Benkharakh.com

By Ben Kharakh

Award winning solo performer and former Daily Show correspondent Lauren Weedman makes her full-length literary debut with "A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body". The hilarious collection of truth, half-truths, and exaggerations details Weedman's time at America's number one fake news source, a four-year stay in Amsterdam, the search for her biological mother, and countless moments where Weedman makes inappropriate jokes that you know you shouldn't laugh at but you can't help it and laugh anyway.

The introduction said that the book is mostly half-lies and exaggerations, but all of it is true. How much of it, then, is true, and how much of it is half-lies?
I should have said none of it was true. Now that it's published and it's all too late and I'm trapped forever with the written word, I realize that I should have said it was nothing but lies. They're all events that I went through, but I did whatever I wanted to the stories. I don't know what the percentage of truth is. Seventy percent, maybe? It's not facts. It's not a memoir. I exaggerated stuff if I thought it was funnier to say something else.

So there are parts of the book that are entirely untrue?
Yeah.

So was the situation with Jon Stewart walking in on you having a discussion and then you jumping into the air and pinching your nipples and saying, "I just want to please you," not true?
Yeah. I don't write it completely how it goes, but that is true, because I have a joke that I do with a lot of people, that if a guy is angry with me, I'll be like, "Oh please, please, I just want to please you!" It's a joke that I do with my friends and they would know that I was kidding. I was reading that back, because they printed an excerpt from that story in this paper in Seattle. I got an angry email from somebody, and I was like, "Oh my God, I gotta re-read that story. What do I say?" And it's funny, when you read it, it does sound like I was like, "Jon, hey, do I please you now?" Pinch my nipple. It sounds horrible. It sounds like a homeless woman coming and lifting up her skirt. But it was more just me saying, "Oh Jon, please, please, I just want to please you!" trying to be funny.

How can readers tell the difference between what's a half-truth and an exaggeration?
I don't think they have to. It's supposed to be entertaining stories of a woman's misfortunes through all these different experiences, and how I've sort of undermined myself every time, and hopefully making them entertaining.

Once you joined The Daily Show, how did being paid to be funny change the nature of being funny?
I didn't do well with it, because I am not a stand-up, and I would never say I was a comedian. I did theater, and I write plays, solo shows. I used to be pretty overweight, and that's kind of a cliché, but coming from being a big fatty, I always had that kind of energy about me, of making jokes. I would never say I'm a stand-up because I don't like it that much. Since I've been more in the route of being paid to be funny, it does make me a bit more manic. I don't like it as much. It's harder. Because then you do feel like, like I say in the book, my fear was that I will end up like Chris Farley or something. That I'll start doing drugs to make sure I'm funny, because the pressure is so high. That's a good point, because that's exactly what got me fired. As soon as the pressure was on, I did not believe I was that funny-- and some people will agree-- that I wasn't that funny, that I couldn't do it, and that I'm just an actress. I'm funnier now than I was then.

Having done more projects of that nature, like Best Week Ever, are you more comfortable now with being paid to be funny?
Yeah. Because now I don't think about it as being paid to be funny, I think about it as expressing things in my own voice. I don't think like, "I'd better tell a joke here." I didn't write this book to be a comedy book. When I first looked at it when I was an idiot and was looking on Amazon.com a lot to see how the book was doing-- it's only been out for half a minute-- I was like number sixty-four in the top one hundred comedy books. I was like, "It's a humor book. Oh, of course it is." I mean, I want it to be funny, but when I went to see who was the one above and the one below me, I saw that "Bob's Toilet Humor" was the book above, and "Bob's Toilet Humor Two" was the book below. I'm in the comedy books.

You just said you're not a big fan of the whole stand-up world. What is it that you find off putting about that?
I just don't like the pressure. And the environment of only being funny I find scary. It gives me anxiety to think of that because life is never just that. Yesterday I had a radio interview with a comedy show, and I was a little bummed out before the show started. And I was like, "What am I going to do? I'm not feeling funny." And I walk in, and they're like, "Hey Lauren, you're one of our funniest guests!" And they're being so nice to me, and they all wanted me to be funny. All I wanted to do was complain about how I'm worried. And I'm like, "Oh my God, I can't always be funny." The comedy world is just a little petrifying in the sense that it doesn't allow for a lot of different moods.

