Maria Bamford's Tough Year for Laughs

Duluth-raised comedian Maria Bamford was working from home and dealing with anxiety before COVID. Here’s her survival manual.

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“When I’m feeling anxious, I listen to you to hear you talk about your anxieties,” Stephen Colbert told Maria Bamford in the early days of the pandemic on his show in his empty theater, having summoned the great comic to help guide him through the beginning of our collective anxious times. Little did Colbert know how long these anxious times would drag on or how much Bamford, whom he calls his “favorite comedian on earth,” has to offer any of us willing to listen. 

You know Maria Bamford, right? Born in 1970, daughter of Duluth, proud graduate of Chester Park Elementary, star of more comedy specials and series than just about any comic of the last decade—Lady Dynamite, Weakness is the Brand, Old Baby, The Special Special Special, and more, more, more. But Bamford isn’t just funny. She’s brave and tragic and wise and funny—which is why people like Colbert call on her in a crisis.

This is because Bamford has battled mental illness, including suicide attempts culminating in a bipolar II diagnosis, since grade school in Duluth. For college she headed out to Maine but came back to finish at the University of Minnesota when anxiety called her home and began, in Minneapolis, while serving up slices at Pizza Lucé, to build a comedy career around her particular feminist fight to be exactly who she is—smart and fragile, brilliant and quirky, original as the ocean. 

A lot of people call her a genius. 

Marc Maron calls her a genius. Mike Birbiglia and John Mulaney too. Mitchell Hurwitz, creator of Arrested Development, calls her a genius and also that rarest thing: “a real artist.” She’s often called a comedian’s comedian because of her many high-powered comic admirers. Like the comedy of Andy Kaufman, Richard Pryor, and Robin Williams, her comedy works in many simultaneous layers, not just funny but also pure absurdity and heart-wrenching pathos, all of it so complex and interrelated it can feel like your mind is cracking open and learning new ways to think as it chases after her while she gallops along. I personally find her work gives me courage, so much so that I really don’t like to talk about her too much: If you insult her, it will be personal to me, and I won’t like you anymore.

Which is absurd because I don’t really know her! But such is the complexity of art.

Bamford puts so much of herself and her struggle out front that I, like so many of us, feel I know her. Her mom and dad, Marilyn and Joel Bamford, are such important voices in her work, and have been for so long, that you almost start to feel you know them too. From her social media last summer it became clear that Bamford was back in Minnesota, doing Zoom shows from Duluth. I caught one called Help Me, Help You, Help Me in September; it was delightful. She was in a child’s bedroom, rehearsing some of her own material and also answering Dear Abby–type questions from the audience. The whole thing felt like the funniest and most supportive slumber party of all time. 

And yet. 

Since Bamford had shared her mom’s stage IV lung cancer diagnosis, it was easy to jump to conclusions about why she was in Duluth. Those conclusions were correct. Bamford was here all summer, for her mother’s last three months, working on a memoir and saying goodbye. Marilyn Halverson Bamford died the day after that slumber party of a show, in her own home, surrounded by her family. 

Marilyn was a huge part of her daughter’s work. Played by Mary Kay Place in both seasons of Lady Dynamite, seen by her daughter’s fans clapping from Bamford’s couch beside Bamford’s dad as the

 “What’s hard is my mom loved life. I’m always on the fence about life.”

Maria Bamford

audience in The Special Special Special, Marilyn Bamford will always be remembered as the Minnesota Mom—sharp as a flint knife, judgmental as a fashion editor, kind and loving and reliable as gravity. Maria Bamford had a very public breakdown in Chicago in 2011, and it was her mother she called for help. Marilyn Bamford lives in comedy as the person you call for help. 

Was Maria Bamford going to be OK? 

This seemed like an issue of statewide importance, so I caught up with her while she was in a car wash in Los Angeles, not long after she left Duluth, in the hour before she was going to go do something top secret with Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen. 

“I’m so sorry about your mother,” I began.

“Thank you,” she replied. “My beloved mother. This may sound creepy, and if it does, everyone can go to hell. But I can do a very good impersonation of my mother. Now, to comfort myself, I talk to myself saying what I think my mother would say. Sometimes I skew a little bit more supportive than she may have been on certain issues, but—it’s totally devastating.” A silence of car wash and the impossibility of conveying or consoling grief briefly takes hold of the call, till Bamford tames it. “Also, I want to celebrate what an incredible person my mom was. She was not a saint—she spanked us, and in the ’70s, as my friend Jackie Kashian says, that was the golden age of hitting, and we got hit a tremendous amount. The point is…” and Bamford breaks off, indicating the point is that Marilyn Bamford was both bigger than language and smaller than infinity. 

