tables are made out of slate, so people draw in chalk. And my wife Shadé 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.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  And so I said, I said, wait, are you an intellectual? And she said, uh, maybe. And, 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, and then we got.

• 7:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Lovers.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  And then, yeah, and then we became lovers. I took her on as a lover and, and that was in, we got married in 2020 during the, during the pandemic. But we'd been together since 2014.

• 7:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right, because when you were sick, she was.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  When I was sick.

• 7:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  We had been dating for about six months and then I went fucking crazy.

• 7:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  And, and sometimes I would beg her, I would be like, you really gotta get out of this. It's not, it's not going well.

• 7:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  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?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 8:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Wow.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  To try and, because she had.

• 8:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  The statute of limitations, I'm assuming is.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I would love to talk about, if you feel like it, your being sick. I mean, it's a lot more fun to talk about now that you're, because you seem awesome now.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  I feel awesome.

• 8:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  You look great, you seem great.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm, I'm so grateful and everything is just so much easier from the other, 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, but inevitably-

• 9:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  But that's exactly what happened then, right? You finally-

• 9:04Speaker 01

  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-

• 9:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  So your engine, your creative and comedy engine, it seems, was running as hot then, before you were sick, like you'd always been-

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  -hardworking, disciplined, productive-

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  But it's just like, when you would get sick, then-

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  -everything is back to zero or minus, is that the way it would work?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I would, 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 gonna 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, 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, to make such long-term plans.

• 10:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  We worked together-

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  In, I think it was 2017, and in, looking back now, I think you were not well then.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  No, no, but I would accept offers all the time because I didn't, I didn't wanna, I didn't wanna give in, and so I could put, I could put it together, but if you knew me, you knew I was not myself.

• 10:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  I just remember thinking, like, he's really not very fun, like, you didn't seem like you were having fun at all.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense, I was probably incredibly anxious.

• 10:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  I thought that was just who you were, but then I would watch your comedy and it seemed like a different human.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  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-

• 10:54Speaker 01

  I mean, it was every night from the spring of 2015 through the fall of, of 2017, so it was two and a half years, but also when I was working off a script of jokes, I could be much more compelling than I was in, 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, and so your brain is, 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

• 11:34Speaker 01

  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, this entire conundrum.

• 11:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  What does vigilant mean?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Exercising every day, eating right, getting enough sleep, taking on projects that keep me busy and, and accepting invitations, so getting out of the house and talking with people, yeah.

• 12:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, that all sounds sensible, but, um-

• 12:14Speaker 01

  And then taking my medication every day.

• 12:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  All good, but-

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm wondering, weren't you trying to do all that stuff before, when you were cyclically getting sick?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  I was not as disciplined about the exercise component, and I, I'm lucky to have a, 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, so 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, and get my head straight.

• 12:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, the, the special that you made, right, we call it a special, is it?

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Great Depression, which is a great, 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-

• 13:06Speaker 01

  The title was-

• 13:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a great title.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.

• 13:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what's so interesting about it, to me, is that it is the only hybrid I know, like, you, you said at some point that you are excellent at monetizing mental illness. And, um, 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, but he didn't really get that far.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  But, um, 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.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, it really is, you go through science and some segments of it are not at all entertaining or funny.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, it hit me hard, I, I just thought it was a great piece of work, and I wanna know how you made it, really.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Ah, okay, so, I was recovering from my hospitalization in Massachusetts, I was living in Massachusetts-

• 14:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Living at home.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  At, with my mom-

• 14:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  In your childhood bed.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  In the house, in the childhood bedroom, I would go to this club in, in Cambridge, in Harvard Square, called The Comedy Studio, and it, 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 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, that I looked disheveled and, and I didn't look well.

• 15:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  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, I, one of the things I started saying was how I had been recognized in the psych ward, and I would, and I would say, "Has that ever happened to anybody?" which is kind of a, an old formula of comedy where-

• 15:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  But you were recognized with a, in a particularly interesting way, right? Didn't the guy say, "Are you Gary Gulman?" or, "Am I crazy?"

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Or, "Am I crazy?" Yeah, yeah.

• 15:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  In a psych ward.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  That actually, that actually happened, yeah?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was so great because it's the lowest you can get, really, in my lifespan, which is to be in pajamas at 6:00 PM and, and with socks with treads on the bottom, and yet, part of my relentless ego is like, "Oh, look at me, getting recognized."

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Like, he gave me a shot, he gave me a shot of dopamine, and also, it was just funny that he said, "Am I crazy?" and, and now, when I was in the hospital, I remember-

• 16:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  But wait, then you would watch with this guy, The Office?

