Transcriber: Joseph Rendu Reviewer: Ivana Korom
My favorite Montreal institution is the STM -
"Société des Transports de Montréal"
or Subway System.
Has anybody here seen the recent metro car designs?
Less seats anyone?
Mmmh?
Now I can understand when less seats might be helpful
if they allowed more people to fit on the metro cars.
But have you ever noticed how many more people
can fit into a metro car when you remove one seat?
Zero!
Not one more person.
Considering the seat is about a foot by a foot, there is no difference
in how many more people you can fit into a metro car when you remove one seat.
So now, instead of sitting on your good Montreal metro line,
a person must stand.
In a spot where a seat once was.
(Laughter)
Now you might be saying,
"Robby, aren't you being a little ridiculous over such a trivial issue?"
And to that I say no.
No I am not.
Seating concerns run long in my family tradition.
My great uncle Ed took this very seriously.
I was just a girl when my family and I were uprooted from New York
in the aftermath of my parents' divorce.
We came here like many generations before us, penniless and determined.
With nowhere to go, my great uncle Ed
took my mother, my 9 siblings and I into his home.
They just don't build folk like that anymore.
Now uncle Ed's big mission was bus stop seating.
He could not stomach driving by and watching old ladies standing
as they are waiting for the bus especially in the winter.
So before each day began at 5 o'clock in the morning
there was uncle Ed bustling into the streets of Montreal
in search of chairs or chair parts
left in the driveways of people's houses for garbage.
He'd collect as many as he could then hop back into his car
and on his way back home, drop off chairs he had assembled
the day before at several key bus stops.
Quote
from the Montreal Gazette.
Thursday december 9th 1999
(Laughter)
(Applause)
"Playing mysterious version of musical chairs,
the mysterious chairman of Côte-des-Neiges."
And I quote: "He always strikes at dawn,
that at least eye witnesses can agree on.
Roaring through the streets of Côte-des-Neiges
in his clattery old car,
the chairman comes to a stop at the streets of Plamondon and Victoria,
pulls out half a dozen chairs from his car,
sets them in a neat row at the bus stop gets back into his car and roars away.
A few days later a city trucks drives up
throws the chairs into the truck then drives away.
A few days later the chairman drops off a new batch of chairs,
(Laughter)
the city removes them, the chairman brings more chairs,
the city takes them away.
Few days later, city employees drop off 2 benches.
(Laughter) (Applause)
The chairman acknowledges the benches by dropping off a few less chairs.
(Laughter)
Is the chairman crazy then?
'Who knows, maybe the guy is protesting,' says the cabby across the street.
Look, there is a bench over here and one over there
but no bench right here.
So maybe he's wanting equal opportunity for the benches.
Is the mysterious chairman of Côte-des-Neiges
a patron of the 160 bus?
Is he an equal opportunity bench activist?
Are his 4 legs planted firmly on the ground?"
Uncle Ed would be home by 7:30 AM in time to drop us off to school.
The worst was when he involved us.
Many times I'd be sitting with a chair on top of me
pleading he'd drop me off a block sooner.
But why am I telling this story to you today?
What relevance is this?
I think it's important to know that I am blood related to this man.
(Laughter)
This is somebody I am a descendant of.
They say you ought to know where you come from
in order to know where you're headed,
and as much as I try and fight it, I feel his pain.
The other day when I got into Montreal,
I took the STM in this beautiful city of ours.
I was standing by an older woman who stood in a spot where a seat once was.
I heard uncle Ed's cry from beyond the grave:
(Shouting) "Give the woman a seat!"
For shame!
If uncle Ed could see the STM now removing seats week after week.
One morning as we had our cheerios, uncle Ed barged through the kitchen
with this Montreal Gazette article above his head.
Lo and behold!
Validation! Recognition! Uncle Ed had made it to the paper.
So who was the mysterious chairman?
My great uncle Ed: the equal seating opportunity activist.
It's so nice to be back here.
You know, anybody besides women obviously today celebrating anything?
Any birthdays, anniversaries, any divorces?
Okay no I suppose,
I'll tell you a little bit about myself.
I do come from a very large family, I have 9 siblings.
I have 5 brothers and 4 sisters.
My parents were Hasidic, so had all 10 of us within 12 years.
I actually asked momma how she had all those kids.
And the only thing she said to me was,
"I don't know it seems every time I went to bed I woke up pregnant."
Eew!
That is the grossest thing I have ever heard!
(Laughter)
Momma was only 53 but I feel like she was born in 1911.
She still refers to women by their marital status.
She'd be like, "You remember Sheryl, divorcee?"
"Carolyn, spinster, never married?"
How old is that word?
Oh, heavens to Betsy!
