Comedy’s Zen master
The secrets of Garry Shandling’s archive
Garry Shandling had just paid for a tuna-melt sandwich when a dark one-liner about the human condition — about his human condition, anyway — popped into his head: “I was born in hospice.” He liked it, maybe enough to use onstage, but with no notepaper available he jotted down the joke on his sandwich receipt and stuffed it into a pocket. On a recent morning in Los Angeles, Judd Apatow reads it and grins: “That’s pretty good.” Almost two years ago, Shandling died suddenly at age 66, and Apatow, his longtime pal, collaborator and mentee, became the steward of his personal archive — an enormous, disorganised trove of which this receipt represents just one minuscule fraction. “Garry saved everything,” Apatow says, “but he just chucked it into boxes and chucked those in storage and closets. He had all his awards in this little case next to his washer and dryer!”
Apatow is at his office amid stacks of boxes and tables covered edge to edge with Shandling’s stuff. Here’s a 1950s-era iron-on patch announcing membership in the American Junior Bowling Congress; here’s a script for
Iron Man 2, in which Shandling had a cameo; here’s a notepad from just before Shandling’s death, filled with proto-jokes about Isis and Matthew McConaughey; here’s a diary from 1978, when Shandling was starting in stand-up. Apatow flips through its pages and stumbles on a fascinating passage: “‘Saw Andy Kaufman last night. Although he was funny and unique, there was nothing to hold his act together. It wasn’t anchored to anything. It wasn’t anchored to him.’ He writes this way about a lot of comedians. He wants to know who Andy is.”
Who was Shandling? When Apatow first began poring through this archive, in 2016, he did so in the spirit of an amateur detective. As he puts it in his new documentary, “Garry was a mentor to me, but in many ways a mystery to me.” That documentary, The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling, features pages from the archive and recollections from a litany of Shandling’s friends and acolytes, including Jim Carrey, Jay Leno, Sarah Silverman and Sacha Baron Cohen. Shandling was notoriously hard to satisfy, and could on occasion become unhappy with friends, girlfriends and collaborators — always on the alert for signs of fakery and betrayal.
“I was very proud that I got along well with Garry for a long time, because it was difficult,” Apatow says — so imagine his surprise when, during research for the documentary, “I opened the journals and found a page where he listed everyone who’d disappointed him that year — and I was number three.”
Shandling comes off as thoughtful, prickly, anxious and kind,
“We all loved him, but he seemed to behave in certain ways as a result of wounds we didn’t understand”
especially when taking younger comics under his wing later in his life. Many of the comedians and relatives point to a dark side of Shandling that seemed to drive him, and sometimes drove him away from others.
“Garry used to say, ‘People rarely speak the truth to each other, and when they do, it’s a big deal,’” says Apatow. “‘Most people are presenting themselves the way they want to be seen, and you’re not getting to the core of who they are.’ That’s what he found most interesting [in his comedy]: exploring the way people behave and why. And that’s part of what I wanted to understand about Garry. We all loved him, but he seemed to behave in certain ways as a result of wounds we didn’t understand.”
Shandling took laughs seriously: interested in Buddhism since his mid-twenties, he regarded joke-telling as a method of self-discovery. There was something oxymoronic to this — showbiz ambition and quests for egolessness would seem at cross-purposes — which Shandling himself acknowledged. “Getting into show business comes from some core dysfunction, where you say, ‘I want to be seen,’” he once told his friend Jerry Seinfeld. But whether Shandling was telling jokes about penis size or creating two landmark cable sitcoms — the self-reflexive It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and the pathos-rich Larry Sanders Show — his goal was to strip the artifice from his work in pursuit of what he deemed authentic feeling and, through that, inner peace.
His journals are full of entries about this Zen-inflected yearning. One reads, “There should be no attachment to being ‘good’. . . There is no good or bad, only what you are.” Another, written before his first appearance on Johnny Carson: “Become one with The Tonight Show.” Another, in a grimmer register: “If you’re not on TV, you don’t exist.”
The film paints Shandling’s childhood as a happy one that turned tragic at age 10, when his brother Barry died at 13 from cystic fibrosis. “I never had a conversation with him about it, but when I interviewed people, a few said, ‘When Garry’s brother died, they didn’t talk about him anymore,’” says Apatow. “That was an approach some people took back in 1960. They didn’t have the psychological education to know how to deal with it, so they just moved forward.”
As work on the film progressed, “I found a diary entry where Garry was very upset that he was never allowed to go in and say goodbye to his brother, and that his mom didn’t want him to go to the funeral. I found out later that one of her parents died and she got very, very upset, and didn’t want that to happen again in front of Garry. The result was that Garry wasn’t given a way to work through his grief.”
Apatow theorises that Barry’s death became something like the organising trauma of Shandling’s life and work; the documentary emphasizes the importance of Shandling’s complicated relationship with his mother, but the emotional climax of the film centres on the discovery, tucked away in one of the journals, of a letter that Garry once wrote to Barry — an attempt at saying goodbye that they didn’t have as kids.
Those melancholy themes notwithstanding, the documentary is funny. One of its pleasures is the chance to read personal scribblings and hear private audio in which Shandling works out the nuts and bolts of making people laugh. “Use everything you’ve got to be funny,” he writes. “I could still use more of myself. More faces, more voices, more characters, more attitudes.” He observes he needs to improve his “space work,” and we learn that he went so far as to enroll in dance classes to command stages with more grace.
Another of the documentary’s pleasures is in the contrast between the searching earnestness of his diaristic writing and the unabashed silliness of his onstage material. In one entry, Shandling instructs himself to “do your comedy not for the sake of fame and fortune, but because it is what God does through you.” Shortly before that, we see footage of him in a comedy club saying, “I decorate my bedroom with dollhouse furniture so my dick looks bigger than it is.” When I mention this juxtaposition to Apatow, he laughs. Shandling understood, he says, that “sometimes, God wants you to tell a dick joke.”