 Meryl Marko is a legendary comedy writer. Her books include Meryl Marko's Guide to Love, How to Be Happ-Happ-Happy, Like Me, What the Dogs Have Taught Me, It's My Effing Birthday, The Psycho X-Game, The Name of Your Book, that's out right now and available through Amazon or at bookstores if they still exist, is a collection of essays entitled Cooled, Calm and Contentious. This book is amazing. Everybody told me pick up Meryl Marko's book. It's going to blow you away and it really has because in praise of crazy mommies. Yeah, I made a mistake. It was supposed to be called in praise of crazy mommies, the women who invented stand-up comedy because they are the source, I think, of funny people off-balance mothers produce comedians. I have a friend who says that in the 50s and 60s comedians were making fun of their wives and those same women now are being made fun of by their children. Take my mother, please. Have you been to, are you a therapist person? Have you been to therapy? Yes, since I was 17. Really? Well, so, you know, for me the big eye-opener with therapy is the secret ingredient that can turn everyone into a psychic, which is repetition compulsion, which is that people feel compelled to reenact the worst aspects of their childhood. No matter what they are and they presume that there will be a solution, it's the kind of thing that feels comfortable and that they'll be able to conquer. So they just replicate it down to even people who have been beaten as children go on to beat their own children. But in the case of what I'm writing about, all that stuff is even darker than what I'm writing about. What I'm writing about is just that, you know, if you had an unbalanced mother, you pretty much marry an unbalanced woman, you find her again. And so it's those. The repetition compulsion? Yeah, that. That was Freud's theory. You can just say to people, when you see somebody's life problems, you can just look at them, condense them and then figure out what their parent situation is. My repetition compulsion is, I keep going back to therapy. I was in therapy as a kid and I keep going back to the same therapist. Well, the therapist, count on that. Yes, I actually did not marry my mother. I was very smart. And you married your father. But did it work out well? I'm still married. This was a rough year because we have emptiness syndrome. The FBI found the kids underneath the floorboards and they took them away and have my wife and I are just staring at each other. This was a rough year, but I was very smart. And it wrecked the nest. It wrecked the nest. Why you upset me in this book? Because I realized that my mother wasn't crazy enough to make me that successful because there's column A and column B. You say that a mother must have a certain number of traits coming from column A and a certain number of traits coming from column B. Column A, my mother does not have. She has all the traits. I don't even know which ones were column A. Column A would be crafty, wise, daring. That was everybody I asked people after they had loaned me a story. This particular piece is full of stories from friends of mine. I attempt to prove that being raised by a heckler essentially turns you into a person who trades in comedy. And I would say that you probably fall into that category. I'm talking about people who go for a compulsive joke no matter what happens to them. I don't want to run away from this because to me this is really important. You said there are two columns that comedians pick from. I asked people to give me traits of the people who contributed stories to describe their mothers and everybody tried to balance it a little bit. You isolated the comedic particle. It's like Cern is trying to find the God particle. And what you said in column A, witty, smart, funny, daring, charming, willing to take risks. I don't find that. But column B, everything. The narcissism, you can't depend on her, prone to hysterics. And as I was reading that part, I thought, well, that's why I'm not as successful. She wasn't crazy enough. No, she was crazy enough. All the negative stuff by itself without the positive stuff is fine, too. Right. Don't punish yourself. She didn't have any positive traits. My mother was really pretty impossible, but she was very smart. IQ is separate from emotional disability. Ronnie is her name. She was very high IQ and just really screwed up emotionally. That's versions of that work. Now, that essay about the diaries of Ronnie Marco? Diaries of Ronnie Marco. Yeah, I found her diaries after she died. I never could get along with her in life, and I worked really hard at it, including going to therapy. And I would, before I would see my mother, I would run scenarios with a therapist. I'd go, all right, I'm going to see her, and here's what she's going to say. What should I do? And we'd figure things out. And even that, I could never succeed in getting along, because she was pretty much bound and determined to pick fights with me. She's very critical. She has a very critical. Extremely critical, and she was, as most narcissistic personality types are, looking to vent. And I was just, that was the relationship we had as I provided a vent for her. She'd always find things wrong with me, and then she'd vent on them, and that was. Would she do it with