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, The Office would come on, The Office is always on, and The Office would come on, and I, I would, I don't know why I said this, but, again, my ego, you know, I auditioned for that, 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?"

• 16:43Speaker 01

  And, of, 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, you 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, 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, 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."

• 17:25Speaker 01

  So, "Fail better" became my mantra, I've heard it's been, that expression has been co-opted by tech bros, and, and shame on them, because, because it was, it was so, 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." So, my manager, who kept in touch with me-

• 17:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's the manager's name?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Brian Stern, and it, and at no point did he say, "When are you gonna 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, and a special?"

• 18:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Had you done a special before?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had done, I had done three specials, and it was actually the previous special that I had done, that I felt was, um, what's a, a trigger, it was a trigger for, 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 was, I could do.

• 18:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  What was that special?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  It was called, "It's About Time," and it had a joke that, that's since gone viral about, about abbreviating the states. How are they gonna 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 gonna be easy because Alabama lured them into a false sense of security, they said, "Alabama, AL, holy crap, this is easy."

• 18:58Speaker 01

  "We're gonna finish before they stop serving breakfast in the hotel restaurant." And they got back to abbreviating, and they said, "What's next?" they said, "Alaska." "Everybody cool with AL?"

• 19:09Speaker 01

  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. And, 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?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  And then, 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 was much easier to sell specials back then. 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. So my, my manager, Brian, said, "What if we did a hybrid of a special with a documentary? I just worked for the documentarian, his name is Mike Bonfiglio.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  And Mike had just worked with Judd Apatow on the Avet Brothers movie and, and a couple of thirty, for thirties, and the Gary Shandling, the Gary Shandling documentary. And he later did the, the George Carlin and...

• 20:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  You liked Gary Shandling, I'm guessing, yes? Yeah, right.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was, he was one of my heroes. Him and Richard Lewis, I think, were the two, and David Brenner also, but...

• 20:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Only Jewish comics, right?

• 20:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's okay.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Steven Wright, you liked a lot as a kid, I remember?

• 20:52Speaker 01

  I loved Steven Wright, 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...

• 21:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you like Lenny Bruce a lot?

• 21:05Speaker 01

  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, I just think of him as somebody who other comedians were standing on his shoulders. Pryor and Carlin and, and Richard Lewis types, yeah.

• 21:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, sorry, I interrupted.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  No, that's okay.

• 21:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're, you're...

• 21:28Speaker 01

  This is how a conversation works.

• 21:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is how a conversation works, yeah, I agree, I agree.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's your, um, mental state before a show? Are you excited, are you anxious?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm really excited. I'm anxious in the same way that I used to get excited before a basketball practice or, 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.

• 22:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is the, is the anxiety or the loss of confidence in sport, you think, greater than or less than performing?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Almost identical. It's so, it's so interesting.

• 22:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's almost paralyzing?

• 22:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you're, you're a good basketball player, we assume, yes?

• 22:53Speaker 01

  For somebody who doesn't play basketball...

• 22:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  But you were, you were good when you were...

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  If you don't play basketball, you'll think, I'm, it's like magic. Like a magician can tell whether a magician is good, but a layperson 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, "Meh, slow and can't jump." And, and, and if I, if I get too close to him, he'll miss.

• 23:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, since I don't really, I haven't played basketball since I was probably 16, so...

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Oh, we should definitely play.

• 23:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, we'll play.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  I would love it, okay.

• 23:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  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 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...

• 24:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  What are you, what are you doing now that's stretching for you?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  The one-person show was, was something that I wrote, I probably finished writing a year ago, and now I'm touring it.

• 24:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is grandiloquent.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  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, and this, this, um, opening night is going to be a disaster. I can't memorize all these things that I, that I wrote." And, but then I thought, "Oh, well, failing is, 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.

• 24:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  How do you do that? Just yourself, or do you have Sade run lines with you?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Just by myself. I use the, a lot of the Pomodora method and, and also...

• 24:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's the setting the timer for whatever.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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. And 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 Madame from, from Solid Gold, like the Wayland Flowers puppet with that

• 25:43Speaker 01

  long chin and the, 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.

• 26:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Good it wasn't a grapefruit.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have this, so I have this image of my grandmother, and that relates to the high cost of, of babysitting in the 1970s. My 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 grandiloquent."

• 26:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  You smile so much, is it strategic?

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Yes, because it's part of a, it's part of certain punchlines.

• 26:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  And it, and it relieves some, some tension.

