Misery Loves Comedy Page #3

You're... you're going

to do what he was going to do

and there's not a discussion.

And as my grandfather said

before he passed away,

"You're gonna fix

what he f***ed up."

And so whether that's

rightful pressure or not,

that's... that's pressure, so...

How old are

you when he says that?

I was 15 years old. 15.

He told me he was proud of me...

He was sick and he was

in hospice care at that point

and he said, uh, he said,

"Freddie, did you

clean your room today?"

I said, "Yeah, Papa,

I cleaned my room."

He said, "I'm very,

very proud of you."

And you're 15, you don't realize

he's saying it for everything,

but he's too much of a man

to say it, right?

I go, "Yeah,

yeah, no problem."

And he goes, "You know, your

father really f***ed things up."

"What?"

He goes,

"And it's your job to fix it."

Four hours later, he was dead.

I literally was just like...

"Um, I gotta get into acting."

Literally, I saw Neil

Patrick Harris that summer

getting people excited

for acting in my high school

and I was like,

"I gotta do this sh*t."

98% of kids suffer

from "Hey, look at me,"

desperate for attention.

Is there a way to explain

why any of us actually chooses

"Hey, look at me" as a career?

"Oh, I'm gonna devote

the rest of my life

to being the center

of attention."

Those early teens where you

get to sort of hang out

with your father and his

friends, you know, occasionally,

and just sort of getting

a sense of their...

of their kind of adult humor

and just seeing

little glimpses of it.

They were still

moderating it for the kids,

but you could see

between the cracks,

there was something

a little bit more edgy there

and a little bit naughtier

and the bad language

was kept to a minimum,

but, you know,

you could see it was brewing

and the off-color subjects

were in the air.

I remember that being

very tantalizing, you know?

Kind of wanting

to hang with them.

I would sit in the pub garden,

'cause I wasn't allowed in the pub,

but sitting in the pub garden with them

and, you know, eating a bag of crisps

and kind of excited,

and so that excitement of when

do I get to be part of that?

And it was this dynamic of

the laughter, you'd hear, like...

As a kid,

I'm just hearing, like...

And you'd hear

this rumbling laughter

and I was completely

taken by it, fascinated,

and it was some of these

relatives from the past

that really got me, like,

"Okay, this is something.

Something going on here."

- And it was alcohol.

- Uh-huh.

That's what I realized.

It was the booze.

I was sitting around the table,

and from a very, very young age,

I always dominated

the conversation.

It was the one place that,

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