The Broken Comedian--Brooke

The marquee read “Gregory Marcus, comedian.” But comedian was written with quotations as to be read sarcastically. That was his favorite joke I think, because he would always start every show with, “Hello everyone and welcome to my show, my name is Gregory Marcus, and I am a, quote, comedian.” It was funny, but not funny enough. Every single show he would say that joke hoping to get a good response, but that was the one joke that wouldn’t work out as well as he had hoped.
Don’t get me wrong, his other jokes were funny. Like the one about his air conditioning breaking down and him finally living out his dream of filling his bathtub with ice cream because of it. Or the other joke about how he knew he wasn’t allowed to eat in his meetings so he stole a donut from a little kid on the street to tide him over for the next few hours. He made sure that his audience knew for a fact that he was overweight. That I didn’t find very funny. There was something about his jokes that seemed like they stemmed from some sort of sad truth. He played it off like he didn’t care about his weight, but I think he did.
Everyone thinks I’m stupid for thinking this because Gregory Marcus is just a “funny guy” and he isn’t ever serious about anything he says on stage. But I didn’t listen. I wanted to figure this man out.
This may sound super creepy, but I knew where he lived. Not because I looked it up or anything, but because I happened to be walking home at the same time as him, and it just so happened he lived at the cul de sac right next to mine in a cute two story house with white shutters on the windows and roses surrounding the entire house. It looked like a house someone would invision living in if they wanted that “American dream.” His roof was missing a brick right in the hard to reach place, and the grass was unevenly cut. His garage door looked like it had been painted over ten times in the past year, and his front door was red. I always thought it strange when people painted their doors a statement color like that, but on his house, it really tied everything together. He walked up to it, fumbling with his keys, opened the door with a strong push that required him to lean his whole body into it. He slammed the door shut and I watched as the lights flashed awake on the first floor.
The next day, I was walking my dog and suddenly she stopped right in front of his house to sniff some papers that seemed to have missed the trash. My curiosity got the best of me and I picked one of them up. It read:
Gregory Lee Marcus, a Memoir of the Broken “Comedian”
I stopped before I could read on and picked up the rest of the papers. Then I did
something even crazier... I went into the trash, searching for all the other loose papers I could find. I found a good sixty pages before I heard something from across the street. I immediately ran as fast as I could back to my house, where I laid all the papers out on my bedroom floor, putting them in chronological order. Once I had finished, I noticed I had missed something, because the sentence was unfinished on the last page. Besides that, I couldn’t help but read it. I read up until page 73. Only six more pages to go, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish. I didn’t want it to end. He had such profound opinions about the true meaning of happiness and what laughter derives from. He spent three pages explaining how to write that perfect joke that will make everyone laugh, and went on to explain the human species as a whole and why we react

to certain things the way we do. On page seventeen he talked about children and their strong yet fragile outlook on life, and page nineteen talked about how he wished to be a child again. Page twenty-three talked about his own childhood. He grew up in Salem, Massachusetts and recalled a time when he was eight years old waiting for the witches to come back and take him away from his home. He said that at the time he would’ve much rather lived with witches than with his parents and older brother. On page fifty two he spoke about how much he longed to live in an elderly home even though he isn’t even near retirement age. And then came the dreaded page seventy three. He wrote about how much he was losing his inspiration to write jokes anymore, and hearing that made me not want to finish. I had to, though. I had already gotten this far.
Six more pages. Six more pages and all of my questions about Gregory Marcus would be answered. Page seventy four explained how he felt in times of loneliness, page seventy five talked about how he felt during his shows, page seventy six talked about how he feels guilty for some of the jokes he says, page seventy seven explained the in-depth consequences to being a comedian, page seventy eight talked about how he wished he could’ve been a doctor or lawyer to make his father proud, and finally, page seventy nine. On that page, the last few words were, “I wish there was someone who--”
I walked back to that house, knocked on the door, and when he opened it, I smiled, and holding all of the wonderful pages with poured out emotion on them, I said, “I understand.”
And he smiled back.