other people or only her kids? She would do it with other people. Oh no, she would, she picked fights with, yeah, she was. But it was easy to pick a fight with your own child. Yeah, and she picked fights with all my boyfriends, and she picked fights with all my friends in school, and yeah, she picked a lot of fights. She also didn't, if she didn't want to, you know, she could be very charming and charismatic. And you said there was a 36-hour window? With me, I was, when I used to go home to see her, I figured out that I had exactly 36 hours to get out of there, which she didn't like at all, because she wanted me to come and stay and hang out for days. But I realized if I, every hour after 36 was a countdown to a fight, I used to feel like she was shooting peas at me, you know? Remember pea shooters? She started, I feel them pinging off my chest as I would be sitting across from her, and she'd be, she had ways that she would be searching for arguments and fights that had no application to anything, and sooner or later she'd catch me if I just got sick of it. I saw your interview with the great John Stewart. He was talking about the diary essay. He was fabulous, by the way. He read my book. I couldn't get over that. I went on a talk show, and the host actually read my book. He's great. But you did, too. I've read, I haven't read all of it, but I'm going to. It's so well written. I rather be reading it than talking to you, which I think is the highest compliment. What John brought up was, were the symptoms of this woman from the same essay that I read that he said she was critical. You could never do anything right with her. I didn't have the same takeaway from that piece. I saw it as a feminist statement that this was a woman who was incredibly smart, who was a copy editor for Time Magazine, who spell-checked signs in the grocery department, corrected your grammar, who traveled all over the world and wrote vociferously and brilliantly about all the countries she saw it very critically. But because she was a product of her time, she had to give it all up for your father. Well, you know, she didn't have to give it all up for my father. My grandmother lived with us. She had a built-in babysitter, as she used to call it. She could have done anything. She could have been writing secretly. I tried to get her to. It dawned on me because I'm a product of the 60s and the early 70s and stuff. I was well aware of that stuff, so I started pushing her in every kind of direction that way, and she could not be budged off her own emotional problems. So it was, okay, then I stand corrected. She certainly was the example of a feminist issue. That was why it was interesting to me, but I tried really hard and narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder hits at about three. So some strengths think that when you're looking at these people, you're actually talking to three-year-olds and four-year-olds and five-year-olds, and really the IQ is way ahead of the emotional, but the IQ can be 170, but you're talking to a three-year-old with a 170 IQ. And they can't be cured. No, because they don't acknowledge there's anything wrong. There's something wrong with you. So as long as they don't think there's anything wrong with them, what's in it for them to change? If you would change, I used to, I grew up thinking, and everyone who grows up with a person like this, grows up thinking, if I didn't put my book down in the wrong place, life would have been so much better today. That's the whole problem, and you can't get them to talk about what's really bothering them because they won't acknowledge anything else. Right. They feel lousy all the time. Well, they're angry. And that anger, the way that my shrink used to explain it to me, it's just this sort of bubbling cauldron of unresolved anger that comes from bad parenting at age three. And an awful lot of people don't really know what they're doing in terms of taking care of a three-year-old, so it's not all that uncommon to have this whole thing be the result. I really mean this. I think there are two definitive books about stand-up comedy. Steve Martin's book. I got to read that. Standing Up, just unbelievable. Your essays about what makes a stand-up comic, I should show you my Kindle. I was just underlining everything because the training that you have with the mother... Well, it basically is being raised by a heckler. It's a comedy set because I'm always on edge with an audience because that audience is my mother and they're going to change any minute they're going to change. And what I do with an audience, I don't want to talk about me because I am a narcissist, but what I do with an audience is what I used to do with my mother, which is I know she's going to yell at me. I know she's going to be angry. So I purposely tell jokes that I know are going to alienate the audience or aggravate them so that I can control the hostility. Well, that's interesting. I really do reenact my childhood on stage. And you found a funny way to control the hostility. I think it's funny. Not sure everybody else does. Uh, your mother was a victim of a chemical imbalance more than a victim of, say, cultural dictates? I think she was the combination plate. I think I never did figure out what exactly happened in her childhood