(Laughter)
When interviewed some time ago,
a journalist asked me if I thought women were funny.
To me that's like asking, "Are people funny?"
Being a stage performer
It's practically impossible to separate what I do from who I am doing it.
I'm a comedian who happens to be female.
And I'm a comedian because it's all I can be.
I tried being an accountant
and I tried suppressing my understanding of life,
but unfortunately failed.
The ideas and words in my head
have blurted out onto the stage where suddenly they've become understood.
Suddenly people understand
that co-workers are, in fact, without the shadow of a doubt,
the worst kind of people in the world.
(Laughter)
Comedy is not about a joke or one story but a collective of my life.
The stage understands me and it's where I'd like to live.
Remember that old lady who lived in a shoe,
she had all those kids, she didn't know what to do?
That rhyme was based on my mother!
(Laughter)
With that how could I not become a comedian?
But practically speaking I did put myself through McGill University
to get a cushy accounting job which ironically was a poor decision.
Because: I'm a comedian.
But comedy chooses you, I think.
I mean what sound minded woman would choose to get up night after night
on stages splattered with imaginary semen and sweaty microphones?
Couldn't I have just enjoyed a regular day job?
I'd have liked that, really.
Comedy is hard and subjective too. It's not a race, it's a marathon.
Success is a product of hours of stage time.
No comedian is spared this journey, there is no easy way to the top.
But now is also the moment for women in comedy.
There are more female led sitcoms and features than ever before.
See back in the day, a female comedian might receive the odd,
"Oh you're funny." But it was usually followed by,
"For a girl."
I've been told I'm pretty for a lesbian but that's for another day.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
But absent are the elaborate credit heavy introductions
that men would receive when they were brought to the stage.
i.e. "This next comic has appeared at the Boston comedy festival,
please welcome to the stage: Jack Reynolds!"
This was thrown out the window when a woman was brought to stage
and simply replaced with, "This next girl up."
Now why was I asked here today to tell my story?
It's nothing special
but I'm happy to tell it and you'll infer from it what you want.
In the fourth grade we had a pop-quiz
on a short story we had read together as a class.
The quiz was easy, super straightforward: 10 questions on a story we'd just read.
Only problem with the quiz was that I wasn't paying attention during it
I was daydreaming about God knows what
so literally had not a clue what it was about.
Panicked, I stared at the page. Scribbled my name on the top corner.
Who knows? Sometimes they awarded part marks for simply writing your name.
And then it hit me.
I could enter in the space for the answers made up chinese pictographs.
Who's to say they're wrong?
(Laughter)
So that's what I did. I was a bit of a strange kid
and as a kid I used to like to study the child's craft language book,
memorizing letters from other languages
even though their meaning still remains a mystery to me.
Of course we got the quizzes back
and I had a big red zero on mine with "come see me".
No part marks to my name.
I took my quiz, I walked up to my teacher head held high.
"But who's to say they're wrong?" I pleaded.
You never gave quiz instructions, or said the answers had to be in English!
Until we get a Chinese translator in here, we don't know that they're wrong.
(Laughter)
That energy, that energy, I never grew out of.
Comedy ambitions never came easy, but that energy keeps me going.
Ultimately my TEDx talk is about another thing and how all these things
eventually have meaning for doing other things in your life.
Another thing, "What do you mean?"
you're asking, "What thing and why another?"
Over the course of my life I've always questioned
how many other things I can take?
Every time another thing happens to me I go, "Really God why me?"
For instance when I first fell in love with a girl and discovered I was gay
I was in shock.
Really? Another thing, on top of it all?
(Laughter)
Not only was I born to a mother who had 10 kids,
not only was she hearing impaired,
not only was she a single mother, not only did we grow up poor,
not only did I move out of my house at 18, not only was I allergic to pistachios,
not only was I a Jew, not only was I a woman,
but now gay too?
Today we're talking about positive disruptions,
and female comics by virtue of what they do
are contributing to positive disruptions.
What do I even do as a comedian?
Disrupt!
It's all I do.
And I disrupt ideas and thoughts in such a way
that intend to make you laugh which intends to be positive.
But not only are female comedians positively disrupting
because of what they do but because they are women doing
what has historically been perceived as a male profession.
And every time a woman entered a male profession
she positively disrupted things.
(Applause)
Birth was at Long Island College hospital in New York city.
Momma says it was the best of her 10 births
because the hospital had just redone its rooms,
still looked more like bedrooms which felt warm and nice,
unlike the sterile conditions of her last six births.
The 3 births after me had been in warm rooms too
but were marred with complications.
I'm born 7th I've been 7th my whole life, many people have names,
I'm 7th.
(Laughter)
There are many studies done on birth order for those born 1st, 2nd and 3rd.
