The Funny Thing Is... (13 page)

Anyway, let’s not stand here on the threshold any longer. Welcome to my home. Let me just get the door here … I’ve got the key, right … ummm, this key ring is so confusing… Okay, wait … here it is … No, that’s the key to the maid’s quarters … the chauffeur’s quarters … my personal training facility … bowling alley … Here we go! The front door! Once again, welcome to my home! One second … this lock is a little sticky … stupid lock … There. And here we are! Finally! The front foyer!

Now, I wanted to make this a very warm, welcoming room, so I covered it from floor to ceiling in tan shag carpet. Isn’t it nice and quiet? And it gets very warm in the summer. I’ve had people tell me that once they walk into this room, they don’t want to go into the rest of the house. Isn’t that nice?

I like this room the most because you can’t break anything in here. Not even if you try! You could throw a vase straight up into the air and it would just hit the ceiling, bounce off a wall, land on the floor, and not even have the tiniest chip in it. And the whole thing would take place in complete silence.

There’s a spiral staircase on our right that leads up to the second floor, but we’re not going to be visiting that floor today. I don’t mean to sound bossy. It’s just that I have to set boundaries. And, if I asked you where you wanted to go, I’d have to go the way you wanted to go, but if another person read this and wanted to go, say, to the rumpus room in the basement, then I’d have to write another version of this book for them. Another version would mean the cover photo would have to be slightly different and I would have to add a “.01″ to the title or something to signify that it was a new version of the book. I don’t think it would work to put one of those yellow stars that say
ALL
NEW
VERSION
on the cover because really, the rest of the book would be the same, except for this one chapter.

I mean, I can’t open up the possibility that every chapter could be customized for every reader. It would make me seem insecure. When you have an idea, you’ve gotta stick to it!

My grandma used to shout that at me when I was a child. I knew she was trying to be supportive, but why did she have to shout it? She never yelled at my brother. She’d just creep into his room at night and whisper, “All that glitters is not gold.” Come to think of it, maybe I got off lucky, because he’s been scared of anything glittery ever since. It’s really very sad. He lives a glitter-free half life. He can’t ever go to Mardi Gras. Children don’t want to do arts and crafts with him. He can’t even look at a pinata. But hey! This isn’t a chapter about my brother’s grandma-induced neuroses, it’s about my beautiful home.

So, let me throw open these French doors and lead you into my living room. To the left, the length of the wall is covered with that nature-scenery wallpaper like they used to have at the dentist’s office when I was a kid. This particular scene is a lake in autumn; beautiful fiery reds and oranges, with the calm of the dark blue lake in the background. It’s gorgeous and scuff-resistant.

That sets the perfect tone for my sunken conversation pit, the centerpiece of the room. These were very popular back in the seventies, when people were really interested in talking. I find now they’re just as useful for drinking and waiting for dinner to be served. All the furniture in the pit is brown and the carpeting is a dark apricot. I wanted the overall effect to be pit-like, but most people don’t get it. A lot of people assume I’m colorblind.

To the right, I have a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over my professional Ping-Pong court. Comedy is my life, but Ping-Pong is my passion. It’s great to sit in here in the summer and watch a match. If you’re in the pit, you’re watching at about knee level but that’s when you realize the game of Ping-Pong is all in the knees. It’s awe-inspiring.

Let’s plow ahead and go into this back hallway. The kitchen is on our left, but there’s nothing too exciting in there to show you, unless you love sponges. I had everything in my kitchen made of sponge. That way, the spill cleans itself up and no one ever cuts their finger. But it’s not that interesting, just very bouncy to walk around in.

Now, this back hallway stretches one hundred yards in both directions. This not only helps reduce sound when I’m having late-night parties and babysitting, but I can also do my wind sprints without having to go outside. These are the things you dream of when you’re house hunting, but you don’t think you’ll ever actually find.

At the end of each hallway are matching guest bedrooms that have been decorated to be the mirror images of each other. I loved this idea when I thought of it, until I realized I had to look at one room, walk two hundred yards, look at the other room, and then think about how they were the same—but opposite. It’s not as “freaky” as I wanted it to be. It kind of just seems like a hotel.

