Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
So, usually I do comedy.
Today, I wanted to try something different
and talk about
a relationship I'd been in for a very long time
that has been a very difficult relationship,
and now I think shows hope of being a good one,
and I am, of course, talking about my relationship with reality.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
I mean, honestly, from the very beginning, I wasn't even attracted to reality.
(Laughter)
I don't like reality.
I don't want to say reality's abusive,
but I looked up, just before I came here,
the signs that you're in an abusive relationship.
He's demanding.
(Laughter)
Every day, I get a to-do list a mile long.
You know, make the bed, write a script, read "A Brief History of Time."
That's when I envy Joan of Arc.
All she ever had to do was one thing:
save France.
I mean, it was a big thing to do, but at least she could concentrate.
He's controlling.
Yes, reality's whole idea is that you can measure everything,
and then you can predict everything, and then you can control everything,
including me.
I'm not a submissive type,
which brings me to
he expects you to be the perfect person
and meet his every need.
Well, good luck with that.
I was never the woman reality wanted me to be;
I was too emotional, I was too loud,
I didn't defer.
You know that whole yin-yang thing,
where yin is the passive, receptive, feminine,
and yang is the male, active principle?
I was a yangy-doodle dandy.
(Laughter)
I was an action hero.
And then there was that whole flap in one of the advice columns
where women were complaining
because men like to leave right after sex
and women liked to cuddle,
and, you know, I was on the male end of the spectrum, okay?
I had a man break up with me once because right after making love,
I would run and go weigh myself.
(Laughter)
I think what he really objected to were the ankle weights, but ...
Mr. Sensitive.
Okay, so,
the point is I never actually divorced from reality.
You know,
I did the go-along-to-get-along thing,
and I'm sure from the outside, it looked good,
but on the inside,
I was becoming more and more estranged,
and then there came a point when I read Quantum Physics and Chaos Theory,
which is a little strange because I don't do math,
and not because I think women can't do math -
believe me, I think little girls are born with an innate ability
to understand those abstract concepts,
and then, at six, they give you Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to read,
so you become immediately aware
that there are only two kinds of men in the world:
dwarfs and Prince Charmings,
(Laughter)
and the odds are seven to one against your finding the prince.
(Laughter) (Applause)
(Cheers)
But I suddenly was asking myself these big questions,
like is our whole idea of success based on Newton's law of inertia,
that an object, once in motion, will continue in a straight line
unless impacted upon by another object?
Is it rational to measure our self-worth in dollars?
Why is there a setting on the iron for permanent press?
(Laughter)
And while I was having all these ideas,
I was trying to figure out to monetize them
because my actual job at the time
was to think up new ideas for situation comedies
and sell them to the networks.
In fact, I had just made a deal with the Walt Disney Studios,
and that was the real problem
because the day I moved into my office on Dopey Drive,
they sent over a present.
Not the Lalique vase or the Thunderbird I was expecting,
but a three-foot-high stuffed Mickey Mouse,
and I immediately looked in the catalog to see how much it cost -
$70 -
but it was the description that got me.
It said, "Life-sized mouse."
(Laughter)
And my heart just sank
because I realized they expected me to believe that.
And then I looked all around me, and I saw everybody was making up reality.
This was during the Bush administration, and ...
(Laughter)
(Applause)
So perhaps you remember Karl Rove making fun of a reporter
because the reporter, he said, was stuck in fact-based reality.
"We are an empire now," he said.
"We make up our own, we create our own reality."
So like ping - empirical reality, pong - empire reality.
And Wall Street,
whose financial instruments
were becoming more and more abstracted from anything real -
derivative reality -
and all of these realities depended on an ideological bias
that an idea in your head
was bigger and realer than actual reality,
which, I can tell you, is very dangerous.
I mean, if you don't listen to me,
listen to the story of Mr. Russell,
an Australian lion tamer who was severely mauled by his lion,
and who, said the article in the National Enquirer
in which I read about him,
(Laughter)
learned lion taming through a correspondence course.
