Confronting Baby Reindeer

I didn’t like this show at all, except for the one moment when it spoke directly to me

Like most modern couples, my wife and I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what to watch on TV.  She’s always interested in watching whatever the buzzy new streaming show is.  I’d prefer to watch old episodes of Seinfeld on Comedy Central.  Binge watching something on Netflix is something I’ve intentionally avoided for a while now. A switch flipped for me around the third season of House of Cards when I watched all the new episodes in 24 hours and felt awful afterwards. Binge watching had started to make me feel the same way binge eating and binge drinking does, full of regret and wishing I had the energy to get off the couch and do something better with my time.

So whenever my wife wants to spend a lazy weekend watching something new on streaming, I usually refuse.  Most of these shows are terrible anyway, so what’s the point of devoting all that time and getting nothing back?  Unfortunately, a husband only has so many “No”s at his disposal when his wife suggests an activity, and I had to watch something with her over a recent weekend.  She suggested the new Netflix drama Baby Reindeer.  I looked it up and saw it was about a stand-up comedian, which usually leads to an immediate “No” from me.  But I also saw it was only seven episodes at around half an hour each, so it would be over and done with quickly.  Against my desires and better judgment, I agreed to watch the show.

For those who don’t know, Baby Reindeer is about Donny, a struggling stand-up comedian in London who is stalked by an obsessive middle-aged hag.  It’s a deeply unpleasant viewing experience, and I absolutely hated it.  When you’re not watching a woman who looks like the Pigeon Lady from Home Alone 2 send Donny emails that alternate between threatening and extremely horny, you’re flashing back to when Donny was groomed, drugged, and raped by a predatory comedy producer, all with the promise of getting his own TV show.  Everything about it is upsetting and unenjoyable, with few redeeming qualities.  The only silver lining I was able to find in the whole thing was, “Well, I might not be enjoying this show, but at least it’s making me feel something.  That’s more than I can say for most stuff on TV right now.  Feeling disgust is better than feeling nothing at all.”  I was prepared to grit my teeth until the end, at which point I would drop a light “I told you so” on my wife.

That was until the sixth episode, when I watched a scene that hit me on such a personal level it brought me to the brink of tears.

At this point, Donny’s life is in shambles.  Martha, the stalker, is harassing him at every turn and the police are unable to do anything about it.  His entire life has been upended.  Worst of all, he has to perform in the finals of an important comedy competition while he’s mentally hanging by a thread.  Donny starts out by doing his normal set, which is an assortment of bad puns and anti-comedy nonsense.  After his first few jokes bomb horribly, Donny looks out at the crowd, tosses his suitcase full of props, and goes into full confessional mode without a punchline in sight.  He talks about getting abused by the comedy producer, laying it all out for everyone to hear.  But what resonated with me wasn’t the what of Donny’s story.  I (thankfully) can’t relate to any of that.  It was the why.  Why did he allow these terrible things to happen to him, just for a chance at a comedy career?  It’s a question the viewer themselves might have, because if you’ve been watching the show up to this point, you know that Donny has invited nearly all of this misfortune on himself. 

Donny says that he wanted a successful comedy career because “I feared judgment my entire life.  That’s why I wanted fame.  Because when you’re famous, people see you as that.  Famous.  They’re not thinking all the other things that I’m scared they’re thinking.  Like that ‘That guy’s a loser, or a drip, or [gay].’  They think…’It’s the funny guy.’  And I wanted so badly to be the funny guy.”

It was just a few simple lines, delivered with genuine emotion, and it cut me right to the core.  Because if I’m being fully honest with myself, a major reason why I got into comedy was to pre-empt judgment from other people.  Like Donny, I’ve feared judgment my entire life.  I’ve been able to fine tune it as I’ve gotten older, but I didn’t have the most normal or agreeable personality in my teen and early adult years.  I’m having a hard time trying to properly describe it here, so I’ll just say I usually struggled to fully gel with my peers when I was growing up.  I always felt one step out of sync with everyone else.