because she wouldn't explain it to me. I mean, I knew my grandmother and she was a kind of a non-existent person almost, you know? So it was very hard to trace and her father was dead before I was born. So I never got to see what that dynamic... I couldn't figure any of that out, but my mother started being sick for the last 30, 35 years of her life. But she always had, like, what I think are anger-related illnesses. So she was taking drugs too. She was also on, you know... Alivell, Emotions. A million. She had a long assortment of things that had to do with upset stomach and intestinal distress and nerves and needing to sleep and so forth. So she was, you know, it was the full thing. Did your father enable her? Did your father... My father was just like her. You know, that was another thing that I never realized because they were very fused. I used to think they were kind of a tag team for low self-esteem. I didn't really realize what my father was. He was kind of grinning and sweet and not saying much in the background. This is my father. This is my father. But when my mother died ahead of my father and I thought, oh, this is going to be interesting because I'm going to be really close to my father now. We really get along. Turned out my father was my mother. I had no idea that was coming. That was a real big surprise. I just made a cup of coffee. John picked up on that too. Right out. You checked it on him right after she died. They had joined personalities at the head. They were like Siamese twins. That doesn't make any sense to me because... He was just as critical as she was. But were they critical of each other? Oh, yeah. They were fighting all the time. Oh, they were fighting all the time. They said it was the love that, you know, the history books would long remember. I said to my father before he died, what are you proudest of in your life? What things do you look back on most fondly? And he said, my marriage. And I thought, wow, that's amazing because you guys looked really miserable. And I never wanted to get married. Do they shrug at each other? They were just... You know what? It wasn't... There was a lot of screaming. But more than screaming, there was a lot of last straw talk, a lot of... I told you three times a lot of that, which was unnerving and looked to me like I'd rather be dead than be in a relationship where everybody's on the last straw all the time. Did you live with the fear of divorce? No. When I was a little kid and I heard about divorce, I was afraid of it. But no, there didn't appear to be any move toward divorce. And they traveled together. I mean, they would go on vacations from... They would play to be very happy. For a month in the Far East. They spent a month in the Far East. They traveled a lot. And I don't know that my mother liked the traveling, my dad liked the traveling. It's interesting to think who either of them would have been had they made it with someone else. But they claimed to be happy. So, you know, who am I to argue with that? This is a woman who traveled with horrible... They really traveled with men? With horrible digestion. Yeah. With a horrible stomach. She took a train case full of pills with her everywhere she went. You would think she would have been a shut-in with that kind of stuff? Well, you know, not only that, but when I read those diaries, and those diaries are really amazing, when I read them, in every diary there's similar things about the third or fourth day in, my father gets sick. So, every country they go to, my father is sick. He gets the flu. They have to bring in a doctor. My mother has to run around the streets, bringing in soup and stuff there. You know, that was my father, the healthy one. Right. So, would you... I never knew what that was exactly. Why was he getting sick everywhere they went? So, how powerful was Ronnie's rage? She made me a nervous wreck. I'm still worried about that stuff all the time. I fight with it every single day. You know, I know that it's ridiculous because it's talking about me being a little kid. But I, every day, some version of the insecurity that that fostered in me surfaces. So, she had a lot of rage directed at you, directed at your father. My brother, and... My brother has got the identity, even maybe more extreme version of the same kind of insecurity. And you have a sister? No, just a brother. A brother younger or older? Younger. And how did he churn out? He's, you know, he's a lot like me and yet nothing like me. He's, we're sort of opposites in interests. And he's, he's an academic. He has a PhD in archaeology. We're both very career-directed. Well, you guys come from outside. That's one thing I notice is you really come from great stock. You know, you have... I don't know about that stock. Well, come on. You graduated from Berkeley where my daughter is graduating in... That's a fun place to go. And then you got a master's from USC. Yeah, no, I got a master's from Berkeley. Oh, it's from Berkeley. Okay. I taught at USC very well. You taught at USC and you were teaching painting. Yeah. This is what I, I went, oh my God. You were, you were teaching painting with a master's. And then you decided, I'm going to go write scripts. I'm going to go write for... Well, it didn't occur to me when I was at Berkeley and, you