The Misery to Joy Ratio:
 A Quick Rumination on the Lives of Road Comics, Writers, and Other Chasers of the High
A while back I heard an interview with a comedian (I can’t remember which) talking about how almost every aspect of a road comic’s life sucked. You spent almost all of your time traveling from one gig to another—either in anonymous and sterile airports, or driving mile after mile on unchanging highway. Once at your destination, you either went to some random hotel (or even worse, a motel) for the night, or you went to a house the club kept specifically for their acts while in town. A lot of those acts—comedians, musicians—knew others would come after them and they liked to play pranks. They would leave perishable items out rather than putting them in the fridge, hide used condoms beneath the pillows in the bed, unscrew lightbulbs and throw them in the trash. The usual gross and immature stuff you would expect grown adults not to do, unless, you know, they were comedians or rockers.
But then the big night of the show would come. Granted, said “big night,” was probably just at some tiny, smoky comedy club—The Chuckle Hut, the Funny Bone—and not a coliseum, like when you first envisioned taking this path. But the fans would be there to see you (if you were lucky) and not have just showed up for a night of random comedy. Maybe parts of the set would be clunky (you’d be trying out new material), or a drunken heckler would ruin a bit at a key moment. But, some nights there would come a time where you hit your stride, a kind of comedic flow state where you were having success and the crowd was in that moment with you. Maybe it was a bit of improvised crowd work that didn’t just go well, but featured the kind of serendipitous exchange everyone would be talking about on their way home. And there would be a little bit of something ineffable—euphoria—when things went your way and you felt like you’d made the right career choice. You knew, in this moment, that you were doing what you were born to do, and that—while you might be generally useless—you were at least good at this one thing, dammit.
Yes, the high would soon fade, and be followed by an hour of manning a merch table, selling a handful of CDs and t-shirts to fans. After that, maybe a couple of bumps of cheap coke cut with God-knows-what in the greenroom with your opening act and the bartender, then the comedown. After that, who knows? Maybe anonymous sex with a fan or a more random hookup you met at the bar. More likely, though, just coffee, a slice of pie, and a cigarette at some vinyl booth in a dingy all-night diner on the edge of town, before heading back to the motel to get some sleep. Only to get up and do it again, and again, and again.
And somehow, either for the luckiest or the unluckiest of comics, those few minutes where everything flowed right on stage make the rest of the nightmare worth enduring…
I’m not sure what exactly this comedian called it, this life of so much tedium and hassle with that little bit of incredible joy mixed in there. But it’s something I’ve come to think of as the “misery to joy ratio” (which you can probably tell from this blog entry’s title.) And it’s something that I imagine exists in probably every artform, some bargain the art makes with the artist that ends up winnowing the large cohort of people who try it down to a much smaller group of those who have no choice but to do it.
My own art (I feel ridiculous calling it that, but just play along for the sake of this blog) is my writing. And it is an art that comes with its own many agonies and its handful of joys that must still somehow provide enough compensation to keep me going even when there is very little literal remuneration involved.
What are those pains and joys?
The pains are myriad, and probably any writer can tell you about them, and many in fact spend more time complaining than writing.
There are, for instance, those days where you not only don’t want to write, but you don’t even want to get out of bed. Maybe your body is hurting (I know mine is) and even the physical task of sitting in your chair and typing brings a certain amount of agony with it. Most of the time, though, even when the physical pain is absent, the psychic pain is still there, the gnawing doubt, the self-loathing, the feeling that you are the least successful and least talented person to ever attempt your particular craft. For me it’s a running monologue, a soliloquy of self-defeating insecurity that continues to play in the background as I work. It always starts out very loud and (usually) if I keep writing, keep plowing through it, the voice grows quieter, more distant, faint. But even then it’s still there, if only as a remote and faded echo.
At first, though, it’s speaking in ALL-CAPS.