• 26:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  They say it's also good for you.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Yes, but also, I can't tell you, Jeff Garland 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, when Badlands is next. I'm like, "Oh, you like that one? Where do you hear it? This one." Um, because I really worked this one.

• 27:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a great feeling, I would imagine.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  It's such a great feeling. And so that's where, that's where the smile comes from.

• 27:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's also a great feeling that you get for two seconds that reflects 30 hours of working on your own earlier, right?

• 27:26Speaker 01

  30 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. Like, because it was something...

• 27:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you still do that joke? Do you still do it?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  I don't do it any, anymore, because comedy, fortunately and unfortunately, isn't like music where you want to hear the hits, but, yeah.

• 27:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  How long would it take you to get it back if you had to?

• 27:53Speaker 01

  I could, I could listen, I could listen to it on a subway ride and, and be able to remember it, yeah.

• 27:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, do you, do you feel your memory is freakish?

• 28:03Speaker 01

  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."

• 28:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  But because of my depression, I lost a lot of memories.

• 28:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  You did.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you want to just quickly describe your family that you grew up in?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  I mean, some of the most unimpressive people, and yet so critical.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  It astonishes me that people this average could be so critical about every aspect of every judgmental. My mother, I brought a girlfriend home one time, and within a minute, she, the, 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, so homely."

• 29:03Speaker 01

  And it just-

• 29:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Was your mother pretty?

• 29:05Speaker 01

  No!

• 29:08Speaker 01

  There were pictures of every old lady where they were young and their wedding pictures, she was a beautiful bride. 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 is somebody who comments about, about people's physicalities. And 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." And, 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."

• 29:54Speaker 01

  But it was just, it was, it was diminishing and belittling and it just, it, it got to the point where, 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."

• 30:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, did you cut your family off? How'd you, how'd you deal with it?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, she didn't come off so well.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  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, I just thought it was really funny

• 30:46Speaker 01

  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 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 had a receipt.

• 31:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're well now.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  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. It's not painful.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  But it's very, very specific. So I feel like, uh, 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?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Ah, it's an interesting question. I, one thing, and I, 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, I 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, the most frustrating part of life in general, but specifically depression, was being able to describe what was going on inside you.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  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 feeling well, that I don't want to, that I want people to feel like, "Oh, what hope was there for me? Gary was my, was my..."

• 33:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  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-

• 33:16Speaker 01

  No, but amongst, but for comedians, I, I, I guess. I, I just, it was always a fantasy of mine that my, my suffering, I would be able to, to make people feel a little bit better in the way that I had.

• 33:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  But isn't that a little weird to use your suffering to make other people feel better?

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Well, I guess what I'm saying is that when, for instance, quarterback Terry Bradshaw and Bruce Springsteen, these men's men came out and said, "We are, 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 just say, "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."

• 34:19Speaker 01

  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, 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 they let you off the hook also for being racist and sexist and, and homophobic. So, so you gotta be, you gotta be careful, I think.

• 34:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  You have some show and tell, it looks like, you brought with your brain?

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Yes. 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, and I said, "Yes. Yes.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Yes, you, you may."

• 35:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's a hard decision.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  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, could throw me off track. And I remember my wife, in the interim between me auditioning and then saying, "Yes," my wife said, "This is really unfair because I am 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, I'm fine with that." And, and that, and of course, then it happened, so I never had to, to really live with it.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  But, but that's the, that's how it, it came to be. And then we shot it in June, it aired in October.

• 36:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Where'd you shoot it?

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Changed everything. In Brooklyn, at a place called Roulette.

• 36:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hmm.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Um, and it changed everything, meaning what?

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Meaning I, I've had, I was able to write a book based on people who watched that. And 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.

• 36:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  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?

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Sometimes, but only because I sometimes tell myself, "Man, it's a good thing you went crazy."

• 36:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because you would have run out of material otherwise?

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Well-

• 36:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, it's good material. It's really good material.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  And also, just doing really good observational jokes didn't really bring me the, the following that I have now.

• 36:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're saying, you became known-

• 37:01Speaker 01

  I became better known-

• 37:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  As the depressed comic-

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  And, but now grown beyond it-

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  To some degree.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Although many people, I'm sure, still know you for that.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. But there were people before that who just knew me as a, as an observational-

• 37:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  I knew you as the, the two-letter state-

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was the state abbreviation. Yeah, that was my born to run.

• 37:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, it was your born to run. I'm so glad you're back.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 37:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm so glad you're back.

