Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
At the start of 2020, the comedian, actress, and writer Rachel Bloom was riding high. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” the musical TV show that she had co-created and starred in, had wrapped up its four-season run the previous year. Her book of memoiristic essays, “I Want To Be Where the Normal People Are,” was scheduled to be published in the fall. She was at work on a new musical with her collaborator Adam Schlesinger, and was simultaneously developing a comedy special that interspersed standup bits with her signature bawdy original songs. And she and her husband were expecting their first child, a girl.
Then, in March, everything came apart. The COVID pandemic, which had seemed so remote a few weeks before, suddenly hit. Bloom gave birth to her daughter, but the baby had lung problems and had to be confined to the NICU. Later that night, she learned that Schlesinger, who lived in New York, had been hospitalized with the coronavirus. The news was a shock. Nearly a week later, as she was bringing her daughter home, Bloom was told that Schlesinger had died.
That uncanny synchronicity, the jolting coincidence of birth and death, changed Bloom’s life, and the trajectory of her work. She began to develop a new piece, “Death, Let Me Do My Show,” which she toured around the country, and which will arrive on Netflix this week, as “Death, Let Me Do My Special.” The show, which I first saw last fall, during its Off Broadway run in New York, begins with a burst of joyful abandon, as if Bloom is willing her audience to return with her to the comparatively carefree days of 2019. Dressed in a sparkly sequinned jacket and heels, she bounds onto the stage to her favorite pump-up track, “Space Jam,” and proceeds to sing a nineteen-twenties-style ditty about a romance unfolding beneath an odorous Bradford pear, better known to the smelling public as the “cum tree.” It’s funny, silly, and raunchy, a classic Rachel Bloom joint—until, suddenly, a voice from the audience interrupts her. A heckler? Yes, but not just any heckler; the interloper turns out to be Death himself. Death (played, in the Netflix special, by David Hull) wants Bloom to stop ignoring him. Hasn’t he been kind of a big part of her life over the past few years?
The show that ensues has moments that are as funny as anything Bloom has done. She got her start making parody music videos—her first, “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury,” was a viral pop-punk paean to the nonagenarian writer—and musical comedy forms the backbone of “Death.” There is a fantastically zany song about the Rainbow Bridge—a kind of mythical gateway to heaven for pets and their owners—which turns unexpectedly profound on its reprise late in the show, and a delightfully counterintuitive number about ghosts and the afterlife. But the show is frank about the tough stuff: the overwhelming anxiety that engulfed Bloom when her daughter was born, her sense of despair at the loss of her friend. It deals with love, sorrow, and survival. Bloom and I recently spoke on Zoom; she was sitting in her home office, in Los Angeles, in front of a whiteboard full of notes and a framed medical diagram of a breast. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
I was trying to get screeners of the special for a while, and your very sweet publicists were, like, “This week!” for a number of weeks.
We shot it in July, and then edited it now. We just got the final version last week. There are some choices we’ve made in the Netflix edit that differ from the show.
What are some of the changes that were made?
The big one is that all of the things that I said at the top of the show, where I’m, like, “I was working on a show in 2019”—that’s all cut. And so I replaced that with the voice mail. [The show opens with a recording of Bloom leaving a voice mail, in 2020, saying that she’s going to postpone the filming of her special.] That gives you all of the exposition you need. I actually love it, and it’s something that you could not do onstage because it would break the illusion of the stage. But for the Netflix special, it really works.
The voice mail is dated March 13, 2020. You’re talking about how you want to put the special on hold, because it seems like the world’s going a bit crazy. What was that voice mail? Who were you talking to?
So that’s fake.
Oh, fuck.
No, I mean, look. I want people to believe it’s real, because that is what was happening around that time. And that is a text that I was sending around that time—
Well, let me ask it differently. You were working on a special in 2020. What was the state of it then?
In March, 2020, I’d already been doing some of the bits and some of the new songs at shows. So I was very much in process. And I was going to have the baby.
You were how many months pregnant?
In March, I was nine months pregnant. The plan was, I’d go on a slight maternity leave, and then I would really ramp up into prepping for this special. At the time, I had offers from a few places, because I’d just come off the TV show—and this is a time when many people were getting specials, which is not the case now, by the way. The specials market has kind of collapsed. So I had about half of it planned out.
Then what happened?
I give birth; the world explodes. At a certain point, my daughter’s playroom was my office, which is just a very on-the-nose metaphor. It was still my office, but it was slowly being overtaken by baby stuff. On the back of the door was my whiteboard, where I had my whole special outlined. I was playing with her at, like, 5 A.M., you know, exhausted. My friend had just died, and I’m looking at this silly whiteboard and thinking, This is so stupid. This is irrelevant. And then I was, like, Well, what if you did a show where you acknowledged that, and then Death came in and interrupted?
