Miranda: Haze—like a drug.
Judd: How has having a child changed the way you think about your pre-child life? How has it changed you?
Miranda: I’m kind of amazed to see that the massive amount of time I spent thinking about my feelings turned out not to be vital to my existence. In fact, having less time to think and having to simply do is just fine. For my whole life before, I thought I needed the maximum amount of freedom, but as it turns out what I really need is to feel free for a limited amount of time and then crawl around the floor saying “I’mgonnagetcha, I’mgonnagetcha” while a very, very cute little boy squeals with glee. Before it was easy to feel alienated from most people; now I feel like I have something sizable in common with nearly every single person in the grocery store. Also, my son had a really rough start so I went through a level of trauma and fear that forever changed my relationship to catastrophe. It’s more real now, so I’m more afraid of it. I suppose I’m braver, too.
Judd: I was forced to realize how self-centered I was. I found it hard to shut my brain down so I could just hang out in my kids’ reality. It’s easier now because my kids’ realities are more like my own. We can talk about Breaking Bad episodes and why we think it is a bad idea to take Ecstasy. How would you like to spend your old age?
Miranda: I’d like it to be just like now—writing and surrounded by people I love—except I want there to be zero anxiety. I want to feel like I’m sitting in a Jacuzzi all the time.
Judd: I want to be like Mel Brooks. A great memory, a lot of energy, still making people laugh. I do not want to be like Jack LaLanne, pulling fifty boats as I swim across a lake. Do you have a conception of the afterlife? Are you a spiritual person?
Miranda: You know, it’s funny. I just wrote that I was spiritual and then sat here for about ten minutes trying to put words to that feeling. Everything I came up with seemed made up or like some idea I’d had when I was fifteen. It all felt distasteful to me so I erased it. I think I’m less entranced by amorphous things at this moment.
Judd: I have some friends who had near-death experiences who felt a presence tell them to go back. It was not their time. That is all I can hold on to. When I am creative I think something more is going on, so maybe it does not end. I don’t think I am going to get ninety virgins or hang out in a beautiful kingdom. My biggest fear is that I will become a ghost and be forced to hang out in some house watching a bunch of jackasses live their lives. I don’t want to be a tree. I know that is supposed to be a beautiful thing, to become a tree or a beetle. I am not into that. I would like to stay me.
Miranda: What are the top three times you’ve been most freaked out in your life so far?
Judd: One, when I was in sixth grade my friend’s brother grew pot in his room. One day my friend got his hands on a joint and we attempted to smoke it in the middle of the night at a construction site. Before we took a real puff a security guard pointed a flashlight in our direction and we ran for miles and miles and miles as if he was hot on our tail. There is no chance he took even one step in our direction. We stared out the window at my friend’s house for a half hour, terrified that he would knock on the door and tell our parents. The next year I was so scared that my friends were going to become potheads that I switched social groups. My new friends eventually became the real potheads of the school, and after two years I ran back to my old friends, who never bothered to try it again. Two, when the Northridge earthquake happened it really felt like nuclear missiles were falling from the sky. The noise and the shattering of glass freaked me out. My girlfriend at the time seemed to have a bit of a mental break. Afterwards I wanted to go back to sleep. She wanted to look around so we went outside and every time we passed a cracked section of sidewalk she laughed nervously in the way bad actors pretend to be crazy people on the TV show Quincy. We broke up soon after when she cheated on me with a sportswriter. A year later I tried to win her back but she refused my advances because she was dating a pot dealer. Three, I got freaked out when George Bush beat Al Gore for the presidency because he was so terrible in the debates and I assumed everyone in the country saw what I saw, a man who clearly was not equipped to lead our country.
Miranda: One, aforementioned birth of baby. Two, that girlfriend you had who had a mental break during the earthquake? That might have been me. I was in bed and the next thing I know I’m on all fours growling in the corner. I was so scared I turned into a dog for a moment. Three, various flights with extreme turbulence. I grab the stewardesses, the people next to me—I pretty much do the dog/earth quake thing but without going down on all fours because the floor’s gross. Last question: Can you try to give a little running narration of what it’s like in your head, how the thoughts come and go? Are there fully formed words and sentences? Is it incessant and talky? Do you compose emails in your head? Or are you more in the moment than that?
Judd: My mind is a noisy place. I tend to look for problems so I can solve them before they blow up in my face. I am like a lookout for disaster. I also have a voice that tells me to calm down. I have a TM mantra and every once in a while I try to breathe and think about some piece of advice I have heard or read, usually from the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Then I will think about my mantra. About one second later I am worried that I will never have a good idea again, or that I have wronged someone in my life and I try to figure out what to do. Sometimes I am really hungry. Other times I am moved by a piece of music or a deeply felt thought and I cry. Laughter has happened, too, but less often. My great love for people and my family is pushed up close to terror and my existential crisis. Occasionally I think of a great dick joke, like when Steve Carell tries to pee with an erection, and I get very proud of myself and feel like I am adding something very positive to the world. I can almost feel people forgetting their troubles and laughing, and for a moment I feel like there is a God or a higher purpose and I am truly happy. God gave me that dick joke. It all makes sense. Then I get scared again and it all starts over. You?
Miranda: Many words and fully formed sentences. Whole emails written out in my head. Lots of planning thoughts—like every single moment planning what I’m going to do in the next moment, the next hour, the next day, week, year. I have the next ten years planned, work-wise. I also think a lot about washing the dishes or vacuuming. The more boring the task, the more of my mental space I have to devote to it. I also instruct myself a lot, like: “Robot, go brush your teeth.” I lay in bed and think about what I’ll bring in my carry-on bag on a trip I’m going on in five months. Sometimes I instruct myself to “free fall”—exist without thinking. It feels like falling through space. I can also get super-duper focused, wormhole-style. That’s the space that I go into when I’m working—about five hours a day. It goes by in a flash.
This interview was originally published in Huck magazine in May 2013.
ROSEANNE BARR (2014)
Back in the late eighties, a friend of mine—fellow comedian and Undeclared writer Joel Madison—told me about this guy he knew named Tom Arnold, who was moving to L.A. to write jokes for Roseanne Barr. Before we knew it, we were hearing that Tom was going to marry Roseanne, which seemed insane and impossible. It was insane and impossible, of course, but it happened, and Tom Arnold went on to become one of the producers of her television show as well. My secret hope was that, through my connection with Joel, I might somehow get the call to go write for Roseanne, one of the biggest shows on TV. As it turned out, the call I eventually got was to write jokes for Tom’s act, which went well and soon led to a gig writing for Roseanne’s nightclub act.