• 37:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  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 the output, and continue iterating, all while you stay in control. It can help turn messy inputs into useful outputs like briefs, spreadsheets, dashboards, presentations, prototypes, landing pages, and workflows. You can even ask ChatGPT work to take on entire workflows with a single request. Here's an example. It can turn customer research into a campaign brief, use that brief to create marketing

• 38:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  assets, and adapt those assets for different markets, carrying context through every step. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new ChatGPT desktop app today.

• 38:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  On any day that it's above 40 degrees Fahrenheit in New York City, Gary Gulman 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?

• 38:57Speaker 03

  No.

• 38:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, here's what I want. Before every shot,

• 39:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  I simply want you to tell me one thing that you love about basketball.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Okay, Larry Bird.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  The Boston Celtics.

• 39:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nice. What about for you? What does it do for you?

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Oh, basketball is good for the heart.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  Basketball is an anti-anxiety.

• 39:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gary Gulman! So you were very good at basketball when you were a kid.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  But you ended up playing not college basketball, but college football. What happened with you and basketball in there?

• 39:38Speaker 03

  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, I didn't value how much fun I had and how much I looked forward to it. And, and at the time, they were giving literally 10 times the number of football scholarships than basketball scholarships.

• 40:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bigger teams.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  Because they had 100 players at the time. I had the intersection of a, a bad coach. In my book, I refer to him as Ron Bitter. He was, 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.

• 40:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Chair throwing.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  The cruelty, the chair throwing, the swearing. And I was, I was discouraged. And when some football coaches showed me the type of enthusiasm that I, I deserved in basketball, I, I immediately was hooked on, on that type of feeling. And, 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 that's been very satisfying.

• 41:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm happy for you that basketball is, again, a fun part of your life.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  But I also think it's a good lesson for anybody watching. Like, the thing that you love, you got to remember to keep the love in it.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 41:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Or it turns into a, a different thing.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  No, I know, I know. It's just, and I, I feel so, so grateful that I was able to, to rediscover it, actually, after I started to feel better from my depression.

• 41:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 41:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Was it a big part of your getting better?

• 41:33Speaker 03

  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, is when they're not immediately good at it.

• 41:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Or if they're not as good as they used to be when they were younger. That was, that was part of it. I, I had to come to terms with the fact that I would never dunk again and that, and that I would, I would be shown up by much younger people frequently. So, but, but if you can, but that's also a great lesson, which is to curb your ego.

• 42:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  I've been asking my guests on Better in Person to bring some show and tell. The architect, Bjarke Ingles, 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 Gulman bring? A big notebook with stickers on the cover and every page absolutely crammed with joke ideas and much more.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  All right, so this is my most recent notebook. And the first thing is I make a collage.

• 42:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yes, you do.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Of stickers and photographs. This is my favorite actor, comedian, Chris Elliott.

• 42:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  The back is a lot of setlists and transcription.

• 42:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can I see a setlist?

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so here's a setlist.

• 42:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, just walk us through that.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  From August 27th. Gen X wave traffic. The Gen X is the last, is the last generation that will wave to you for letting them into traffic.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  Microwave popcorn button was a diversion from the microwave company's inability to get it to make toast.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  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, they put out a ramp. And that's, and, and so that, 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, and so that's very fun.

• 43:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now that you've said it, the toast failing seems large to me now.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  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, and it can't make toast. And then, but then it also has a diversion, not a diversion, a digression.

• 43:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  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."

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Like that's, and to me, that's the, the, um, that's the bottom, that's the bottom line of capitalism. That, that's the way they think.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 44:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  "We'll always, we'll always have bathtub suicides."

• 44:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, we're, we're, do you remember writing that line?

• 44:44Speaker 03

  I remember thinking of it on, on stage.

• 44:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so then I wrote it down afterwards.

• 44:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did it work the first time?

• 44:51Speaker 03

  It got such a reaction. It got such a reaction. Like, it was similar to what happened here, where people were like, "Ah!" Because it's really, especially for a depressive, to talk about, to talk about bathtub suicides.

• 45:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Also, I could imagine you trying to have toast in the bath.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Somehow.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Right, but then I also followed up with, because this is, this is where the real writing comes in. So you have that line where he says, he says, "We'll 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, really.

• 45:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm so glad you came by. It's great to see you and I'm so glad that you're doing well.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  See each other and spend this time together.

• 45:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  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.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  Oh, that's so nice to hear. Thank you.

• 45:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 45:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gary Gulman.

• 46:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  I hope you enjoyed this audio edition of Better in Person with Gary Gulman. 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 [email protected] or you can also write to us at [email protected]. We will be back soon, right here, with more Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  It's so decadent to have somebody, have somebody link roll you. Oh, my gosh, what a life.

• 46:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  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. Download the new ChatGPT desktop app today.