I'm a big fan of Gary Gulman's stand-up comedy. So when he released a book late last year, Misfit: Growing Up Awkward in the '80s, I thought it would be an enjoyable but typical comedian memoir. It distills and expands his comedy routines into prose form.
But it's so much more. In his revelatory HBO comedy special, "The Great Depresh," he describes his psychological breakdown in 2017 in which he became so acutely depressed he could not perform anymore. He had to leave his then-girlfriend (now wife) in New York City and move back in with his mother in his childhood home in Peabody, Massachusetts. (Yes, somehow, that special is hilariously funny.)
This event is used as a framing device in Misfit, with the narrative bouncing back and forth between his time convalescing in his childhood bedroom, which he regards as an abject humiliation and the story of his school years from Kindergarten through 12th Grade.
Gulman's stand-up soars on its strong wordplay, but I'm not talking about puns. I'm talking about doing a bit and ending it with a punctuated word that is so surprising and perfect that it makes you laugh. But I had no idea that his ability to use words, freed from the strictures of stand-up, goes far beyond that. Misfit is funny, but not necessarily because the stories are amusing, but instead because Gulman's perfect word choices and sentence structures are hilarious.
I found the book to be funniest when he applied this sophisticated writing to his feelings in early childhood. His hyper-articulate descriptions give flight to his outrage at perceived (and very real) juvenile injustices.
But beyond being laugh-out-loud funny, this is a very moving story of how his extreme sensitivity and eccentricities as a child blossomed into the full-blown mental health crisis that sent him back into his childhood room as a 46-year-old.
But maybe it was this sensitivity that allowed him to remember (or invent, which would be more impressive) the details of his childhood so vividly—his meticulous descriptions of emotions, events, wardrobes, and even smells give his anecdotes rich authenticity.
It's hard to believe that a kid who is (a) future-comedian-level funny and (b) a strong enough athlete to start on his high school basketball team and be such a stand-out on his high school football team that he ends up with a scholarship to Boston College, could be a miserable "misfit." How can you lose with a sure-fire winning hand like that?
But spending 283 pages inside Gulman's head as a child and adolescent, you understand that his delicate psyche and pessimistic outlook usually kept him from feeling like he belonged, at ease, or happy. His style of humor was totally different from that of his classmates. He briefly revels in his athletic successes but languishes in his failures, and his sensitivity, at times perceived as feminine, comes off as "odd" to his peers.
I'm so glad that Gulman emerged from his depression episode so powerfully and with such a renewed creative and comic vigor that he could create this eloquent, insightful, and deeply funny book.
The paperback version of Misfit will be released September 10 by Flatiron Books.