So when it comes to being funny, with this book for example, is it partly not so much that you're trying to be funny as much as it is that your world view of things, your sensibility, just lends itself to being funny?
I think so. I need to say that sentence. I'm going to act like I came up with that. Then I'll ask, "What's me? What's him? What's truth? What's lies?" That is what I would say. When I've written other things where I tried to be serious, or even just auditions where I'm auditioning for a straight roll, when I'm really just being myself, people will say, "Lauren, when you did that scene where you found the dead body, it was just funny. You're just funny." And I absolutely wasn't trying to be funny. There must just be something about how I express myself that lends itself to that.

You're an adopted child and you mention in the book that when you found out that the boy down the street, Fritz, was sent back to the foster home, that you started doing stand-up at the dinner table in the hopes of earning your place in the family. Was that the root of your being funny?
That's about as deep as I've gone in trying to figure that out. I used to say it's because I was fat. I was like, "Because I was fat in high school." If you're a girl and you're fat-- I think I said this in the book too-- if you're not a genius, and you're not gorgeous, you'd better start dancing and be as entertaining as possible, so they don't take you out to pasture and shoot you. Like, "She ain't good for nothin'. She don't even got a strong back." You gotta prove that so that the pack doesn't leave you behind.

I imagine that being sent back to the foster home must have a lot of negative ramifications. Do you know what ended up happening with Fritz?
No, and it's funny, I didn't change his name. He's not going to know who he is, though. Because he's probably on the streets, on crack. You're right, because when I heard that, and I was probably eight or nine, my mom really made it sound like it was because he was a problem to them.

Was being sent back a big fear for you before that?
It's one of those deep-rooted things. I never thought about being sent back. I didn't come from a foster home. But this was just a theory. I'm not sure that's really true. It's just a theory I came up with when I was writing. I was like, "Oh my God, maybe you have this thing of 'maybe you don't really belong here, and you're not really part of this family' and that was there throughout your young adult life." Every time I'd come home, I'd be like, "They only like me because I'm funny. They don't have to like me."

When I hear about adoption, usually the child doesn't know they've been adopted. When did you find out that you were adopted?
Really?

Yes. But that's just from television shows.
Oh, okay. I'm like, that makes you seem like you'd be really old, and you don't sound really old. That's such an old-fashioned, you know, people find out when they're forty that, "Daddy wasn't your daddy," or whatever. I always knew. They told me when I was little.

Did your sister ever tease you about, like, "If you misbehave, we're going to send you back?"
No. That was super off-limits. The adoption thing I wasn't really allowed to talk about. I talked about it at school. It's not like they would beat me or anything. I got the impression that everyone knew it, but there wasn't really much to say about it. "I'm just adopted. This is my family." When I was little, I didn't really think, "I'm not a part of this family." I was. It was my family. As I got older, it was other kids at school that kept mentioning it to me.

You mentioned that your mother planned rouses just to get a reaction out of you. What sort of things did she do?
She would act like she could talk to their dead cats, and she acted like there was a ghost in the house. Maybe this was all true, but she seemed to be so entertained by how freaked out I got. And then my dad would be like, "Lauren, if you didn't react so well, she wouldn't do it." She did that, and then she did what I write about, the undercover search thing. She would tell me before she would go out to go do some kind of undercover work. She would come in and she would be dressed like a crazy woman, with a blonde wig and these big fake glasses, and dressed in a big overcoat. Like a joke. She would put it on just to make me worried for her sanity, and then she would leave the house in it. And I don't know if that was true. My family was like, "Oh, she's just teasing you," and I can see myself doing that kind of thing to my boyfriend's son, I can see it would be super fun to mess with him. Because teenagers are just so fricking like-- if I even say something loud, Zach is like, "My God! That was so loud!" It mortifies him. So I can imagine that she toyed with me. I was always so super dramatic, too. I can't remember anything beside the dead cat thing, the Bermuda Triangle thing she terrorized me with, all supernatural stuff.

It seemed like the chapter right before the one about your mother going out to look for your biological mother, that you had portrayed her in such a way that it seemed like she often antagonized you and wasn't very kind. But then in the chapter right afterward, you portrayed her as a very sweet woman, in a redeeming sort of way. Was that intentional.
I just told the stories how they seemed to me at the time. When I was in Amsterdam, I still saw her as somebody who absolutely just didn't get me, she didn't like me. I wrote a play based on the adoption story, a solo show. I did it off Broadway in New York. When I wrote the play, it was then that I realized how much she had done these things for me. Every night that I performed the show-- I do her in the play, too, she's a major character in it-- I was like, "Oh my God. She did this for me. This was the greatest gift she could have ever given me." My birth family is a huge part of our family. They don't come over, but I am allowed to be a part of their lives. No one's ever made me feel weird about the fact that I spend time with them. What those two stories show is how I saw her at those times, and how it changed.