“The great thing was, she just kept saying to us as a family, with more eye contact as she said it,” continued Bamford, switching into her mother’s well-known voice, all quavery and affectionate but also impatient and getting-on-with-things: “You guys are going to be fine.” She switches back to her own voice. “What’s hard is my mom loved life. I’m always on the fence about life. I could really take it or leave it on a regular basis. But she loved everything about it. My mom could wax poetical about this car wash bench I’m sitting on.” She switches to her mom’s voice again. “Honey, it’s got breathable circles in it so you won’t get too hot when you’re sitting. This is just wonderful. I wonder if we could get one of these for the backyard. I mean, they’re sort of industrial looking, maybe Germanic, not exactly Scandinavian. I’m going to ask the guy inside.” 

Bamford turns back to her loss, and how she will be OK without Marilyn. “My mom would be irritated if I lost my mind—and I really thought I would when she left the bounds of earth—but I actually felt OK. Obviously, I’m weeping uncontrollably whenever I think of her and I’m alone or if I listen to a voice mail message she left me, but I felt OK [then]. Because I’m on my meds!” 

Bamford relates that grief is best experienced on different psychiatric meds: “Laughter is actually not the best medicine; medicine is the best medicine.” 

“My mom would be irritated if I lost my mind—and I really thought I would when she left the bounds of earth—but I actually felt OK.”

Maria Bamford

Then I ask her the questions I imagine every creative in America wants to answer right now: How to work without a live audience? (Bamford has done shows just in her living room for her parents, or just by herself, for herself.) How to navigate a world of such intense anxiety it seems like it could swallow us up? (Bamford knows anxiety so overwhelming you fear you might hurt someone or yourself.) 

But Maria Bamford has to leave the car wash to go do her top secret Hollywood comedy thing that will doubtless delight both Stephen Colbert and me in 2021. Happily, I was informed the advice is actually all in an audiobook Bamford worked on throughout her mother’s last year, released just after Labor Day. As near as I can tell no one knows about it but you and me. It’s incredible. Because it’s called You Are (A Comedy) Special: A Simple 15-Step Self-Help Guide to Forcibly Force Yourself to Write and Perform a Full Hour of Stand-Up Comedy, you will think you don’t want to listen to it, as it seems far too vocational. Actually, it’s not much about craft at all; it’s, in fact, a lot like Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a self-help book about how to do creative work when life seems too much. 

I have listened to it 10 times. Allow me to scoop out three of the 15 steps and insist that if you listen to the audiobook, wherever you encounter the phrase “stand-up comedy,” you insert whatever creative endeavor engages you: managing a small business in a pandemic or raising kids in a pandemic or making pottery in a pandemic. 

Do what you like; like what you do. 

Bamford explains in detail the fallacy of trying to please anyone but yourself. “Me, I like telling stories,” she says in the book. “I like the six voices I can do. I like my family! I like being physical and making faces, and I love words. Thus, my comedy is heavily story-driven, six-voice-filled, family-based act-outs that could probably use some editing. But Maria! You ignorant cow. What if I don’t get love, adoration, all the laughs? What if I don’t get what I want? Yes, I know. That is painful . . . but have you gotten to do exactly what you wanted to do creatively for minutes, months, or even years? I’d argue that’s a huge win. Congratulations on your Daytime Emmy in Useful Happiness.” 

Ask for help.

“I know it can feel impossible to ask for, much less get . . . help. Call an ambulance, call the fire department, call your local pizza provider. Domino’s always picks up. In Minneapolis in 1995, I dialed 0 on a pay phone. I asked the operator, would they still love someone who was flunking out of remedial math? They said yes. I got a total stranger to basically tell me that they loved me—for free! You deserve all of the human kindness available. There is a weird phenomenon where people get wrapped up in trying to find the right help, that there is some best help out there. There might be. But somehow it’s always someone 2,000 miles away that charges $1,400.” 

That pay phone in 1995, by the way? Coffman Memorial Union. Instead of the best help, Bamford explains in depth how to get your friends to text when you need help doing a task, how to get people on Twitter to help you rehearse, or how to get the people who work behind the counter at your coffee shop to assist you, personally, in exchange for helping them! It’s a revolution in getting through, literally together. 

Keep at it.

“While this book was being written over the course of a year, I rehearsed my stand-up show at least 50 times, with friends, coworkers, strangers, and only sometimes onstage. It has been easy, and boring, and sometimes like pulling out a front tooth directly attached to my brain-heart. You are not alone.” 

If this self-help book were in paper, I would take it through a time machine to my high school–aged self, who would then underline and star parts of it till the pen sliced through the pages. But since I can’t do that, I’m doing the next best thing, which is telling you. I suspect that after 30 years of reading self-help, Bamford could easily spend the next 30 writing self-help, and I hope she does, because she’s gone into the scariest places, shone a light, and come back to tell tales—and I know the rest of us could use a guidebook. 

“I do feel like the one use I have in life is an almost compulsive honesty,” Bamford told me, in goodbye, from the car wash bench her mother would have loved. “If I can use my compulsive honesty to make people feel less terrible, wouldn’t that be good?” 

This article originally appeared in the January 2021 issue.

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