WHY THE HELL ARE YOU DOING THIS? it says DON’T YOU KNOW YOU’RE THE WORST WRITER IN THE WORLD? NOT ONLY THAT, BUT YOU’RE GETTING OLDER, AND YOU STILL DON’T HAVE A WIFE OR KIDS OR ANY KIND OF REAL CAREER TO SPEAK OF. DON’T YOU REALIZE THAT YOU COULD DO SOMETHING—ANYTHING ELSE—THAT WOULD PAY YOU BETTER THAN THIS? WHY, YOU COULD BECOME A DAY TRADER! STOP DRIVING AROUND IN YOUR RATTY HYUNDAI AND WEARING PANTS THAT ARE BASICALLY COMING APART AT THE SEAMS! IF YOU WOULD ONLY GIVE UP THIS STUPID DREAM AND FACE REALITY, YOU COULD HAVE A CAR THAT WOULDN’T LEAVE YOU FEELING EMBARRASSED AND INFERIOR EVERY TIME YOU STOPPED FOR A TRAFFIC LIGHT. YOU COULD EAT SUSHI AT A NICE BOUTIQUE EATERY WITH A PRETTY WOMAN WEARING AN EXPENSIVE DRESS, INSTEAD OF EATING TOP RAMEN WHILE YOUR DOG WAITS AT YOUR FEET HOPING FOR A NOODLE TO DROP FROM THE TINES OF YOUR SPORK.
BESIDES, JOE (YOU ASSHOLE), LET’S SAY YOU EVEN DO WRITE SOMETHING THAT—MIRACLE OF MIRACLES—DOESN’T SUCK. ARE YOU AWARE OF HOW GREATLY THE ODDS ARE STILL STACKED AGAINST YOU? HOW BIG THE SLUSHPILE AT EVERY PUBLISHER IS? HOW HARD IT IS TO BREAK THROUGH WITHOUT CONNECTIONS, A PEDIGREE, AN AGENT? AND DID YOU NOT HEAR WHAT EVERYONE FROM JOYCE CAROL OATES TO JAMES PATTERSON HAS SAID ABOUT THE POLITICIZED NATURE OF THE PUBLISHING CLIMATE AT THIS POINT? NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR ANYTHING ELSE FROM YOU, WHITE MAN, AND EVEN YOUR VERY EUROPEAN, VERY STODGY NAME IS GOING TO MARK YOU AS PARIAH BEFORE THE SLUSH READER GETS PAST THE COVER LETTER. AND YOU CAN HARDLY BLAME THEM. AFTER ALL, WHY PUBLISH SOMETHING WRITTEN BY SOME SCHLUBBY WHITE DUDE FROM OHIO WHEN YOU COULD PUBLISH AN AFROFUTURIST MASTERPIECE WRITTEN BY A UGANDAN TRANSWOMAN RECIPIENT OF BOTH A GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP AND A MACARTHUR GENIUS GRANT WHO ALSO WRITES MOVING POETRY ABOUT THE PLIGHT OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN AND EVEN PERFORMS THE WORKS AS SPOKEN WORD WHILE WEARING A KEFFIYEH AND BACKED BY A BONGO PLAYER.
And the worst part about that self-defeating litany is that a good portion of what it tells me is in fact true. This is a very hard gig. Even successful writers for the most part make less than enough to subsist on, and either have to rely on spouses or other gigs to support what the world views as a hobby, regardless of how seriously the writer takes it.
So why do it? Why, when there is so much misery and disappointment involved in the craft, and even those odd and unexpected moments of joy are so ephemeral and fleeting and are never guaranteed?
If you followed the first part of this analogy about comedy, you already know why I keep doing it.