What inspired the chapter order of the book?
I actually did't play a big part in the chapter order. I didn't write the book in a chronological order. When I sat down to work on this book, I just wrote stories I wanted to tell and then when we sat down to try to put them together, we realized that there was a chronological stream to them.

When it came to the things that you wrote about in general, it seemed very similar to your one-woman shows, except there were no stories similar to the show that you did, "Wreckage."
That is so good. Wow, this is so weirdly flattering, too. And exciting. That's great. That's true, and the reason being is that Wreckage is about lying about rape. I didn't feel like I was a good enough writer to tackle that yet. And this is my first time writing like this, doing the short stories. I wanted to see if I could write at all, and to see if I had the skill to describe things. The stage shows and the stories in the book are connected because they're both my life. They're the things that affected me, the stories that I tell a lot, and the stories I just like to tell. I never say the stage shows are completely true, either. They're all exaggerated for entertainment purposes.

I tried to write that story about the events of Wreckage for Glamour magazine, which completely blew up. That was such a horrible experience. And I did not want to write a story without using humor. It's just not how I would tell something and it's not who I am. And then they took out all the jokes of course, because how could you possibly write a story about lying about rape and put jokes in? But in Wreckage, it is a comedy. A dark comedy, but I am allowed to still tell the story in my own voice.

I actually did an interview with somebody in Vancouver and I read it back, and I was so insecure when I was talking. And you might think that I'm being like, "Oh, I'm not the greatest. This is new. We'll see how it goes. It's fun to do, I'm really glad to do it." I read it back, and the first line was like, "Lauren doesn't think she's such a good writer." And I realized that as I read that, I wouldn't buy the book. You know, you'd be like, "Oh. Okay, I guess she sucks." So I should say, I can't believe the skills that came out of me. I didn't know the muses would sing so loud. Turns out, God. I have the gift.

Why is it that you haven't recorded and released CDs of any of your solo shows?
It just never occurred to me. It's funny because there's people here in L.A. who do one solo show in their life, and they invest ninety thousand dollars in it, and all their friends and family help produce the show, and it's their life dream. What I do is wait for people to come to me, like this book. I'm just not one to think, "I'm awesome. I should do this." And the same thing with the solo shows. I didn't think anyone would want to watch them, past being a live performance. I love performing them and it's still my favorite thing to do.

Audio only wouldn't capture it probably?
I don't think so. I know there are people that invest to do these, but it usually takes somebody coming up to me going, "You know what you should do, you should videotape this. And you know what, I'll do it. Let's plan it." I need someone else to do it, because I'm usually so absorbed when I'm working on it, and so busy, and always doing so many other things at the same time to try to survive.

So when it came to writing the book, did you not even plan to write a book before you were approached to do it?
I thought about it. I didn't plan on it. Brangien Davis, who edited the book for me, she had approached me around the exact same time that I got approached for this book, and asked me to write a short story for her humor zine called Swivel. She really encouraged me to write short stories. She told me, " Just write anything in your own voice. Don't even worry about structure." And literally, I'd write stories and send them to her, and she's like, "Really good, but try to stay in the same tense, and please don't start every sentence with 'I.'" I had a big learning curve, but with her help-- because I can be learned. You can learn me. It's a matter of someone investing and working with me. And this short story I wrote for her went so well, and Dave Eggers chose it for some anthology, and it just went so well, like the first thing I ever wrote-- in my mind it went so well, that I felt inspired to write even more and decided, "I think want to do this. And plus, you get to work alone when you write. Perfect!"

Now that the book's out, what's next for you?
I'm going to do some television stuff. I always do little acting things, because I live in L.A. I'm here doing little jobs for money and joy, but mostly for money. I'm doing a small part in an Eddie Murphy movie. It's not Dr. Doolittle 8, so just take it easy, judgie. He's doing some sort of serious movie. I play his assistant. Not serious, it's a comedy. But it's not like a Disney production. So I'm doing that, and four of the stories in the book have been optioned by Fox, so I'm writing the pilot based on those stories, hoping to write a show I'm not sure if I'll be playing me. I may be too fat to play the role of me. Or too old to be Lauren. So that's happening. And then I do my show Bust some more. So mainly everything is just so I can keep doing more performing of the solo stuff. Just keep buoying myself up with acting and writing, and trying to do as much of my own-- and maybe after a few months, I'll see if I want to write another book.

(© 2007 Starpulse.com™ all rights reserved worldwide)