THAT CHOP RICKMAN
Avoid meeting your screen heroes; watch TV Instead
IT sucks to be let down by your heroes. I haven’t had this a lot, because I’m not important enough to be allowed near any heroes, but there have been a few moments. When I worked as a waitress in London, actor Alan Rickman was a fairly frequent visitor to our establishment. It’s not like I ever had posters of him on my wall, or carried a picture of him in my wallet, but I was sufficiently au fait with his cinematic work to feel myself in the presence of greatness.
Just one problem, with all due respect to the dead: Rickman was a bit of a chop. Relations cooled between us to the point where I would take revenge by subjecting his £20 bills to a lengthy and ostentatious scan with a counterfeit note detector.
Rickman wasn’t really my hero, though. He was just someone whose craft I respected. When it comes to my actual heroes, you have to do a lot to lose my adoration. For exactly a decade, I have been in true-true love with American comic Maria Bamford. Bamford is not particularly well known, but I don’t mean to sound like a hipster about this. I wish Bamford was much more famous, because then I could stop inflicting impersonations of her on anyone who crosses my path.
I do understand why Bamford hasn’t achieved mainstream success, though, and that’s because she’s too weird. A slight, blonde woman, Bamford’s whole comedic schtick is built off a persona of anxiety vibrating on a high frequency. It won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, but it’s certainly mine. “I’m not looking for much in a guy,” Bamford says in one of her stand-up routines. “I just want, like, a really nice guy who has, you know, like a job . . . and the missing half of this golden amulet.”
But let’s cut to the chase: I have worshipped Bamford for a while. And so it was with a mixture of delight and trepidation that I learnt that she was finally getting the break she deserved: a new Netflix sitcom called Lady Dynamite, with Bamford starring front and centre. She plays a character which is an exaggerated version of herself: a left-field comedian with mental health issues.
The show is strange, as one would expect. It skips between time periods, has elements of the totally surreal, and is a fan of meta-commentary on both the conventions of sitcoms and on Hollywood. This can feel a bit injokey for those of us outside those worlds. I’m not saying Bamford isn’t my hero anymore, but I’m scared that the rest of Lady Dynamite may take the edge off our beautiful, one-sided romance.