This first guest bathroom here to our right has its own shower, sauna, and karaoke machine. I know it sounds extravagant, but it was here when I moved in. I think it’s the perfect combination: You can take a sauna to warm up your vocal cords and free your throat of any phlegm, then hop into the shower and crank up the karaoke machine for some of the best shower singing you’ve ever done in your life. It’s the kind of setup I never knew I needed before, and now I can’t live without it.

In fact, a lot of the really fancy stuff here, like the second-floor Olympic-size swimming pool and the tanning bed breakfast nook, came with the house. The man who had this house built was the guy who invented “doing lunch.” Apparently, he made a mint off of that idea, so when he was designing his new dream home, the sky was the limit. He lived here for two years and then got an idea for a dreamier dream home. That happens all the time here in Hollywood. Dreams are a dime a dozen and so are the homes that are built because of them.

So that’s the whole tour! I mean, I could show you the grounds but I don’t want to get my slippers all grimy. Besides, the gardeners haven’t trimmed the topiaries in a while, so the hedge that’s supposed to look like a dolphin looks like a dolphin with a beard and pants.

Here, I’ll just have you picture a beautiful garden, whatever a “beautiful garden” means to you—and then spray some Glade. That’s just what my backyard is like! In fact, that’s what everyone’s backyard is like in Hollywood.

Thank you for coming into my humble home, reader. I hope it was all you imagined it would be,
and more
! Now, if I could just ask you to let yourself out that screen door right past the stained-glass window depicting me performing live onstage, it would be such a help.

Toodle-loo!

I’d read somewhere that it’s good to keep a gratitude journal. We forget how many great things there are in our lives and when you start jotting them down and really get introspective about even the littlest of things, it’s amazing how all the terrible things in life don’t seem as bad.

Gratitude can surprise you. Once you start seeing things in a positive way, you can make almost anything seem like a gift.

At first it’s difficult to get to the things that matter. My journal started off like this:

I’m grateful for air—I need it to breathe.

I’m grateful for food—I need it to live.

I’m grateful for water—it’s what my body is 80% of.

Then, after listing five pages of life-sustaining needs, I became angry with my journal (as you probably already are) and decided I needed to dig a little deeper.

Animals don’t talk. At first I thought,
Oh, that’s a shame, poor things can’t communicate to us
. But then I thought,
If some
people
are annoying, think about how bad it would be to come home from work and listen to your dog or cat tell you what it did all day long
.

First, your pet would berate you for not paying enough attention to it.

“Well, it’s about time! It seems like you’ve been gone forever. I have no concept of time and I’m aging faster than you, you’d think you’d want to spend as much time with me as you could. Why’d you even get me? To pet once in a while? Oh! Thank you, master. Look, I’m bored. I have this one flea that is driving me nuts. I give and give and give. I’m your best friend, I love you unconditionally, and what do you do for me? Oh, you feed me. That same boring dry food every day. I see what you eat. You think I’m stupid? I know there’s variety in your meals, but I, for some reason, don’t deserve anything but this monotony.”

Then the animal would go into a longwinded, boring monologue about the day.

“Okay, this morning there is this bird outside chirping and chirping and chirping and so I start barking, right? And the bitch woman next door screams, “Shut up” to me. She doesn’t tell the stupid bird to shut up, just me. So I barked a few more times just to piss her off. I mean, she can’t tell me what to do, you know what I’m saying? I hate her. Then, I heard something a few blocks away, so I started barking again—and guess what? Yep, she started yelling at me again. It’s not like she doesn’t make noise of her own. She’s got the TV on all day long, all the talk shows … and she thinks I’m loud? Those people on TV yell at each other constantly and when they do the audience applauds and cheers? Give me a break. I’m supposed to just lie around and make no noise? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just in a bad mood. I think I’ll just have a biscuit and head to bed … Hop to it! I can’t get it myself!”

It turns out the main reason I love dogs is that they don’t talk.

