april 16.2004 ».
HUM OR
Being Marc Acito
S
o here’s what it’s like to be inside my
head: “ Do you like me? Do you like me?
Do you like me? I want ice cream. Do you
like me?”
Like many neurotics, much of my day is
spent calculating chess-like moves in my brain,
anticipating the reaction of someone— say, my
partner or my parents or the U PS man— then
recalibrating my action to get the desired result.
O f course, this all occurs before I’ve actually
taken the action in question, which is how I can
spend half an hour staring at a blinking cursor
before I finally do
something as simple as
respond to an e-mail.
It’s exhausting.
W hat I’ve been
obsessing about lately
is the new Charlie
Kaufman movie Eter
nal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind, which
I haven’t seen,
although that’s never
stopped me before
from forming an
opinion. In it, Jim
by Marc Acito
Carrey goes to a doc
tor to erase his memory, perhaps just to for
get The Majestic.
But that’s not the part I’m thinking about.
What I’ve been thinking about is how Charlie
Kaufman, screenwriter of Being John Malkovich
and Adaptation, is getting rich writing about
the short circuits in the brain’s cerebral cortex,
even though Adaptation was really just a movie
about a writer who couldn’t write a movie so
he wrote a movie about it.
Since I’m having a particularly hard time
The Gospel
According
to M arc
What, me w orry?
coming up with a col
umn for this edition I
thought I, too, would
take you on a journey
through the short cir
cuits in my cerebral cor
tex and then perhaps
you’ll think I’m clever
like Charlie Kaufman,
and I’ll get rich.
t all started when a
reader wrote to say
he thought a recent
column wasn’t funny.
He didn’t mean that
he was offended, the
way some overly sensi
tive, politically correct
types will snipe “T h at’s
not funny” when you
poke fun at someone
for their disability like
being fashion-impaired o . _____b
N o, he simply thought I sucked.
For somebody who spends his days calibrat
ing other people’s reactions (“Do you like me?
Do you like me? Do you like me.7” ), this is a
total buzz kill.
So then I got all paranoid I’m not funny.
(“T h at’s it, the secret is out. I’m a fraud. It’s
over. I’ll never write anything funny again.
I
I’m going to have to
change careers and
spend the rest of my
days working at a job
wearing a paper hat.” )
I figured my only
hope was to mine my
personal dysfunction in
the hope that you’ll
find my innermost
demons amusing and
commend me for my
naked honesty.
Hey, it’s worked
before. More than once
(OK, it was just twice,
but that’s more than
once) a reader has told
me that something I
wrote made them laugh
so hard they nearly wet
their pants. Now, while
I consider forcing
..... ......._
......... _ „gainst their will high
praise, indeed, in both cases the thing that
made them laugh so hard was the serious part.
As Mel Brooks said: “Tragedy is when I cut
my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an
open sewer and die.” Put another way, comedy
is laughing at someone else’s pain, although
I’m hesitant to reveal that trade secret
because now all of you will go out and write
'íffitl& fy f
funny things while I remain here unfunny and
unloved in my paper hat.
All this contemplation has made me worry
that perhaps I’m suffering from obsessive-
compulsive disorder, so I’ve taken advantage
of my inertia to visit several Web sites on the
subject. Then I bookmarked them so I could
check them several times a day.
I even took a test to see if I had O CD and
discovered I don’t because I don’t wash my
hands until they’re raw or worry that I might
have accidentally run over someone when I
back out of my driveway (although given the
way I drive, perhaps I should). No, it seems I’m
just your average neurotic.
Now I’m pissed I’m average. See how I suf
fer for my art?
I did find one Web site, however, that
offered both an “American description" and a
“European description” of OCD. I wasn’t
aware there was any difference (except maybe
that obsessive Europeans worry about leaving
the iron on at 230 volts and obsessive Ameri
cans at 120); in fact, upon reading the descrip
tions (both in English), I found that the Euro
pean version simply used much longer and
more complicated words.
I’m ashamed to admit I couldn’t understand
the European version.
But my shame is your gain, and it makes me
happy to know you’re probably laughing at my
ineptitude, even though it means I am not only
averagely neurotic but vocabularily impaired.
And that, my friends, is The Gospel
According to Marc. J H
M arc A cito ’ s first novel, How I Paid for
College, comes out in September. Write him at
wwvo.marcacito.com.
Ti/e ' v
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