This gets to the core of what the show is about. Tell me a little bit about the friend, Adam Schlesinger.
He was my writing partner, one of the three songwriters on “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” I had just seen him in L.A. at a place called Burgers Never Say Die—which is a fantastic burger place—and then he went back to New York, which had started to lock down. Meanwhile, you know, the N.B.A. shuts down, Tom Hanks gets COVID. Stuff is starting to look scary. I go to my doctor and she’s, like, “I think I want to get you in the hospital sooner rather than later.” So I decide to get induced when I’m basically at thirty-nine weeks.
We get to the hospital. I’d just been texting with Adam and Jack [Dolgen], my other writing partner, about my pregnancy, because Jack and Adam wrote a song for “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” called “The Miracle of Birth,” and Adam had two daughters, so he’d seen the process. A couple of days before I gave birth, I texted, “My mucus plug fell out,” and Adam said, “That’s mucus to our ears!”
Anyway, I’m induced. I’m in generally good spirits. I mean, childbirth sucks—
Although I should note that, as much as it sucks, there is a video in your show of you rocking out to “Space Jam” as you are actively pushing.
That’s post-epidural, and I was loopy. I was exhausted because I was induced around midnight, but I couldn’t fall asleep until 4 A.M. because I kept having to pee.
And then my daughter comes out, and she’s purple. I have this on video. I would never show it in the show, but she’s purple, and she can’t really cry. They take her off my chest, and they put her in this incubator in the corner of the room, and then they take her to the NICU. I hadn’t been expecting that to happen. I had had a normal labor, normal pregnancy. So I feel like shit. I’m just sobbing. My husband and I feel awful. And then around midnight, I’m checking my e-mail, and I get an e-mail telling me that Adam has COVID, and he’s on a ventilator. I had no idea Adam had COVID. It happened very quickly.
A week goes by, and we’re in hell. My daughter’s in the NICU, only one parent is allowed in at a time, and the world is starting to really shut down, and Adam’s health is getting worse. Finally, we get my daughter home, and basically the day after, Adam dies.
I had never felt worse in my life. We had a kid in isolation, and now my friend is dead. It was the first time I’d ever had someone suddenly die. I lost grandparents in college, but it had been a long time coming—they were both sick. Then, over the next eight or so months, I lost two more people in my life. And I just felt like the world had exploded. So that’s what the show is about: How do you deal with that, with everything changing, and go back to life? And I think the subtext is the role of comedy.
What do you think comedy’s role is?
The thing that got me through all this was rewatching funny movies and listening to funny podcasts, because it takes you away. It’s an escape. And, also, laughter makes you defy death. Life is inherently tragic and serious, but comedy makes you feel, for a moment, immortal. That’s why the show ends with the “Cum Tree” song. Silly jokes about cum, in the scheme of things, are really stupid. But it’s all we have.
You know you’re alive because you’re singing about a cum tree.
Yes. The opposite of death, I find, isn’t the profound moments of, My baby is walking for the first time! In the months when this was going on, everything felt so loaded, and it just felt too cosmic and too profound. Comedy feels small, and it would take me away from that profundity. Yes, your child’s laugh is the opposite of death, but it also makes you think about the cosmic: this child will be alive when I’m dead. As opposed to, like, a dick joke or a fart joke, which is just so small, and which suddenly makes life feel very manageable again.
One of the moments I love in the show is a lullaby that you sing with the chorus, “Now, please don’t die.” It’s your job as a parent to keep this totally vulnerable thing alive. You have an insane power over this creature, and also no power at all. I think that it’s impossible to be prepared for that feeling.
I’ve never felt that way about anything else in my life. I get my mother’s worry now. It makes you understand certain things.
Your putting it in a song and making it funny gave me a big sense of relief, and also helped articulate this taboo feeling, because you’re not even supposed to think that such a thing—your child’s death—could happen. And yet, of course, it’s on your mind.
I think every parent thinks that. You’re told that babies are fragile. And if you go on the Internet—which I did—you learn about all this stuff. And, look, I wonder, in the alternate universe where Adam didn’t die, and where there was no COVID, would I have been that anxious about her? I don’t know. I think that what made me more anxious about her—and what makes me still anxious about her—is I now know how it feels to lose someone suddenly, which I had not known before. There’s no fate. There’s no cushion. Anyone can die. I know exactly how it will feel if she were to die, and it would be the worst feeling. It would be what I’m feeling now about Adam times a million.
The intensity of that experience is very present in the special. There’s a moment toward the end when you’re essentially looking into a huge, gaping chasm of death and all the bad things that can happen, and you have to pull yourself out of it. Was performing the show itself cathartic?