Before my gratitude journal began, there were things out in the world that I wished never existed, like mosquitoes. Mosquitoes, especially at night, are the most annoying thing I can think of. I know there is some scientific explanation for why even the mosquito plays a part in balancing out nature, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that many times I’ve spent the better part of what was supposed to be a good night’s sleep hunting those bloodsuckers down. Then I thought, “Wait a minute … that’s what being grateful is all about. It’s about the mosquito and the fly and other bothersome creatures. If we didn’t have them, what would I complain about?” Who wants a world where there isn’t a reason to complain?

There are people in this world who never complain. “Hey, you know Bob’s girlfriend, Cheryl? She never complains about anything. Isn’t that great?” What am I supposed to talk to her about? Eventually, that’s how people bond. What a boring relationship if every conversation went, “You like humidity? Me, too.”

“I love when mosquitoes bite me, it reminds me I’m alive!”

“You know what doesn’t bother me? Frostbite… Yeah, it makes me forget I have fingers for a while.”

Small talk would be impossible.

“Boy, it sure is a hot one today.”

“It’s how reptiles thrive.”

“Yes, but my skin doesn’t shed.”

“Yes, it does, we couldn’t live if it didn’t.”

“Good-bye.”

Small talk is something I used to dread. Now, since I’ve found ways to be grateful, I realize that without small talk people at parties would just stare at each other and eat twice as many chips. I go to a lot of parties—I would be huge! Now I love to start up a conversation with someone and discover, through small talk, where they live. How fascinating.

“How long have you lived in Pigeon Acres?”

“Oh, for about six years.”

“Is it nice:

“We love it.”

“Great. I’m gonna go talk to that guy over there about how unseasonably cold it is this summer.”

“Okay, I should probably stand by the crudites platter and discuss where to buy the freshest vegetables.”

“Isn’t it fantastic we aren’t just staring at each other?”

“Yeah, this is a really good party.”

My gratitude journal is turning out to be an exercise in tolerance.

I locked myself out of the house the other day and I used the time as a chance to get to know my neighbors.

I stubbed my toe on my table and realized I should wear shoes inside.

My cat knocked over my plant and it made me hang all my plants. Now I have more room for books and candles!

Gratitude is about taking that frown and turning it upside down. How can you turn a frown upside down when it is already down? It should be upside up. Gratitude is looking on the brighter side of life, even if it means hurting your eyes. Gratitude is something we can learn from others if they will talk to you.

Gratitude is appreciating the things we can’t have, like a talking dog.

One of the best pieces of advice I have ever been given is, “Don’t care too much about what other people think, or you’ll never do anything.” Well, that’s fine to say, but it’s really hard to do without feeling self-conscious. Some people really, truly don’t care what other people think, and I say, “Good for them!” There are guys walking around in bicycle shorts and that’s it! It’s quite a bit to look at and difficult
not
to look at, all at the same time. Yet they couldn’t care less.

I’ve decided the key to doing whatever you want—and I’ve been interviewed on this subject hundreds of times—is standing out but fitting in. That’s what it is. Take fashion, for instance. You don’t want to wear something so wild that, God forbid, somebody notices. But you also don’t want to choose the kind of outfit that someone else could be wearing—like when you both show up at a party in exactly the same thing. That’s embarrassing! I don’t know if it has happened to you, but it has happened to me—twice. Both times it was William Shatner. And you want to know something? I think I look better in a tube top and I’ll say it.

The way I dress is kind of boring. I don’t care. I don’t go for all the trendy stuff. I don’t understand it, really. Sometimes I think that fashion designers are just trying to see what they can get away with. They want to see if you’re willing to dress up like a circus clown or a prostitute or, worse yet, a circus prostitute. You know, they come up with some of these things like the sarong or the sari. It is the same thing, I think, and if not, I’m sarong. Sari.

There was a time when shopping involved an actual dressing
room
. There were four walls, and you entered through a door. A whole door! And you could close the door and you could try on clothes and cry or whatever you do in the dressing room. But you had a door. There is no door any longer.