If at Birth You Don't Succeed (9 page)

The crowd would be silent as I delivered the final punch line. They'd still applaud politely, but the enthusiasm would be gone and the experience as a whole would be reduced to “a really good first attempt at stand-up.” My body was so stiff that I was pushing as hard as I could into the backrest of my wheelchair, hoping that I could deliver that last sentence with such force that even though it wasn't funny, people would be tricked into laughing, like a golden retriever named Skippy who also responds to “Ethel” if you use the right tone. And just at that moment, when it was all about to fall apart, Fate intervened.

I'd been pushing so hard on the back of my chair that my seat actually
broke
. Under the force of all my strength and impending shame, two bolts had shot out of the sides of the chair, causing it to slump awkwardly and stopping me in mid-sentence. It was an unplanned disaster.
Hallelujah!
I looked around the audience, shrugged my shoulders, and said, “Ummmm … that's new!” They laughed. “I really don't have any more material, but it looks like I'm going to be here awhile, so … how are you guys doin'?” They went wild. Where the joke falling off its hinges had threatened to ruin my stand-up debut, my seat falling off its hinges had saved it. The right thing had gone wrong at the perfect time.

I rolled offstage prouder than I had ever been of myself, even though my main contribution to the success of the night had been a fear of failure so intense that it caused me to break steel in half, like one of those mothers who is imbued with superhuman strength to save a child pinned under a burning car. The first person I met offstage was Ella, who'd come to the show bearing a gift of flowers made from Legos. I knew that we probably wouldn't go on any future dates that weren't arranged for the purposes of television, but I also genuinely thought that this girl was cool. And a cool girl thought I was funny.

But the main connection I wanted to make that night was not a romantic one. I looked around for Dave. He came up to me and said, “Man, you gotta be happy with that. Couldn't have gone any better! I really gotta get back into doing this.” Dave didn't have to start a chant for me that night, but having him there felt like I was finally getting the chance to end the set I'd started ten years earlier. It had been Dave's initial show of support all those years ago that had made the prospect of going onstage again slightly less horrifying. And it made me happy that, in turn, my performance was able to reignite the same spark for him.

In the end, none of the chaos from my three days in New York made it into the actual episode of
Rollin' with Zach
. The footage was manicured into a triumphant trip to a famous comedy club, mixed in with a successful date, an exciting helicopter ride, and “the best root beer float I've ever tasted!”
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It bothered me that they didn't show any of the things that went wrong, because my life has taught me that sometimes the things that seem like mistakes are really just setups for the punch lines of jokes we don't understand yet.

For me, the success of that night at Carolines had started with an encouraging failure ten years earlier on the stage at Kenmore West High School. I dropped out of school later that year due to my mysterious stomach ailment. In the decade between my talent show debut and my debut at Carolines, I also failed to complete my college degree, failed to get a job as anything other than a TV personality, failed to land so much as a drunken hookup at a frat party, failed to open a box of Lemonheads, and failed to zipper up a single coat without assistance. But the one thing I never failed at was having a sense of humor about these things. If my life has taught me one thing, it's that, like humor, turning failure into success is all about good timing. What comedy teaches you is that if you're quick enough on your feet, opportunities and mistakes are the same thing, and you have to seize both. Twice, I've ended up leaving the stage without even delivering the planned punch line, but both times, life gave me a better closer than I ever could have written.

 

CHAPTER 5

Who Wants to Smell a Billionaire?

“So, what does Oprah smell like?”

People ask me this question all the time, because in the fall of 2010 I got to sit across from Oprah Winfrey for twenty minutes. It was during the second-to-last episode of
Your OWN Show
as part of a press junket challenge where the final three contestants were interviewed by
TV Guide
and
Entertainment Tonight
, and then at the end were surprised by the queen herself for a one-on-one pleasant chat/the most important job interview of our lives. The only difference between me and the other two contestants vying for their own shows was that I was not surprised. When Oprah came up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder, and said warmly, “Hey, fancy meeting you here!” my response was a casual and generally muppet-y, “Hellooo! I was expecting you!” I'd put two and two together that this was how the day was going to end as soon as I saw that producers who normally wore jeans and an eternal five o'clock shadow were now clean-shaven, wearing sport coats, and whispering about somebody with the code name “Big Bird.”