know, that, that tail end of the 60s, it didn't occur to me that there was show business, that we didn't have show business. Ronnie Marco. That makes me laugh that you know the name Ronnie Marco. Ronnie Marco. How did this woman travel? How did she spend a month in the Far East eating at restaurants that she describes as filthy? Yeah. With a horrible stomach. I think rage and anger is a very powerful tool. I do too. And it really shaped my life. I watched her be so angry. And I just thought the thing I got to do in life is avoid anger. And to a certain extent I had to learn to have anger later in life, like last year. I had to learn to get back and use some anger because I sort of eliminated it as a tactic. I was so unhappy at watching her. And I did the same thing with jobs. It's a reason that I got out of certain TV writing. It was making me furious. I have never been happier not writing for television. Well, it's a real angering kind of situation unless it's your game. And then I think it must be a whole other thing than the other people are angry. That was one of the reasons I didn't push harder to just stay on staff at places I didn't particularly believe in is it was making me really angry. And I thought I'm going to turn it to my mother. And I would internalize it. I can still be a gun for hire if I like the boss and if I don't care. If there's a level of intelligence and interesting creativity going on in the circumstances, you can do it. I can do it, but I can't if there's a sense of humor I don't relate to. It just feels like I'm on Mars. You have a sterling resume. When you're working for shows that are, I don't want to say prestigious, but they have people that are self important. It drives you nuts because you care about the game and you care about their decisions. The most liberating experiences I've had are writing on shows that I don't care about. That or I'm just a gun for hire and you just walk in there and you go, this is just a day at the factory and the guy in charge is just trying to get, he's making decisions and it's when you're working for really talented people whose opinion you care about, then it's mommy and daddy. I never really thought about that. You know, I've never really, I'm so not detached from my work that I guess I haven't learned how part of growing up with a problematic mommy and daddy is that I put all my emotion in work. So I get like I really, it's very hard to write a thing. And for me, you know, I try to pretend I don't care if it gets, if what happens, I don't care if it's published, I don't care if it's picked up. I don't really care. I just, the work is all that matters, but then you do care. You have to care in order to make it any good. This is going to air a couple of days before Christmas. So people should go out and buy your book. It is cooled, calm and contentious and it's great, great writing. And if you're a fan of comedy and want to know where comedians come from, get this book. I only came to that conclusion, by the way, because whenever I get to, you know, most of my friends are comedy writers or comedians or many of them are. And I always, when I'm getting to know them, I always go, I always ask them about their families. And then I heard over and over and over again, I started hearing the same thing, especially among women. It's about 100% for women, the problematic mommy. Occasionally you hear a man say it's not the case. The only story that I find forgivable is Wendy Liebman's story about the mother playing the drums. That's the only one where I go. Except she asked her not to. I know. But a short little woman playing the drums at a wedding, if that's... What about if it was your mom? If, believe me, I'd rather have her beating the drums than me. Emotionally, there are two things you should do. You should buy Merrill Marko's book, all her books. And if you have the space and the time, you should go to the pound or a shelter. And pick up a rescue. If you have the capacity to love an animal, you should go pick up an animal. Absolutely. We have three dogs and three cats. Wow. Ginger and... Ginger and Jimmy. Ginger and Jimmy. The only two purebred dogs I've ever had. Retreatment. I almost always just get mutt rescues. But these guys were the children of Ponzi scheme. Not made off though, right? No, this guy was a forward thinking guy he proceeded made off. He had his own Ponzi scheme in Malibu and was on the lamb and left the dogs at my vets. And six months later, they were still sitting in a little glass cage waiting for somebody and my vet introduced me to them. You described something that is so beautiful and so true and so real. And I experienced it two weeks ago. I found a kitten 12 weeks old on the street. We have three cats. We do not have room for another cat. And I find this little tiger on the street. Absolutely beautiful. It was like she was painted by nature. And I pick her up and she starts purring. I bring her home. An hour ago, she was on the street. She's lounging. Or you described the same thing with your dog. So is she your cat now? We have three cats, three dogs and one cat. Was it attacking her? Yeah, I cannot have another cat. Our home is a nursing home. All the animals we have, we got when the kids were babies. Now my kids are off at college and we're left behind