Gary Gulman May Ask You to Re-Parent Him

In “The Great Depresh,” Gary Gulman’s documentary-style comedy special about his lifelong struggle with depression, a camera crew follows him to his childhood home in Peabody, Massachusetts. “A happier kid you couldn’t find,” his mother recalls. “Always had a smile on his face.” Gulman, combing through keepsakes in the living room, picks up a copy—the copy—of “The Lonely Tree,” a book he wrote in second grade. (First sentence: “There once was a tree that no one liked.”) Sitting next to his mother, he says, “To anybody with just a small amount of psychology knowledge, you would know this was a cry for help, an allegory.” She didn’t get it then, and it’s not clear that she fully gets it now. He laughs and pats her arm, but he doesn’t seem to be over it.

“They could be so charming, my family, but so oblivious,” he said the other day. “They were all about cutting you down to size, making sure you don’t get a big head. My therapist always tells me, ‘The audience is not your family, Gary. They’re actually rooting for you.’ ” At fifty-four, Gulman is often described as a comic’s comic, though he prefers to compare himself to the Silver Surfer. (“Nobody knows who he is, but the people who do know him really like him.”) He still seeks from his audience the recognition he lacked in his upbringing; this is true of most comedians, but Gulman is more overt about it. In his new one-man show, “Grandiloquent,” now at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, he tells the crowd, with a wince of sympathy, “Nowhere on your ticket did it say you’d have to re-parent me.”

“The Great Depresh” aired in 2019, on HBO, and many critics declared it one of the best specials of the year. (The Emmys and the Golden Globes, Gulman hastens to add, did not.) Then he put out another memoirish HBO special (“I grew up in an oft-ignored sector of Jewish people called ‘poor’ ”), followed by an actual memoir, “Misfit: Growing Up Awkward in the ’80s.” (On the cover, Gulman strikes a Billy Madison pose, holding a brown paper lunch bag.) Now there’s “Grandiloquent,” which again mines his elementary-school years for material. Proust had Combray, Twain had Hannibal, Missouri, and Gulman has Peabody, a middle-class Boston suburb where, as a hulking, sensitive kid in 1977, he was forced to repeat the first grade. He was already reading at an advanced level—“I knew what ‘precocious’ meant, and I knew it applied to me, and I liked it”—but his father still insisted on holding him back. “The teachers tried to talk him out of it, showed him charts and everything, but he said, ‘I know my son’—which he absolutely did not,” Gulman said. “When I talk about it onstage now I get gasps, which is gratifying, in a way, but also sort of disturbing.”

He was standing in the fiction section of Three Lives & Company, a corner bookstore in the West Village, wearing jeans and a Rush T-shirt. He is six feet six—a shelf or two taller than all the other customers—and has recently been sporting a Frank Zappa look, shoulder-length curls and a pointy Vandyke beard. He began coming to the shop after Sunday-brunch shows at the Comedy Cellar or morning games of pickup basketball at Tompkins Square Park. “I developed a ritual of getting ice cream, then coming here to browse,” he said. A solo ritual. “Not a lot of people I know with that exact combination of interests.” Gesturing toward “The Three-Body Problem,” by Liu Cixin, which became a Netflix series, he said, “I enjoy watching an adaptation of something I’ve read, because I get to be the obnoxious guy going, ‘No, no, they’re combining these two characters, it’s all wrong.’ My wife loves it when I do that.” He often returns to the Yiddish absurdists (he’s in the middle of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye stories) and the plainspoken American humorists (“Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Letters from the Earth”). “When this show is over, my plan is to read Twain’s autobiography, then maybe ‘James,’ ” he said, referring to Percival Everett’s reworking of “Huckleberry Finn.” He spotted “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” with which he has a complicated relationship. When his doctor first suggested electroconvulsive therapy, he said, “I recoiled, because in my head I was imagining what everyone imagines, Jack Nicholson getting strapped down and zapped. But eventually I tried it, and it saved my life.”

He bought the book in an edition he didn’t have—Penguin Classics, with an introduction by Robert Faggen—and started up the street to the Lortel, where it was almost time to get into costume. Onstage was a teetering set of bookshelves, the spines painted in seventies suburban yellow. They were all just for show, except one: the original copy of “The Lonely Tree.” He opened it up. “He got so sad that tears came down,” it read. “They made him grow and grow and grow until he was the biggest tree in the forest.” He sat in one of the red velvet house seats, turning the pages. “Still holds up,” he said. ♦