Big Bird and I hit it off instantly, probably because I didn't lean in to sniff her wrist as soon as we met. She asked me a question I'd gotten used to answering over the past couple of months since my audition video had gone viral.

“When did you realize that you were different?”

“Well, I knew I was in a wheelchair, obviously,” I quipped. “They didn't shield that from me!”

Oprah laughed, but the truth is that I'd lived with CP my entire life and I'd rarely had to articulate my feelings about it—that is, until I was inadvertently thrust into the role of advocate and spokesperson for everyone with a physical disability.

I'd wanted to be famous for as long as I could remember. First, I thought I'd be an actor. Growing up in the early '90s gave me great hope that the advent of CGI would one day allow me to play the action hero Bruce Willis/Harrison Ford–type roles, with a pair of fully functioning running and jumping legs inserted during postproduction.

When I was five years old I auditioned for the role of Tiny Tim in
A Christmas Carol
. Seeing as I was the only applicant who was both tiny and crippled, I thought I was a shoe-in for the part, but I didn't even get a callback. Undeterred, I continued to audition for school plays and musicals with zero success. I chalked up my lackluster career to a lack of mobility until college, when I realized the truth—I'm just a really, really shitty actor. The only two characters I can play convincingly are myself and a dumber and sweeter version of myself. So sometime in early adulthood, I consciously stopped attempting to act. I decided instead to hone my skills as an on-camera personality rather than holding out for computer-generated movie stardom. If I was gonna make it in entertainment, I was going to have to do it on the virtue of my charisma alone. I just had to find my voice and my angle to break in. I knew that cerebral palsy would probably hinder my leading man status, but I'd be lying if I didn't also say I recognized that it set me apart.

When I was filming my audition video, I checked my friend Aaron's opening frame and gave him a direction I would normally avoid: “Go wider. They've gotta see the wheelchair right away.” I knew it would be off-putting to just see a guy with a lazy eye flailing his arms around like E.T. fleeing the CIA. But my instincts told me that if I showed the wheelchair and then went straight for the funny, I'd be more relatable than if I tried to hide it, and if I did this right, then by the end of the video my electric wheelchair and erratic movement would just be background noise.

Over the years, I learned that in my career, unlike in life, sometimes my wheelchair is its own automatic door opener. I was able to win the OWN competition by applying one simple principle: be funny, and admit you suck before anyone else can call you out on it. In other words, make the narrative of your failure a comedy.

I knew I hit the mark when John Mayer posted a vlog about me on his blog,
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saying that while watching my video, “the chair simply disappears,” which means that to the singer of “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” my body was not the focus, or, if taken literally, it means I can levitate. Both things are pretty cool. John Mayer even made good on a promise to write the theme song for
Rollin' with Zach
and posed with me for goofy pictures backstage at a concert in Buffalo. But the storm of media attention surrounding my video brought with it some things that were far less comfortable than having a rock star sit on my lap. I was given a title I wasn't prepared to own: Disabled Celebrity.

I think we can all agree that Peter Dinklage is the best (technically) disabled person there is. When I was a kid, I didn't have any dwarves to look up to, let alone any role models in wheelchairs. When people ask me who my heroes are, I never know how to answer that question because all the people I admired growing up were comedians and filmmakers and none of them had physical challenges. And though as a six-year-old in a tiny red wheelchair I could see virtue in FDR's New Deal, Roosevelt's reported womanizing barred him from idol status in my mind.