Because of that, I was worried that people (Especially women) thought I was weird or a loser or a creep.  I didn’t trust myself to be likable (Or even halfway normal) on my own, so I entered a space where I could present myself in a desirable manner.  That space was the comedy stage.  It gave me the opportunity to craft a first impression in an environment where I was completely in control.  It allowed me the chance to be seen as “the funny guy” instead of something I didn’t want to be seen as.  

Even as I got deeper into my career and started to proclaim that my motivations were centered around “making good art” or whatever, I think the true driving force of the whole thing was always trying to get people to like me and see me in the way I wanted to be seen.  I wanted to be seen as someone who was funny, smart, interesting, and worth spending time with.  It was a desire that was completely rooted in fear.  I was afraid that I wasn’t any of those things, so I tried to force them into existence.  I wanted to control people’s perception of me.

There were times where it worked, and there were times where it backfired spectacularly.  Guess which ones stand out more in my memory?  

One time, during the first couple years of my career when I was still living and performing in Washington, DC, I saw a group of girls I went to high school with sitting in the front row of a show I was on.  And this wasn’t just a group of girls.  It was the group of girls, the type of girls that made me want to get into comedy in the first place.  Think of Lauren Conrad, Kristin Cavallari, and their whole crew from Laguna Beach. 

I went onstage and tried to do “edgy” material so they could see how funny and intelligent and cool I was.  Surely this would show them how much I had changed since high school and how desirable I was in my new career.  All teenage wrongs were about to be righted.

I, in the parlance comedians are wont to use, absolutely bombed my dick off.  It wasn’t the absence of laughter that hurt the most.  It was the looks on their faces.  I can still picture them.  It felt like when your parents tell you, “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.”  It’s been close to 15 years, and I still think about this incident at least once a month.  Or, it’s more accurate to say, this incident pops into my mind, completely against my will, at which point I’m overtaken by a full body spasm of embarrassment and need to go lay down.  

It was horrible.  My pursuit of comedy had the exact opposite effect of what I intended.  Instead of erasing all of my worst fears, it completely confirmed them, using the original cast of characters who helped bring them into existence in the first place.  Although, now that I’m writing it out, it’s finally starting to seem funny to me. It could not have gone any worse, and ultimately, I got what I deserved.  When you try to bend someone’s impression of you to your will instead of honestly showcasing who you are, it usually blows up in your face.  That’s comedy baby.

Back to the present day. I’m sitting on the couch watching this scene, and I hear the lines I described above, and it feels like a sumo wrestler is sitting on my chest.  This was something I had always kind of known about myself but had never really brought to the forefront of my consciousness until it was forced there by a Netflix show.  I was upset for the rest of the evening, and had a hard time sleeping that night.  I explained how I was feeling to my wife, but unburdening myself didn’t really make things better.

What made things better was a realization I came to the following day as I was walking to work.  Maybe my desire to quit comedy wasn’t only about being burnt out and tired of failing.  Maybe it was also about the fact that I didn’t need comedy to fill a void anymore.  I’ve felt pretty decent and confident about myself for a good long while now.  There’s no longer a fear of judgment that I need to pre-empt by making strangers (Or people I knew in high school or college for that matter) think of me as “the funny guy.”

Part of this is the maturity that comes with age.  Part of it, ironically, is the personal growth that came from striving to become a better comedian.  But most of it can be attributed to my wife.  It can’t be overstated how having a partner who you love and who you know loves you can settle and ground you. Sure, she makes fun of me when I sperg out about a great movie I saw or some philosophy book I’m reading, but it’s done with the type of gentleness and care that you know is rooted in love.  Who needs an adoring crowd when you wake up to that every day?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret my pursuit of comedy or think it was misguided.  It was something I had always loved and wanted to do.  But I do think it also accentuated parts of myself that I could have done without.  Now that I’m finished with stand-up, I can leave those parts in the past where they belong.  And even though I hated 99% of it, Baby Reindeer helped me come to that conclusion. It also led to me telling my wife something I never thought I’d say.

“You were right, I’m glad we watched that show.”