Maria Bamford Speaks to Your Concerns

If the deep earnestness of funny people doesn’t feel obvious to you, and you are in the mood to read some good academic fieldwork, see Pretend the World is Funny and Forever: A Psychological Analysis of Comedians, Clowns, and Actors, by Seymour Fisher and Rhoda L. Fisher. After scores of detailed interviews, the Fishers found that the core concerns of funny humans are pretty much the same as those of rabbis and philosophers: What’s the purpose of all this? And how do we get through?

Who better, then, to give advice on these questions than the people who reckon with them every day? To reboot its long tradition of comic advisers (in our former column “Sedaratives”), The Believer turned to Maria Bamford. An actor and stand-up comedian, Bamford is known for her fantastic absurdities—see, for example, her version of “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” where she begins with “On this farm he had a Pterodactyl”—and her frank work about mental illness. Her comedy is laced with her experiences with OCD, bipolar disorder, suicidal thinking, and psychiatric hospitalizations. She is the star and cocreator of Lady Dynamite and The Special Special Special—in which she performed a forty-five-minute set for an audience of her parents, Joel and Marilyn Bamford—and The Maria Bamford Show. After an open call for questions on Twitter, I sat with Bamford at her home office in Altadena, California. Her answers were transcribed and edited.
—Joshua Wolf Shenk

Hi, Maria,

I don’t know if I should be sending you this since I’ve been awake only maybe an hour or so and that could be a problem. For the last twenty-one years or so, when I wake up I have been hearing this really dour voice in my head. I open my eyes from sleep and the first sentence I think of is something like “Everything fades. Can you feel yourself starting to disappear?” or “You’ve never taken the time to live your life. Do you even know what you like?”

And the voice is couched in this sort of gentle, urbane disguise, like the voice of one of my favorite Ben Stiller characters. And then, after I’ve been awake for maybe an hour, those little lines switch to a slightly less bleak tone. They’re never menacing; they never feel angry or suicidal or anything, just like the psychological version of a heavy J.Crew color or something; Manchester Morning, Cold Winter Clouds, Distant Stoned Heather, Overlooked Novel, Why Is Life Perfect for Amanda and for Dave But Not for Me, or whatever they call gray with a little blue or green in it.

Then, here’s the catch: by noon I am so...