I keep doing it, 1) Because I have to and 2) Because when everything goes my way, when the fingers dance and typing feels more like moving a planchette over an Ouija board than “digging a ditch,” to quote John Colapinto, the buzz is unlike anything else. Hell, even after it’s passed, that residual echo of the high is something you can carry around with yourself for hours afterward, and it makes trudging through mud or slogging through snow feel like walking on air. And it’s something to look forward to finding again and again, something I’m willing chase no matter how much of a harangue I have to hear from that self-defeating homunculus screaming from the center of my head every time I sit down and begin typing anew.
Besides, what else am I going to do at 2.a.m. when I can’t sleep and there’s still nothing good on TV?*
I suppose I could try day trading, but even that pursuit probably has its own misery to joy ratio.
* Yes, even in a world where there are a thousand streaming services offering a million options, many times it feels like there’s nothing on TV (or on my computer.) On such nights, I have come to realize, I’m better off entertaining myself with my writing than relying on Hollywood, YouTubers, porn stars, and assorted other riffraff out there in cyberspace to entertain me.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Spaceman (2024)
Directed by Johan Renck
Written by Colby Day
Starring Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, and Kunal Nayyar
Spaceman ** ½
I should have known as soon as I discovered that the cloud of interstellar dust particles was named “Chopra,” that this movie would not be real science fiction. Guru Deepak Chopra, after all, is the person most responsible for confusing the issue when it comes to non-Newtonian physics. Instead of trying to reckon with its complexity, he dumbed its mysteries down into a philosophy of “manifesting one’s will through visualization.” Or mind over matter, rather than mind’s interaction with matter.
In a way, Spaceman is basically a numinous negro story, only instead of a negro we get an alien. And instead of Bagger Vance showing up on the links to help a white man, we get a spiderlike creature showing up in space to help a human.
It stars Adam Sandler as Jacob Prochazka, a Czech astronaut (though they still say “cosmonaut” in formerly communist countries) on a strange mission. He has been sent to investigate the origin and nature of a cloud of interstellar dust radiating purple light over the Earth. One would think that an unmanned mission would be safer, or that processes like gravitational lensing and spectral analysis were now advanced enough to investigate the cloud from afar. After all, the dangers to the crew on a manned mission would be significant, especially if the cloud were radioactive enough for its rays to break through a vessel’s shielding.
Thankfully, though, Spaceman, despite its title, is not really a science fiction movie, and so it isn’t really concerned with such granular details.
Prochazka has been alone, and in space now for several months, and though he is nearing his destination, he is cracking under the strain. He maintains two links to Earth to keep himself from getting too lonely. One is to a standard mission control setup. That allows him to talk to the mission’s planners, investors, and children curious about what it’s like to be in space for so long. Cosmonaut Prochazka goes through the motions in these meetings, clearly uncomfortable talking to a roomful of people after months of solitude amidship. There’s even a hint of self-loathing in those moments where he has to give shoutouts to the mission’s various sponsors.
His other link is the more intriguing one, and also the one more vital to him. It is a device that uses the principle of quantum entanglement to allow him to talk to his wife without experiencing any day. The device isn’t explained in any detail, but that’s okay since we’re in the future and the people using it likely take its to-us magical nature for granted.
These meetings are especially important to Jacob since his wife is very pregnant with his child, and there are longstanding and unresolved tensions that exist between them. She wants him to pay more attention to her, and the time they have together, while his mind remains beyond Jupiter. It is suggested that his lack of concern may have contributed to the stress that led to his wife’s previous miscarriage. One day, though, Prochazka’s wife Lenka (ably played by Carey Mulligan) doesn’t show up for their chat at the appointed hour.
It turns out that she can no longer take being married to a man who is married to his work, and is also more interested in himself than anyone else. She wants to tell him it’s over, but the people behind the mission don’t think that’s a good idea. Wait until he’s finished exploring the cloud, the Commissioner, played by Isabella Rossellini, urges. Despite doing my best to see things from Lenka’s perspective, I found myself concurring with the Commissioner. If your husband is only a few days away from making a discovery that could alter the fate of humanity and maybe the universe, maybe put the mission first? I suppose, though, this may make me a misogynist in the eyes of some.
