Here’s a true thing that sounds like a joke: Comedian Gary Gulman got recognized by a fellow patient in the psychiatric hospital he checked himself into in 2017.
He’s more likely to be recognized now. For one thing, his athletic 6-foot-6-inch frame makes it tough for him to blend in — at 53, he looks more like the retired version of the NBA player he once aspired to be than a comedian. But the warm reception for “The Great Depresh,” one of several recent-ish comedy specials that have ridden the wave of our evolving cultural understanding of mental health and the debilitating effects of toxic masculinity, substantially upped his profile. (He also had a small role as a comic in “Joker,” the $1 billion-grossing worldwide hit released the same week.) His memoir, “Misfit: Growing Up Awkward in the ’80s,” was published late last summer, and a new streaming special, “Born on 3rd Base,” followed on Max in December.
He recently sat for a long interview on the podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” where it was immediately apparent why more famous comics like O’Brien and Judd Apatow (both credited as executive producers on his recent specials) revere him: His meticulously constructed jokes come from a place of empathy, not cruelty. The incongruity of such vulnerability residing within such a traditionally handsome, articulate guy who by all appearances would seem to have the world on a string has made him an unlikely spokesperson for mental health awareness — minus the fun-obviating baggage of being a, well, spokesperson.
“We’ve expanded our view of humanity, and in my case manhood,” he reflects. “When I was growing up,” in the suburban Boston of the late 1970s and ’80s, “it was very narrow in terms of archetypes of how to be a man.”
A hybrid of stand-up and documentary directed by Michael Bonfiglio, “The Great Depresh” combined footage addressing Gulman’s harrowing health crisis — one that sent him to a mental ward and then, at age 47, back into his childhood bedroom in the Peabody, Mass., home where his mother still lives, for several months while he fought to regain his emotional footing — with a triumphant performance filmed the following year. It opens with archival footage of Gulman bombing onstage in Boston before his hospitalization, so paralyzed by suffering that he can hardly choke a word out, then tracks his tentative return to stand-up, including the first time Gulman confided to an audience that he’d undergone electroconvulsive therapy for his depression.
Bonfiglio says one bit that Gulman had performed on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” in January 2017, about oversleeping and eating ice cream with a fork, seemed to point the way to a show about depression — though Gulman had framed it in that routine as mere laziness. Which gets at the internalized shame with which depression is so frequently commingled.
In his specials, in a 2019 “This American Life” appearance and in “Misfit,” Gulman returns again and again to the idea that from an early age, he fell victim to the insidious notion that success — whether as an honor roll student and accomplished athlete in his student years, or as an artist later on — would salve his feelings of worthlessness. He’d begin to feel good once he deserved to. During his brief run as a college football player, he never felt at home around the kind of aggression his coaches and teammates expected.
“He is competitive,” Bonfiglio says. “He’s not cutthroat. He certainly does pay attention to what his peers are doing, and it makes him happy when his peers do well.”
“Misfit” the book and “Born on 3rd Base” the special both spend a lot of time on a subject arguably as stigmatized as mental illness: poverty. Treating his depression with ketamine injections and finally ECT was an expensive ordeal, especially after the disease had rendered him incapable of working for more than a year.
But Gulman had grown up broke. The youngest of three boys whose parents split up before Gulman entered grade school, he recounts in “Misfit” the trauma of hearing his dad grouse about the $110 alimony check he wrote out to his mom at the end of each prescribed Sunday visit.
That innate sense of value is one reason he wants to make it clear that on his current tour stops, he presents a fresh hour that he wrote last year, not material from his six-month-old book. He still remembers feeling burned when he bought “SeinLanguage” in 1993 — the year he began performing, while still holding down a day job as an accountant — and discovering the tome was little more than a transcript of the shopworn-even-then stage act by a sitcom star against whom Gulman measures himself in “Born on 3rd Base.” As Gulman identifies the culprit: “Remember the guy who played Jerry on ‘Seinfeld’?”
Anyway, the “Seinfeld” model of success — stand-up followed by an unconscionably lucrative sitcom — seems to have gone out with the monoculture. Gulman was recently saying to some other comedian friends how nice it would be if he could find some way of ensuring his career would remain right at the comfy level where it is now.
“To be out of town [performing] two weekends a month, September through June, is really manageable,” he says. “A decent living.” But not the kind of confining fame Gulman has seen when he’s gone on just before or after a much more famous headliner. “There’s this sense of awe the audience remains in,” he says. “They’re so giddy that there’s a celebrity in front of them” that the jokes get lost.
Gulman’s managed to duck that sort of message-scrambling degree of recognition, building an erudite audience, if not a massive one. There’s a world in which his career might’ve gone another way: He survived to the final round in the second season of the early-aughts reality TV series “Last Comic Standing,” and he released his first big-time special, “Boyish Man,” in 2006. But he says his comedy deepened and grew more specific when he moved to New York that year and began playing to more discerning crowds that were receptive to whimsical or literary jokes.
Certainly, his vocabulary is a big part of his appeal to word nerds. He punctuates his act with chestnuts like “eschew” and “ne’er-do-well,” sometimes pausing for just a beat to let them register. Not forbidding or pretentious words, necessarily. Words you recognize and understand, but probably don’t throw around in conversation.
He mentions his friend the comedian and actor Ricky Harris, who died in 2016. “He gave words to an idea I’d always felt: ‘People love to hear words they forgot they knew.’ People hear it and there seems to be some kind of adrenaline or dopamine release. It tickles them.”
Being attentive to what makes the dopamine flow is another part of looking after one’s mental health. And Gulman is part of the movement that’s brought us to a place where we can discuss this openly.
“I say this a lot, and I don’t mean to be glib,” Gulman winds up. “But there’s never been a better time to be mentally ill.”
Another true thing that sounds like a joke.
If you go
Gary Gulman: ‘Misfit’ Book Tour
Warner Theatre, 513 13th St. NW, warnertheatredc.com. 202-783-4000.
Date: March 16.
Prices: $49-$89.