with flatulent, whiny animals. Geriatric animals. Geriatric animals. And this is very sad. The price you pay for having children and puppies and kittens is... It becomes a nursing home. So we give her to a friend, Mary, a friend of ours who had only one other cat. And she starts sending me pictures of the cat. And then videos of the cat chasing her tail. She's 13 weeks old. And you capture this so brilliantly in the book. You talk about how these animals got into your... Ginger and Jimmy. Jimmy. Get into your car. Not knowing where... You could be taking them to drown them. They get in the car. They're going for a ride. They come into your house. Oh, this is great. I think I'll take a nap. I'll eat. I'll meet these dogs. Ever. That's just a beautiful story about animals and how trusting they are. Well, that... And how they teach us. I think that a lot of animal rescuers come from the crazy families too. Because I think that part of the great appeal with animals is that whole naive good intentions that they seem to have. It's very easy to bond with them. They are the opposite of critical. They're just instantly sort of approving unless they're really damaged. And then that's another... Which brings me to your essay about Caesar Milan. Yeah, Caesar Milan. You've never seen him, I guess. Oh, yeah. My wife, we've tried everything. I want you to talk about flexible cohabitation. Oh, that was my... This is my life. This is what three dogs explain flexible cohabitation. Well, the premise of the piece is that I was watching Caesar Milan and I realized that his methods, while they are really riveting and interesting and stuff, at some point, the one that caught my eye is whenever, repeatedly, people come on his show and have problems walking their dog on a leash. And that's a really common problem. You pretty much have to train your dog to walk on a leash. Otherwise, they just drag you around like Fred Flintstone water skiing. You know, that scene. So over and over again, you watch Caesar Milan cure this in 30 seconds. And what he does repeatedly... On roller blades. Yeah, he can do... Yeah, he doesn't even need to get off his roller blades. He takes the collar and he moves it up right behind their ears. And then you walk with them and then the dog walks really slowly. So I thought, well, that's amazing. That's how did I not know this? So I took my dog that really drags me around and did that exact thing. And I realized it's a dog show walk and it looks like they're choking. When you're actually walking with them that way, it's the opposite of going for a walk with them. It's like walking somebody attached to an IV, you know, with the IV stand. It's like, it's not like taking a dog for a walk. So I was trying to think, well, what method of training? Because I don't really... You have to do some dog training with your dog, especially if it's problematic. A lot of people get rid of their animals because they didn't train them. And they can't get along with them. But me, I always have enough training to be able to get along with them just fine. And then after that, I just kind of give up and I don't really get them to do very many things. Because I don't really want them to do very many things. I enjoy watching them be dogs. Right. You don't have the time to be a tyrant. It's exactly right. And I find them hilarious. For me, they're like exchange students from Neptune. But it's like any wild animals that you bring in, they've been domesticated, but they have an entirely different perspective on everything. And we're pretending that they are other people. But in some ways, like it just makes me laugh. Whenever I write these dog pieces, it makes me laugh to pose questions to them and imagine the answers because seriously, they don't know what I do for a living. I mean, they've been living with me now, over a decade, all of them. And you ask them what I do for a living and that wouldn't even be in their realm of conversation. So that stuff just makes me laugh to try to explain the concepts and then to try to get answers after the explanation has been given that's the nature of this piece. Anyway, flexible cohabitation is my plan for how you live with your dogs, which is you just kind of let them do whatever they want. And you just kind of go, oh, well, I didn't really want that couch. I can get another couch after they shred it is what I'm saying. Yeah, we've pretty much given up on nice things. We've decided we can either have things that are alive. And as you talk about, have put stains on things and nose prints on shiny objects, you can have living things or inanimate objects, but you can't really have both. Well, the same is true raising children, I would imagine. I mean, the craziness that happens when they're out of control on three and you're turning them into a narcissist. Flexible cohabitation with kids. You have to keep them safe. But, you know, if you're too tyrannical. And I always looked at kids. I think it's flexible cohabitation. I looked at kids as forces of nature. Yeah, you don't come into life as a blank slate. Right. You come in with a slate of things that you're hoping to do and it's a question of whether or not people forbid you to do them or people encourage you to do them. Right. I don't really understand women and stuff. So I