“I’ve always had real trouble knowing what my actual desires and goals are.”
“I’m a total fuckup, honestly. The reality is I’m not this person with this driving “get it done” attitude. I’m a complete fuckup and I’ve fucked up a lot of things in my life. I’m constantly tortured by a sense of failure. I feel like quitting all the time. I feel like hiding in drugs or alcohol. I feel like I’ve failed in terms of what my potential is. I don’t think I’ve achieved my potential because I haven’t worked that hard and I haven’t found the right angles. The reality is, I’m not a “get knocked down and just pull myself back up by my bootstraps and come back harder” kind of guy.” - Greg Giraldo on Failure.
Michael Ian Black linked to this interview that Greg Giraldo did in 2009, writing “it rings too true for me… The constant feeling of never being good enough. I think a lot of us suffer from that.”
I believe I first heard his comedy on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn. I may have been the only 14 year old girl in the world who regularly watched and enjoyed a sit-down talk show featuring, and perhaps catering to, angry, middle-aged men. I also thought he was cute, but it’s not very hard to be cute next to Jim Norton and Nick DiPaolo.
(I just remembered the afternoon I tried to inoculate my friend with Jim Norton’s comedy. As it turns out, not many other 14 year old girls found detailed stories of buying prostitutes and dealing with alcoholism funny.)
Michael Ian Black is right. A lot of us suffer from never feeling good enough, from feeling like you are a fraud at what they tell you you do best, feeling like you’ve somehow tricked your way into this set of friends or that position in your career. What Giraldo talks about in this interview is so relatable that I, a young, female college student, arguably the exact opposite of the man speaking, both sympathizes and empathizes with him. It is that true of being human.
Maybe that’s what made Greg Giraldo such a good comedian. Maybe that’s what makes good comedians. I’ve always thought, for as long as I’ve thought to think about it, that those who perform in the arts — musicians, comedians, artists, writers, etc. — and perform in them the best, have to be so in tune with the human condition. Maybe not in tune with themselves, maybe not in tune with their boyfriends and girlfriends, but in tune with the human condition. What makes us tick. What can make that tick race. What can make it slow down until it almost ceases completely.
How can you be too ignorantly optimistic and stand on a stage and try to relate to hundreds? How can you be bogged down with selfish depression, the kind that forces blinders on your eyes and all you see is the shit, and try to sit and write a novel meant to be read by thousands? I don’t think you can. You need to see all of it, you need to feel all of it; how bad it can be and how amazing it can get, and realize it all goes hand in hand because that’s just the way it is. You can’t reach anything above sub-par if you try any other way. I think. But what the fuck do I know?
This interview isn’t sad to read, although it feels like maybe it could be. This interview is a relief to read. We all strive to relate. I think that’s all we want to do. To look at someone and have them look back and say, “I get it. I get you.”
RIP, Greg Giraldo. I hope when I have my own 14 year old daughter, you’ll still be on reruns somewhere on television and she too can sneak downstairs to watch you with the volume on low after I’ve gone to sleep.
“I tend to blame myself for everything. There’s an expression I’ve heard used for people in my shoes, people who see themselves like I see myself. I feel like I’m “the piece of shit at the center of the universe.” It’s a paradox. You feel like you’re so shitty you ruin everything, but you’re so important and powerful that you caused it, that you actually are to blame for everything. I’m doing the best I can, and maybe that’s enough. It depends on how much sugar I’ve had that day.”