Rather than let Jacob hear Lena’s kiss-off, the Commish decides to stall, first citing problems with the QE machine, then Lena’s being out of town. Jacob suspects something is wrong, but soon he has bigger problems. A giant spiderlike creature capable of speech (or its telepathic equivalent) is cohabitating the ship with him. He tries to quarantine it, then kill it via release of decontamination spray, but nothing works.
At last he realizes the spider only wants to probe his mind and memories in order to understand humanity. That, at least, is what it says. What it really wants to do is help Jacob see the error of his ways, understand how selfish he’s been, and what he owes his beleaguered wife stranded on Earth.
I liked this story better when it was called A Christmas Story, and the least the FX crew could have done is deck the spider out with some Jacob Marley chains. Repent, Spaceman Prochazka, before it is too late!
Like Arrival—a much better made, but still ultimately mawkish affair—this isn’t a movie about the wonders of encountering alien entities. It’s about how encountering alien entities makes us more human, make us more caring and thoughtful. Real aliens would more probably be interested in dissecting our corpses (or even more horrifying, vivisecting us.) But these aliens are basically just interstellar therapists. The Spaceman could have solved his problems much easier, and much more cheaply, by paying a shrink to sit him down on the couch.
Like Arrival, Spaceman also features lots of stirring, manipulative musical cues by Max Richter and Malick-esque whispering between characters caressing each other with their loving words.
In case you can’t already guess, I hate this shit, and find it insufferably false.
That said, none of what doesn’t work in this film is the fault of Adam Sandler. There’s no point this late in his career spilling ink (or wasting keystrokes) expressing shock that he can actually act. Punch-Drunk Love proved he was a talented dramatic performer, as have myriad other roles since then. Uncut Gems not only solidified the impression, but showed he was capable of actual onscreen greatness.
Here he does a beautiful job here of presenting a man who is tired and lonely to the point where it registers in his every expression. A genuine and ancient suffering seems to claim the Spaceman’s features, the bags under his eyes almost deep enough to look like scars. He smartly doesn’t even attempt a Czech accent, but still somehow gets across that he is a man from a place that is not America. It’s in how believable he looks and sounds when talking about his father, a former communist functionary who did terrible things in his spirit of true belief. Or in those scenes where he recalls running across beautiful green fields and through woods in the countryside outside Prague. Or in his vision where he imagines himself kissing a water nymph from Czech mythology, knowing her kiss will kill him but consequences be damned.
The design on the giant spider is also very good, and despite it being CGI, it is mostly convincing. I would say I have a normal amount of arachnophobia, and thus found myself surprised by how cute I found its change in expressions. And of course, as a binge eater with a sweet tooth, I practically fell in love with him (it?) when I discovered his love for Nutella. Paul Dano also does a good job voicing the spider, expressing curiousness as well as wisdom, making the creature sound as long-lived as it claims to be.
Also, unlike in a lot of nominally science fiction films, the ship actually looks real, too. Most of the equipment is sheathed in ruggedized casing, and lots of the controls and buttons appear to be real holdovers from the Soviet era. There are plenty of scenes in which Prochazka navigates from room to room and none of it feels stagey or like a set. His zero g spins through the space do not appear to be mere camera trickery, but instead a probe through a cramped, albeit three-dimensional space. The cloud itself is also impressive, a luminous explosion of elements and debris supposedly leftover from the Big Bang. How it got from its starting place some thirteen billion years back in time and space is another matter (maybe that Einsteinian “spooky action at a distance” again.) Regardless, it is a marvel to look at, and there is a genuine emotional charge the moment the Spaceman and the Spider make their final approach.
It sort of makes me want to go and find the source material, a book called Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar, see what got lost in the transition from page to screen. Because the movie, for all its faults, definitely has its moments, and will no doubt find its fans and defenders.
 
 
 ​