falafels, pizzas, ice cream, pretzels, charbroiled steak with smells that steamed out of street vendors’ stalls. Food was a comfort amidst all the stress in my life.
Around the second year of “Saturday Night Live” I taught myself to throw up. I became bulimic before medical science had even given it that name. I got to be just as thin as I wanted, but the bingeing and purging overwhelmed my life. I was a total professional about my work, but my private life was all obsessive eating and throwing up. I wasn’t interested in drugs because I had food. Like any addiction, the eating disorder took charge and left little time for life.
In the three years before my cancer diagnosis, I had begun to change. Through therapy and with Gene’s help, I had overcome my eating disorders. I had retaught myself to eat, and left bulimia far behind me. Gene introduced me to people like Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft and Carl Reiner—people who survived their careers and their successes with good health. I cut down to six cigarettes a day and gave up drinking entirely. I began exercising daily—tennis lessons and swimming. I even stopped chewing gum. I was following a rigorous anticancer diet and even had an apron from the American Cancer Society that had a big chart on it with foods you are supposed to eat and foods you aren’t supposed to eat. I thought I could counteract my genetic predisposition to cancer through proper nutrition. I suppose what was happening was that I was beginning to care about my life.
I learned much later that we do things in life that are considered “towards life” and things that are “against life.” I filled many years with “against-life” behavior. I was so defiant and so funny that I thought I could smoke and say, “Fuck you—fuck you, cancer.” I remember, when someone said to me, “Why do you smoke?,” I’d flap back with “At least I have a say in my own death. At least I’m causing it, instead of having it sneak up on me.” I could stay up all night and roam the streets of New York looking for food, alone at two or three in the morning, not feeling that there was any danger. Nothing could touch me. I let stress and pressure run my precious life, and then when I caught on and began to change, cancer came along and said, “Remember how you tempted death? Well, here’s your opportunity.”
I always felt that the point of my comedy was to say what the other person was thinking before he said it so I could catch him off guard. I always thought that my comedy grew from my neurotic way of life—the way that I would think The plane is going to crash before it took off, so then it wouldn’t ever happen. I never leave the house without thinking the house will blow up or catch fire or whatever, because it’s all like a magic way of making it not happen. I thought I was controlling my chances of getting cancer by thinking I might get it and being neurotic and funny about it. But it doesn’t work. I realize now that it doesn’t work.
There was a time in my life on “Saturday Night Live” when all of life was there only for me to find out what was funny about it. The news never meant anything to us on “SNL” because we always looked at it just to see how to satirize it. Nothing in our personal lives was sacred. We used all of it for material on the show. The most important thing was those ninety minutes live on Saturday night. So what if your whole world was falling apart as long as you could find a joke in it and make up a scene. Millions of Americans saw what we did, and it was a charmed time. We thought we were immortal, at least for five years. But that doesn’t exist anymore. Now real stuff happens. Once we did a sketch about cancer and I played a woman being diagnosed as having breast cancer. I thought it was so funny because I carried my purse—actually a big clutch bag—over my chest for the whole scene. I sang a song once called “Goodbye Saccharin.” I sang that I had
Around the second year of “Saturday Night Live” I taught myself to throw up. I became bulimic before medical science had even given it that name. I got to be just as thin as I wanted, but the bingeing and purging overwhelmed my life. I was a total professional about my work, but my private life was all obsessive eating and throwing up. I wasn’t interested in drugs because I had food. Like any addiction, the eating disorder took charge and left little time for life.
In the three years before my cancer diagnosis, I had begun to change. Through therapy and with Gene’s help, I had overcome my eating disorders. I had retaught myself to eat, and left bulimia far behind me. Gene introduced me to people like Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft and Carl Reiner—people who survived their careers and their successes with good health. I cut down to six cigarettes a day and gave up drinking entirely. I began exercising daily—tennis lessons and swimming. I even stopped chewing gum. I was following a rigorous anticancer diet and even had an apron from the American Cancer Society that had a big chart on it with foods you are supposed to eat and foods you aren’t supposed to eat. I thought I could counteract my genetic predisposition to cancer through proper nutrition. I suppose what was happening was that I was beginning to care about my life.
I learned much later that we do things in life that are considered “towards life” and things that are “against life.” I filled many years with “against-life” behavior. I was so defiant and so funny that I thought I could smoke and say, “Fuck you—fuck you, cancer.” I remember, when someone said to me, “Why do you smoke?,” I’d flap back with “At least I have a say in my own death. At least I’m causing it, instead of having it sneak up on me.” I could stay up all night and roam the streets of New York looking for food, alone at two or three in the morning, not feeling that there was any danger. Nothing could touch me. I let stress and pressure run my precious life, and then when I caught on and began to change, cancer came along and said, “Remember how you tempted death? Well, here’s your opportunity.”
I always felt that the point of my comedy was to say what the other person was thinking before he said it so I could catch him off guard. I always thought that my comedy grew from my neurotic way of life—the way that I would think The plane is going to crash before it took off, so then it wouldn’t ever happen. I never leave the house without thinking the house will blow up or catch fire or whatever, because it’s all like a magic way of making it not happen. I thought I was controlling my chances of getting cancer by thinking I might get it and being neurotic and funny about it. But it doesn’t work. I realize now that it doesn’t work.
There was a time in my life on “Saturday Night Live” when all of life was there only for me to find out what was funny about it. The news never meant anything to us on “SNL” because we always looked at it just to see how to satirize it. Nothing in our personal lives was sacred. We used all of it for material on the show. The most important thing was those ninety minutes live on Saturday night. So what if your whole world was falling apart as long as you could find a joke in it and make up a scene. Millions of Americans saw what we did, and it was a charmed time. We thought we were immortal, at least for five years. But that doesn’t exist anymore. Now real stuff happens. Once we did a sketch about cancer and I played a woman being diagnosed as having breast cancer. I thought it was so funny because I carried my purse—actually a big clutch bag—over my chest for the whole scene. I sang a song once called “Goodbye Saccharin.” I sang that I had
Similar Books