just kind of went along, had the typical relationship with my daughter she turns 20 and says, you were emotionally distant. My son and I were much closer and I saw him as the Mississippi River and I thought, you know, you can change the Mississippi River, but there are prices to pay there. You end up with a dustball. You end up with flooding. If you leave the Mississippi River alone, it'll find its way into the Gulf of Mexico. And as long as the Mississippi River isn't doing anything morally damaging to others. Right. Right. But that is himself. But if you're from my background, it's very difficult to accept a person unconditionally. One of the comedians you quoted about the unconditional love. Oh, you mean Bill Schaft. Yeah, what? Bill Schaft writes for The Letterman Show. Right. He quoted his mother as saying, I'll give you unconditional love when you do something to deserve it. Great line. That's a great line. Right. I do a joke in my act that doesn't get a laugh and I've stopped doing it, but my parents loved it. Probably a bad sign. Yeah. Well, I tell my kids, I don't care what you do with your life as long as it makes me happy. And I think, well, that is a, to me, that is the perfect parenting joke. Yeah. And writing books, novels, and essays. It's a long, more arduous form of stand-up. What is your, yeah, what is your discipline? I am, you know, it turns out I do have a lot of discipline, but my discipline has to do with me wrestling myself to the ground and punching myself in the face and mind. What time do you write? What time do you write? I write when I just get so full of anguish and I'm so angry at myself that I haven't been writing that I start. Your mother kept a diary? I used to keep a diary when I was younger. I don't know anymore. For how many years did you keep a diary? I have diaries that go back to second grade. And so what age did you stop keeping them? Maybe seven or eight years ago. Okay, so you really kept, that's serious. Have you burned any of them? I'm always think I'm going to, if I think my life is over, I'm going to make sure I burn them all. Okay, but if you were to die tomorrow, would you want somebody to do that? I have it in my will that I want people to burn them. You don't want anybody reading them? No. Then I did, you mean how did I feel about publishing my mother's diaries? No, I'm curious. Because I did have a big discussion with myself about that. My mom's been dead 20 something years. My big discussion with myself about that was I felt weird about it, but I thought the job, my job, I think as I define it in this world as a writer, is to reflect on what it was like for me to be alive. And this was a big area of what it was like to be alive for me. It was a big point of dissection and reflection for me, so I went ahead and I worked with it. And also I started reading them on stage and they got laughs. You didn't violate anything. I didn't put anything overly personal in there, it's just you can hear her attitude. People who are really critical are impossible to live with, but they're alive and they're sick, but they're alive and they haven't given up and they expect things from others. Granted, they're unbalanced and impossible, but learning to think critically... Well, she certainly felt that way. On the other hand, there was no pleasing her. When I realized that she had dismissed St. Mark's Square in Venice because she thought it was in terrible taste, I thought, well, what was I expecting? I thought she was going to approve my little efforts when St. Mark's Square in Venice, widely accepted as a real amazing place to visit, was not right for my mother. My mother was impossible, you couldn't please her. So that was sort of an eye-opener for me. But there's a need for people like that, and maybe this country... Well, maybe she should have been a critic, I guess. Or French. How was she in France? She loved France, she was a sort of a Franco file. She kind of used to like to pepper her language with French phrases, which I always found kind of embarrassing. Maybe this country... Throw in pied-à-terre and stuff like that. Pouring coffee, she might say du café. Just embarrassed the hell out of me. Wouldn't this country be better off if we had a couple of Ronnie Marcos? Well, you know, Hillary Clinton kind of looked like my mother. I was always having trouble bonding with Hillary for numbers of reasons, but one of them was how much she looked like my mother. I think this country's given up. It's given up critical thinking. Yeah, it does seem like that's the case, doesn't it? So we could use... Well, she would just tell everybody how bad everything was. I don't know how much approval she'd have for anything. You kind of have to have a balance there. I'm not saying... I think you have to become an artist, you have to know what stuff you don't like and what stuff you do like, and you have to sort for that. But if you find everything intolerable and grotesque, then you're depriving yourself of most of what there is about being alive. So she criticized herself out of a career. I think she was so critical that she was too afraid to pursue a career. That's all I can think of, because she clearly saw herself as a writer, but I think she was so critical of everybody's writing that she just probably thought