Today the landscape has changed. People with Down syndrome star in movies,
2
pop stars pretending to be in wheelchairs are on sitcoms, and, for the first time, people kinda maybe know what cerebral palsy is. Josh Blue won
Last Comic Standing
, and RJ Mitte became a household name by being the worst character on one of the best shows of all time. People with disabilities are more mainstream than ever. But there's still one big problem that I see. Usually, the disability still comes first.

Even on brilliant shows like
Breaking Bad
, where smaller ancillary characters are given emotional scenes and complex arcs, the guy with CP is used primarily as a device to make Walter White more sympathetic. Isn't this drug kingpin's life difficult? He has a son with a disability! RJ Mitte
might
be a good actor, but he's given absolutely nothing to do besides whine and eat cereal. They only show his parents reacting to the prejudices he faces and they never give us any story lines about how
he
actually goes through life. Where are the episodes of
Breaking Bad
where Walt Jr. gets drunk at prom, or where he gets caught smoking pot with friends or masturbating into a meth beaker? So many missed opportunities to flesh this kid out! The reason we never see what he does or how he feels about anything is because characters with disabilities on television aren't really portrayed as people. They're just around to make you feel either good or bad by virtue of how other characters in the show respond to them.

In 2008, when a show I was doing at the University of Texas called
The Wingmen
started getting some attention, a Hollywood agent sent me a script that he thought I'd be perfect for. It was a network sitcom about a crappy after-school chorus called
Glee
. To get me the audition, the agent had enthusiastically lied: “You need a guy in a wheelchair who's a great singer? I got 'im!” I may have looked the part, but I can carry a tune about as well as I can carry an unborn baby. I was a horrible actor, but nevertheless, I put myself on tape reading lines and singing a rousingly pitchy rendition of Bruce Springsteen's “Dancing in the Dark.” In the script, the character of Arty is locked in a porta potty by cruel football players, only to be rescued by Finn, the quarterback with a heart of gold. Once again, the guy in the wheelchair is the helpless one. In this sitcom universe, the majority of the world is populated by prejudiced, narrow-minded jocks who trap cripples in toilets, and the one person who would not do that is the
best
person who has ever lived. I don't know if that show ever went anywhere, but I didn't get the role. It didn't resonate with me.

When Oprah Winfrey asked me, “What do you think the biggest misconception about people with disabilities is?” my answer was, “That people think they're helpless and that their personalities are defined by their disabilities.… Get to know the person; the chair is incidental.” Unfortunately, more often than not, the entertainment industry gets it backward.

When my Oprah audition went viral, I was given the chance to finally share my perspective on what it meant to actually live with cerebral palsy. People with disabilities are given a platform so rarely that as soon as I had the chance to speak, it was assumed that I would and could be the voice for everyone with any physical disability—paralysis, muscular dystrophy, whatever it was that the elephant man had, and the anomaly that caused Bill Murray to relive the same twenty-four hours over and over in
Groundhog Day
.

When I spoke about my own life and how humor helped me face down discrimination and other challenges, most people were very receptive to my story. Others were adamant that in order for me to be seen as an individual, I needed to be on message, reciting a rigidly scripted, politically correct monologue every time a journalist asked me about my experience with CP. I had apparently gotten my own life wrong.

That week when I became a household name overnight, I was getting about a hundred calls a day because it hadn't occurred to me to take down a promo reel on my YouTube channel that ended with my personal phone number. Most of the calls were from fans—fathers whose children were disabled and were moved to tears by my message of hope, shrieking teenage girls, even other OWN show contestants who called to wish me luck and give me advice.

There was one phone call in particular that made me super-stoked that my phone number was public knowledge.

“Hey, Zach, this is Stephen Colbert. I heard you might be interested in doing a buddy cop movie. The writers and I had this idea to shoot a trailer where you would play a character called Rollin' Thunder.” Somehow, Stephen had seen the Reddit AMA where I mentioned that he would be my ideal partner in an action movie.