And I have to say, I, too, was mauled by a lion -
metaphorically, not really,
but the lion in my case was a tumor in my pituitary gland,
which had been going on undiagnosed for 20 years,
causing me to grow my feet, my hands, my head, my ideas,
and bone spurs,
which brought on osteoarthritis,
so then I had to have a hip replacement.
Then I fell and broke my leg and was in a wheelchair and crutches for two years -
during which time, I came to know actual reality,
where there are actual constraints
and actual challenges to meet,
and guess what?
I loved real reality
because there was a real thing at stake:
my survival.
And it turned out, I was fantastic at that.
And because we're living in a time
when our collective survival is threatened by climate change
and our collective response seems to be to deny it or do nothing
or build spaceships that will take us to another planet
that we can then despoil
or to leave our physical bodies altogether and ascend to a higher consciousness
called the singularity.
I'm sorry, I can't tell the difference between the singularity and the rapture.
(Laughter)
But because of that
and because I've learned these survival tips,
I want to quickly share three with you,
and one is, forget ideology and connect with the physical world.
Because, yes, thank you.
(Applause)
Ideology alienates us from our own bodies.
I knew this because during this whole thing,
I split into a head and a body at some point,
and the head - they would have these conversations,
and the head would say,
"Well, tomorrow, we're going to drive to LA
and take a meeting with MGM,"
and my body would say, "No, I can't. I'm too tired."
And the head would say, "No, you can't be tired.
You have no reason to be."
And the head's like a slave driver.
And one day I actually heard my head,
I heard myself say to myself,
"You know, if I were you ..."
(Laughter)
And that's when I knew the head was crazy, and I started listening to the body.
And this is good for heads of companies and body politics and all of that.
Okay, second thing, really quickly.
I was being impacted on
in just the way that successful people are in Newton's universe,
and it got so bad, I had to see a psychiatrist.
I found a great one - a friend recommended him.
This friend is a connoisseur, and he had checked all around, you know.
And he had done a test,
and what he had done was find someone else who went to the same psychiatrist,
and on Monday, Bob went in
and told the psychiatrist the most complicated dream,
you know, with everything - cigars, train tunnels, what not -
and then Thursday, this other guy goes in
and he tells the psychiatrist the exact same dream,
and the psychiatrist is like, "Wow, this is really weird.
You're the third person this week to tell me this dream."
So, I think I didn't tell that joke right.
You see, first one person went in, then another person,
then the really smart psychiatrist said, "You're the third ..."
then - fuck the person who told him the joke.
Anyway, never mind. Let's move on.
Let's move on - the point is I said to this psychiatrist,
I said, "You know, I just want me back.
I want the person I was
before all this stuff started happening to me,"
and he said, "There is no such you.
There is no you who isn't impacted on
and being impacted upon
by other people and your environment."
And that's when I realized the problem with action heroes.
If you think of action movies,
they take responsibility for themselves,
but they never take responsibility
for the impact they have on other people or the environment.
You never see an action hero come back after the car chase
and pick up all the little lemons that he upset off the lemon-seller's cart,
or you never hear Arnold Schwarzenegger
say, "I'll be back
with my insurance information."
You know, no.
(Laughter)
So, what I learned is we need interaction heroes,
and we've seen so many of them here today,
connecting head, heart, hands,
connecting poor people with opportunities.
You know, that's been wonderful.
And the final thing I want to say,
and this is a very hard thing to do,
we have to give up the idea that we can control anything.
We can do our best, but we cannot control anything.
We cannot make things be the way we think they should.
An idea in our head is not going to overrule reality.
So, the thing to do is to accept as best we can
that we're all like the old woman in this joke who's driving a car -
she's driving her middle-aged daughter to the store -
and she goes right through a red light.
And the daughter doesn't want to say anything,
because she doesn't want to be like, "You're too old to drive."
But then the mother goes through another red light,
and as tactfully as possible, the daughter says,
"Mom, are you aware that you just went through two red lights?"
And the mother says,
"Oh, am I driving?"
(Laughter)
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Cheers)