There are traits linked with the eldest, the middle and the baby.
I have yet to read what traits are associated
with being born 7th of a 10 children family.
But as a case study for 7th borns I will say this:
I like people.
Which is good news considering I entered a family after 8 had already been there.
Beyond this things were obviously tight financially
but if things weren't tight financially,
then I wouldn't have my school lunch bit
and we all know you can't put a price on a good joke.
Growing up we had the worst school lunches and my sister's here today she can attest.
I'd get home at the end of the day, momma would look through my lunch bag,
"Why didn't you eat your saltine crackers?
They are fresh."
It's like you'd rather starve than eat salty cardboard.
Of course momma would get back at me,
"Can't you trade?
We used to trade when we were kids, don't the kids trade anymore?"
It's like, "Ma, no ones will trade Oreos for freaking saltine crackers!
I'm at the bottom of the trade chain here!"
(Laughter)
So see growing up poor was worth that joke alone.
(Laughter)
But people want a further example
of what's it really like to grow up with 9 siblings.
I'll give another one.
There are 8 Popsicles in a standard box.
(Laughter)
Unless there was a steep sale on Popsicles,
Momma just bought the one box.
Which meant that you were running home racing to be one of the fortunate 8.
It was like playing musical chairs but with your after school snack.
And privacy was pretty hard to come by too
which is something you'd think I'd value more
given how precious it was growing up.
But in fact the opposite has happened, I live my life openly, on stage.
In fact privacy scares me just a little bit.
If I catch myself being too private I know it's because
I want to hide something.
Maybe the way I grew up or my background
or maybe something even more personal like my sexuality.
Which actually, shockingly enough wasn't such a huge other thing for me.
See when you've got 9 siblings there is another benefit.
When you have 5 brothers and 4 sisters,
there's got to be someone who mocked up worse than you have.
(Laughter)
There's got to be the token mock up!
Your only job is to make sure you're not that mock up.
I looked around and my older brother
had a baby at a wedlock with a girl we never met.
And my sister was dating an ex-con.
So I said, "Screw it, I'm gay."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Nobody flinched, nobody flinched.
Ultimately, due to a shortage of ressources,
I did move out on my own at 18
and have been living independently since then.
And it was in this time, my first year on my own,
that I discovered I was in love with a girl.
This was the first really great other thing to happen to me
but it was also another terrible thing
because it meant I was gay.
Every time another thing happens to me,
I've stumbled on some of the greatest things ever to happen to me.
For example: when I left my house and moved out so soon
it was so scary and so hard
but on the flip side, for the very first time,
I could breathe.
I had space.
I could figure out what I liked.
I had possessions.
Regardless of how small, they were mine.
And it was in this time
when I was alone and broke in my apartment
that something really great happened.
I fell in love.
I knew for certain what life was all about.
Suddenly it didn't matter that I had Kraft Dinner the past 6 nights in a row,
or that school was threatening to put me on probation
if I didn't pay the small fee.
Suddenly it was all about love so who cared about anything else.
A great lesson I'm thankful to have learnt so soon.
But even though I know where I came from,
I must admit to you all that I don't know where we're headed.
I'm just as scared as most milliennials about our future.
I think we have it just as hard as our grandparents
if not harder, for different reasons.
Initially when I wrote this presentation,
I was standing at the fork of my own road.
Up until a couple of days ago I had been living a double life
since the inception of my comedy career.
While I had discovered my passion,
I wondered if I'd ever gather the courage
to ultimately leap into my full happiness
and make that jump.
I'd obviously watched enough TED talks to know what the right thing to do was.
(Laughter)
But the other day another thing happened.
I was offered a full time position in the writing room of an amazing show
and the job starts Monday.
(Cheers) (Applause)
After that even another thing happened.
I was able to quit my job.
Writing this presentation has been a slightly miserable experience,
I must admit to you all.
Mostly because I wasn't sure what to say or why anybody would care.
It's also been a wonderful experience
because it's allowed me to look at my life in a sideshow-like fashion.
And by doing so I was able to see a constant in my life.
I have always been outspoken.
Always.
My 4th grade teacher may not have appreciated this back then
but she might be proud to know that I haven't hushed
and continue to speak out,
as a person,
as a comedian,
as a woman.
Over the course of my life I have also seen pattern.
Aside from plague and disease almost nothing happens for nothing.
Something I know now that I didn't when I was first out on my own
was that it's all fine.
Something will happen, a prong in that fork will be followed.
So even though I don't always know why things happen.
I do now believe that they've all been for good.
I mean what in the hell would I be talking about on stage
if all these things hadn't happened?
What would my perspective be?
Like yours?
Hardly a story fit for comedy.
(Laughter)
Thank you so much.
(Applause)