Funny, defined
Maria Bamford tends to find comedy where few other people even think to look.
Her early stand- up was often a catalogue of the banal, elevated by her uncanny knack for voices that dripped with cartoonishly cruel cluelessness. Her most recent special, 2012’s manically titled Special Special Special!, consisted of her performing to her parents in their living room, from where she dove headlong into her experience with mental illness — she has been diagnosed with bipolar II disorder — and how it affected their family dynamic. She still does a really amazing impression of her own mother.
Probably because of this, she has been labelled an absurdist, and though she certainly can fly around, nearly untethered, her topics are generally painfully real, if also the kind of things we prefer to forget about. She’s taken that to new heights in her Netflix series, Lady Dynamite: besides being a running list of all the things she’s tackled before, she also examines alienation, that heartsick feeling of being both alone and surrounded.
Alienation tends to be the province of our more morose artists; its mention probably conjures up the mildly ironic image of rock stars glowering out to crowds of thousands more often than comedians working a room into fits of laughter. As much as it seems to be either spark or fuel to funny people — I don’t think it would be overstating it to say that a sense of humour develops at least partially as a way for the eternally overlooked to try to fit in — it rarely makes it into their acts. Even the darkest comics seem to prefer to laugh as a means of forgetting about all that. (Although note how often it pops up when comedians try a more serious turn.)
Lady Dynamite, though, is a candy-coloured look at how painfully absurd the world can be when you can’t find a place in it. Based loosely on Bamford’s own life, it jumps through three separate time frames in the life of a woman who has just gone through recovery for a manic-depressive episode: Present, with Maria fresh out of recovery and trying to get her life back on track- ish; Past, charting her rise to career glory and descent into breakdown; and Duluth, the washed-out period when she was actually going through treatment in her midwestern hometown.
It says something that home is the place where we see Bamford at her most miserable — suicidal, beset by local yokels, endlessly disappointing everyone, at least in her mind — but all three scenarios are marked by a Maria who fundamentally can’t quite fit in, or is acutely aware of how little people seem to regard her, her thoughts, her feelings, even what she might find funny.
Lady Dynamite is a show that sometimes gleefully slides down the double-helix of alienation, Bamford’s own insecurities or perceived shortcomings intertwined with the blithely selfish desires of often equally broken people making it through their own lives.
Virtually no one in Bamford’s life is actually looking out for her. One of her self- admitted best friends not only refused to visit her while in recovery — “I didn’t have anything going on,” she assures her, she just didn’t want to go — and basically only sticks around because Bamford hires her as the (world’s worst) assistant.
Paying people doesn’t work any better, though. Her manager, a fatuous boob who is introduced putting his brand-new steel-toed cowboy boots through his brand-new glass “power player” desk, is seen absent- mindedly making “Show me the money” gestures while he carefully explains that she is never allowed on the Fox Studio lot again. Her life coach uses their sessions mostly as a chance to brainstorm book ideas.
What allows most of this to be funny — besides the show’s knack for gloriously silly asides, like a half-memory/dream sequence where a bad boyfriend shoots a puppy who was about to cure cancer — is that Bamford herself is really no better, for herself or anyone else.
Her career peak is a turn as the spokesperson for a Target- esque superstore (which Bamford really did), but her cheques are an albatross: she barely cashes the first one before she is racked with guilt over the people who are making these cheap wares, and the amount of money she gets to smile and wave is a source of shame around her (admittedly awful) old friends. She can’t even do a stand- up set in front of children without nearly drowning in her own anxiety, because she knows they’ll never get her jokes.
She’s not much better with other people. She counsels a snotty teen to base a comedy set on what a horrible person her mom is — works for Bamford — only to find out that her mom has terminal cancer. And that aforementioned boyfriend, who she saw nothing in, turns out to be a pug-loving, charity- giving do- gooder, a fact which she only learns when he fails to show up for a date — because he dies. During her speech at his funeral, she also learns that he has a wife — and that he wasn’t a boyfriend, but a potential agent. She was too wrapped up in her own self to learn anything about this supposed cancer- curing-puppy killer.
It’s a mildly bleak point of view, I guess, but i ts strength comes in admitting that, however much we aim to come together, we are islands at least some of the time. Alienation is only a horror, after all, when you think of it as an aberration. If, like Lady Dynamite, you see it as more like our slightly uncomfortable natural state, well, it can actually be quite funny.