Why I Find Comedy in Difficult Places. Like My Dad’s Stroke.

There’s a story in my new Netflix comedy special, “The Good Life,” where I’m fiercely arguing politics with my father at his house about 20 years ago. The conversation got so meanspirited that when I walked out to my car, my dad didn’t even say goodbye.

I said, “Bye, Dad.”

And he said, “Well, you’ve gone another way.”

At that point in “the special I say, “My whole life I wanted to be my dad, and at a certain point I decided I wanted him to be me.”

But if I’m being honest, that’s not what I thought in the moment. I thought something along the lines of, “What is he thinking? He’s just wrong.”

About a year ago, my dad had an acute stroke that put him in the hospital for months and now he’s home with care. He can’t stand up. He can’t walk. He can speak, but he doesn’t remember anything that’s happened in the last 12 months.

This is a huge change for my family. My dad has always been a big personality. Sometimes too big. When I was a kid, he’d sometimes fly off the handle. So in my special, I make the joke that the silver lining is that as horrible as the stroke has been, “if I’m being completely honest, it has calmed him down.”

One night, after I made that extremely dark joke, the audience didn’t know how to feel about it. It sort of sat there. I think the audience thought, Are we allowed to laugh about this guy’s ailing father? So I improvised a line: “Most of the jokes tonight are for you, but some of the jokes are for me. This is a coping mechanism. And I hope it is for you too.” That lit up the crowd. There was an acknowledgment that this was something I was really grappling with.