I Can Barely Take Care of Myself, Jen Kirkman [the false prince txt] 📗

funny? You are very dramatic, Jennifah.” I reminded her of how I’d always wanted to be voted class clown in the Pollard Middle School yearbook. (By the way, “class clown” seemed to be the moniker given to the most humorless and bullying jocks. What class clown really means is “most popular”; the kids who grow up to be truly funny are shoved into lockers.)

AGAINST MY MOM’S wishes, I continued the pursuit of stand-up comedy, but I did live in my childhood bedroom, with no male visitors, like a good, celibate twenty-two-year-old girl. Every night I clicked and clacked on the Kirkman family word processor, attempting to write jokes.

One of my first jokes was about Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign from the 1980s. I have no idea why that was still on my mind in the 1990s. The joke was horrible. It wasn’t even a joke. It wasn’t even a complete thought. It went something like this: “Nancy Reagan says to ‘just say no’—well, I say that’s not realistic. I think you should ‘just say maybe,’ and then try to walk away from the drugs. It doesn’t make you look like a dork who says no. It just looks like you have something else to do.”

I thought that joke would immediately cement me in the pantheon of great edgy political comedians who also comment on the sociology of humanity—like Richard Pryor or George Carlin. I started to read it to my mom and she just looked at me. She put her head in her hands, much like that gay hairdresser who’d had to shave my head. “Oh, Jennifah. That just isn’t funny.” I rolled my eyes and said, “Mom, you just don’t get it.” I stormed out of the house and got in the trusty white Oldsmobile and struck out for Cambridge, Massachusetts, and my first open mic in the back of a bar at the Green Street Grill. I was headed for my Brenda Walsh moment.

I swilled a few cheap glasses of merlot before I sat down on the stool onstage at the open mic. I drew a breath and got ready to tell my Nancy Reagan joke. I looked out at a bunch of people my age, waiting expectantly, actually listening before I’d even said anything. I could hear my mom’s voice: “Jennifah, that just isn’t funny.” I made myself laugh as I thought about my poor mom sitting in her recliner, tens of thousands of dollars poorer because she’d spent her life buying food, faux designer clothes, and cassette tapes for my two sisters and me, and this was how I was repaying her.

It made me laugh out loud. So I skipped my Nancy Reagan joke and I just told the audience that I was a college graduate who lived with my parents and my mother did not think I was funny. And then I started to impersonate my mom. I’d been imitating her since I was a kid around the house—but until now it never dawned on me to impersonate my mom in front of strangers. It was always more of an in-joke with my family.

I killed. I’m not bragging. All comedians do really well the first time they do stand-up comedy. I don’t know what it is—some cosmic/karmic free pass because what you’re doing is hard enough. But when you’re just starting out, you don’t know that all comics kill their first time—that’s why we stay comics. We think we’re special.

A few months later, my parents came to see me perform. Let’s just say there was another kitchen-table discussion—this time with my mom in tears. She didn’t understand why I was humiliating her in public and revealing family secrets. I tried to convince my mom that making jokes about how she pretends she’s not home when the annoying neighbor knocks on the door is not a “family secret.” My parents didn’t come back to see me perform and things were definitely strained until my mother saw the Margaret Cho movie I’m the One That I Want. Margaret had proven herself to be a successful and famous comedian who also imitated her mother. Just like she came to accept Lauren Bacall’s sex life, she saw via Margaret’s documentary that comedians are actually honoring the ones they love when they make fun of them in their act. My mother not only gave me her seal of approval but also started to come to see me perform regularly so that she could watch the audiences laugh at . . . her. And just like Margaret’s mom, mine stuck around after the show to get attention from the crowds.

MY MOM HAS a really good singing voice. She’s part of a singing group—you may have heard of them, they’re called the Musettes. Oh, you haven’t heard of them? That’s probably because you don’t live in a senior citizens’ home. That’s where they tour. My mom plays piano and sings with three other women and leads them in a rousing (for those settled-down seniors) rendition of “Oh, We Ain’t Got a Barrel of Money.”

One of my mom’s favorite stories is that when she was a teenager she met Patti Page. I’ll spare anyone under forty who is reading this book the trip to Wikipedia. Patti Page is one of the biggest-selling female recording artists in history. She’s famous for songs like “Old Cape Cod” and “Mockin’ Bird Hill.” When my mom met Patti Page she told her that she wanted to be a singer like her someday, and Patti said to her, “You can be anything you want to be.”

That story always depressed me because by the time my mom relayed Patti’s words to me, I knew how it ended. Sure, my mom could have been anything she wanted to be, but she didn’t become a professional, Grammy-winning, popular American singer. Instead, she had three kids and raised them in a time when you couldn’t really just strap your kid into a stroller and pursue your dream of becoming a singer. American Idol hadn’t