Words & Actions

Chris Gethard at the X-Ray Arcade Got Me Reflecting on the Nature of Parenting -- of being a parent, and of having been parented.

Content Warning: This post contains brief discussions of alcoholism and drug use, child abuse/negelct, and a link to a poem about suicide.

Parenting is weird. And hard. And utterly unlike anything else I've done in my life. Even the things that are ostensibly familiar, that share outlines with other difficult tasks I've undertaken or adventures I've gone on, now have alien interiors, exposing me to more and different in ways that are hard to articulate.

This is one of the many ideas that Chris Gethard explores in his new special A Father and the Sun, currently on tour in parts of the U.S. My partner and I caught his show at the incredible X-Ray Arcade, a club which, for the uninitiated, looks from the outside like the most nondescript working-class neighborhood bar but inside houses a weird punk rock venue with a curated collection of classic arcade cabinets and exclusively serves pizza bagels for food, with an explicitly anti-oppressive door policy (unless you’re one of those jerks that thinks vaccines are oppressive, as X-Ray is one of the few venues left that consistently requires proof of vaccine or recent negative COVID test for entry). Early in the show, Gethard describes the bar as being like “a dream pulled from my head” and he takes time to reinforce the uniqueness of the club at several points throughout.

And while not specifically called out, as an all-ages club where adults can visit the nostalgic vestiges of their youth while helping to shepherd in a new world for and alongside a younger generation (through a diverse offering of music, vegan brunch pop-ups, and other events), X-Ray actually helps reinforce some of the themes of the show. Much of his set finds Gethard deftly (and hilariously) exploring what it means to occupy a position that’s in between youth and old age, straddling the demarcation line where everything changes. He is interested in what it means to be a new parent, but also to have been parented, exploring (among other things) his relationship with his own father over the course of an hour with his trademark wit and vulnerability. It’s a hard show to describe without giving too much away, but Gethard is interested in the space between words and actions, guiding his audience through the sometimes big and difficult emotions that live in that space.

It’s probably no surprise that this hit me especially hard. I mean, guiding people to and sitting with those big and difficult feelings is what I do professionally, but even beyond that — this is the kind of exploration I’ve been interested in for as long as I can remember. Understanding where and how words and actions fail, how we can use words to inspire and influence action, how language causes suffering and how action moves us through it. Plus, I’ve made no secret the power “dad feels” have over me. Like, I’ve cried during pretty much every Marvel movie because of this shit. It’s not hard to get me, thanks to a complicated relationship with my own father and learning and unlearning so much about parenting in the process of helping raise a wild and almost worryingly observant 4 year old.

This is the sort of stuff at the center of A Father and The Sun, and while I’m still sorting out some of my reactions to the show, I can say this: I found it a deeply moving, human, and healing experience. I can’t say with certainty that it was the first time I found myself crying at a comedy show (for a reason other than laughter, I mean), but it’s definitely the most I’ve ever cried at a comedy show. The whole thing is an exercise in compassion on the level of David Foster Wallace’s This is Water, but much funnier. Also, I’m reasonably certain DFW never wrote any jokes about 69ing in a foyer, but then again, I never actually finished Infinite Jest.

I can’t say that I had the worst childhood or the greatest. In the grand view, it was probably pretty middling. While I’m not about to parade out my ACEs score or anything, I will say that I faced some challenges that others never had to. At the same time, I had a lot of advantages that others didn’t. My dad was a Vietnam vet who couldn’t talk about his feelings and would explode into alcoholic rages. This was a guy whose idea of spending quality time with his children was letting us ride with when he made a run to the city dump. (To be fair, the dump is pretty fuckin’ cool.) My mom tried her best to protect my brother and me but that often resulted in carelessly blurred boundaries and some harmful lessons about how to navigate the world. I learned to retreat into my imagination. I learned that stomach aches could get me out of gym class. I learned that if I fucked up, to hide it from my dad while my mom found a way to bail me out (sometimes literally).

I escaped into comic books and music and movies, and later into drinking and drugs. For a long time, there was an infinitely deep and dark void at the core of me that I could never fill or get rid of no matter how hard I tried. I firmly believed for a long time that I would one day succumb to its terrible gravity. That I didn’t wasn’t for a lack of trying, and sometimes I still feel the pull.

But I also know that many had it worse. That far too many still do. That there are children who’ve never felt the love of a caregiver or protector for more than a brief moment and will spend the rest of their lives trying to find a feeling that they can’t actually comprehend because they never learned it. Or they will run from it because if you’ve never known the warmth of love it can feel like it’s burning you. That there are children who have to raise themselves, or their siblings, or become caregivers to their parents way too early. Children who are drafted into gangs, sweatshops, or armies. The world can be a cruel and uncaring place. The very name of this newsletter references the sickness at the heart of the world, and the need to fight for something better even when things feel impossibly hopeless.

At his best, [Gethard’s] performances are masterclasses in planting seeds, only to cultivate them much later, weaving together disparate threads.

As human beings, we’re almost impressively bad at making room for ideas like this. When our heads and hearts aren’t in alignment, it can feel like we’re going to break or go crazy under the weight of the contradiction. But being able to hold conflicting ideas and recognize the ways in which they are equally valid is one of the most important life skills there is.

Here is where Gethard really shines, with his ability to lay out complicated ideas in a way that feels straightforward yet profound. At his best, his performances are masterclasses in how to plant seeds, only to cultivate them much later, weaving together disparate threads, leading his audience down a path they have no idea that they are heading down until they get to the destination and of course, this is where we were headed the whole time.

We know that surprise improves learning. In my clinical work, we call it “expectancy violation” and it reinforces and optimizes the use of exposure in treating anxiety disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder and social phobia. I suspect that in another world, Gethard could have been a hell of a therapist, but in many ways, I think the role he inhabits is more important than that. Like Gethard himself I am reluctant to lionize the stand-up comedian, but I do think that there’s something important about how someone like Gethard can reach so many people, folks who may never seek out therapy for any number of reasons and yet get these little seeds planted in their brain that, in the right conditions, sprout into something beautiful.

Because Gethard’s set was a deeply healing experience for me. Maybe that’s unfair to put that on some guy telling jokes up on a stage, but it’s the truth. And I suspect that it wasn’t just me having this kind of experience. The Father and the Sun underlined important lessons about what it means to be a human being, about parenting, about being someone’s child, and how it all comes together. How words are just words and mean nothing next to action, and at the same time can mean so much. They can move a crowd of a couple hundred people in a weird punk rock arcade bar where you can get a beer (or a fancy canned water) with pizza bagels, of all fuckin’ things.

Because even as Gethard tells us that words don’t mean shit, it’s clear that he knows that they mean so much. A big part of Gethard’s set was about why he does what he does. Why, at age 42, with a supportive wife and a toddler and a house in the suburbs, he gets on a plane, flies halfway across the country, waits in airport terminals, sleeps in creepy Airbnbs, only to get up on a stage for an hour and make people laugh and then doing it all over again the next night in a new city.

Maybe it helps him fill his own emotional void, but it’s so much more than that. It’s because words bring people together and help them make room for complicated ideas. It’s because words help people learn and grow and heal, and sometimes they save lives. Words mean nothing next to actions but also words are actions and we have a responsibility to use them to build kindness and compassion and love in this world because there’s no other way forward.