she came up short all the time and never really went for it. When did you get the courage to just write something handed in without your mother's approval? I stopped showing her stuff for years after I realized that because you never did get her approval, and then I tried. So... What did your mother say, the classic line? She has so many classic lines. But the one where she read your spec script and said... I don't happen to care for it, but I pray I'm wrong. Which, you know, was so liberating to me when I spoke that in front of a crowd and I got a laugh from it, because I thought it was so painful for her to say that to me. Was she aware that she was funny? No. Are you sure? She wasn't being funny. No, she was not. Are you absolutely positive? She had the face of depression when she said that. No, she was not being funny. I can tell you that was a glam room. Did she get laughs? No. She was not a funny person. She didn't get any laughs when they entered. Maybe not around me. Did your father laugh at her? No, they were not laughing at each other. My father had a silly sense of humor. He had one of those dad-sense of humorers like, Dad! Did she laugh at him? No, she'd be, don't say anything. Say any more. You're encouraging him. That would be my mother. Did they watch funny shows on television? Yeah, they liked humor, I guess. You know, they liked the Mel Brooks doing the 2000-year-old man. Right. My mother was more just sort of about the high-end culture. You know, and she liked musicals and... Did you ever make her laugh? She didn't find me funny, no. Did you ever... You never made her laugh? I don't know. That's not the relationship I remember with her, but the relationship I remember involved precious little laughing and a lot of criticism. Did your younger brother make her laugh? No, he didn't even try. He watched how bad it was going for me, and he just tuned out. You know, Mel Brooks has a completely different theory about what makes a comedian. He says that from the time he was a baby to the time he was eight, his feet never touched the ground because everybody was picking up little Melvin and handing him around and kissing him. And he said, and this is the complete opposite of your essay, he says that comedians have a lot of love when they're growing up. Wow, I've never met those people of you. Well, let me... I'll address that in a second. Mel Brooks says comedians grew up with so much love that when they became teenagers and realized that love is parceled out, they couldn't handle it. So immediately went to comedy to get the love that was now being denied them. That's his theory, which is an interesting theory. Now, granted, his father died at an early age, and he was in the... And Mel was in the Battle of the Bulge and went a little crazy. And he had a long successful marriage, so maybe he had a... Second marriage. Yeah. The book, cool, common, contentious, Merrill Marko, it's a great read. I just have... How many hours a day do you write? Well, when I was writing this book, it went on and on and on. But writing books is really a tough... Do you read these pieces in front of an audience? No, I don't. I read my mother's diaries in front of an audience and got pretty big laughs. It was... Writing books... Writing novels is much harder than writing essays. Writing essays, at least, is you can see the topography of it instantly. You know it starts here and it ends here, and it's... You're going to cover as many versions of things in the middle, and you're going to pare it down. Writing a novel is just, to me, mind-bogglingly difficult. It has to do with threads that you have to pull along. You have to pull people into the narration of many plots. And if it's not compelling enough, why would they read it? So... And it's 300 pages, so maybe, or 285 pages. So you have to be aiming it all toward things. You can't reread it easily. You have to... It's just sort of mind-bogglingly difficult. But I... Depending on what I'm writing, I guess I write for five hours a day. I don't... Mornings, afternoon, evening? You know, whenever I back myself into it, I get up in the morning and I go, I'm going to write right away, and then I start looking at the internet. Read it. And then I write... Now that I write on a computer, every two seconds I have to go check something. Do you read... When I'm writing stuff, I don't really read that much, because my brain is swimming in words. So, and also I don't... I have a real mimic in my head, and I don't want to start mimicking someone else's voice, so I stay away from people I admire and stuff, so that I'm being true to what I think is my contribution to writing. And what are you reading right now? Actually, I have a pile of books of... Friends of mine's books that are coming out that aren't even out yet. So I would tell you what they are, but... That's such a pain in the neck. Well, you know, happily they're good books, but I have actually three of them. Well, your book is fantastic, and it's called Cooled, Common, Contentious, and you should buy it for Christmas, and then get yourself an animal. If you can... If you have room in your heart and in your home, you should... It's lovely of you to be stomping for animals. Well... That way it's true, though. Boy, there's plenty of them. Yeah. Meryl, thank you.