Sharing the story helps me scab it over, in a way. The first year or two I was doing the show, retelling the story was almost my way of being, like, This happened. Adam died. I’m a mom now. You know, the first year you have a kid, you feel—at least, I felt—like, When are these people going to come pick up their baby? You don’t have ownership over it. It doesn’t feel real.
But I’m expulsive. Just talking to someone else, it helps me work out my thoughts, my feelings. So the show was cathartic. And that revelation at the end of the show—“I am my daughter’s dog”—was a real revelation I had while on vacation. I was in the ocean, and I thought, What if I were to drown right now? And I was, like, Well, at least my daughter would outlive me, and that feels right. It was the first time I thought about dying and wasn’t overcome with panic. There was a calmness, a rhythm to it. And within seconds I was, like, Oh, my God, I’m her dog.
Just to explain this to people: early in the show, you talk about fear descending when you think about the fact that your dog will die before you do. And then you realize that’s the goal: you want to outlive your dog, just as you want your child to outlive you.
Pregnancy is what started that fear. For many reasons, it caused me to get very sad and anxious over the thought of my dog dying, and it made it very real in a way it hadn’t been before.
I watched the special with my dog, although, fortunately, he was asleep for most of it. I thought, Well, that’s the beauty of it. Rachel Bloom is singing about your death, and yet you’re just having a nice, cozy snooze, beautifully unaware.
They don’t know shit!
But you do, and that’s the hard part.
My dog is a sprightly old lady. There are moments when she barks at us a lot for food, moments when she’s such a pain in the ass. But then I’m, like, Oh, my God, you’re fifteen. This is a ninety-year-old woman yelling at me.
I also think, sometimes, how embarrassing it is that she can’t talk yet. Does she register that the kid has only been on earth for a fraction of her life, but the kid’s talking? That’s got to be really embarrassing.
Your daughter is four and a half now. How is that?
It’s great. It’s weird. You know, having a kid feels like the show “Severance” a little bit. When you’re with your kid, you’re a new person, because you’re a mother, right? So there’s this new element of myself that I never had, but also there are parts of me that aren’t present, because you’re not speaking to them as you would speak to a friend, and they don’t really care about what your career is, or your thoughts.
Yes. When my son was tiny, I remember having the disconcerting thought: My baby lives in a house with a stranger, and the stranger is me.
As my daughter’s gotten older, she’s starting to kind of understand what I do, and to like it, but it’s a very skewed lens. She knows that I act, but she doesn’t really know what that means. And she loves listening to my music; my husband, when I was away doing press or doing my show, would play it for her. But she doesn’t really understand it. My husband is a writer—he co-wrote the reboot of “Naked Gun”—and she’s always pitching him jokes, because all she knows is he writes jokes. So a joke that she keeps wanting us to put in something is, “O.K., I’ll stop being crazy. Wahhh!” [Bloom makes a crazy noise.] That’s the joke. She asked me the other night, “Hey, did Daddy put my joke in the movie?” And I said, “Uh, no. But you know what? It’s your joke. You should put that in something.” And she was, like, “No, because I’m not a grownup yet.”
You’re interested in doing a twist on a pop concert—your own Eras tour, but with new songs. What is it about pop music that you want to explore right now?
There’s a valuing of youth that, as I get into my late thirties, gets funnier and funnier to me. It’s funny that they’re all really young. Granted, Sabrina Carpenter has had a career for ten years, so it’s not like they’re all eighteen, but we remain fascinated with stories of the young in pop music, and that’s very interesting to me. Why do we love stories of, like, youthful heartbreak? It’s because the emotions are so strong. It’s the rule of any musical: if the emotion is strong enough, you sing. And layering my life, which is very un-pop-music-like, onto pop music is funny to me.
So one of your goals is to make pop not about young experience but about thirty-seven-year-old experience?
Yeah. And, like, real thirty-seven-year-old experience. For whatever reason, people in their teens and twenties seem to dictate the cultural shifts, and I can’t necessarily tell you why.
Did you feel that in your twenties, when you were developing “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”? Because you had success pretty early.
Yes, but I always felt not-cool. The first song I ever did was “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.” It was, like, O.K., all these pop songs are about, I want to be with a hot guy dancing in a club. That’s never been me. It’s much more me to fetishize an old science-fiction author, because, honestly, that’s more my type. But then nerd culture got really cool in, I don’t know, 2006, 2007. Everyone was wearing those chunky nerd glasses, and so suddenly nerddom became the norm. It’s the reason Comic Con is now called “a celebration of the popular arts,” or whatever.
Are you saying, “You’re appropriating my culture when you talk about nerd culture”?
But here’s the thing, I’m not a huge comic-book expert. The thing that I was obsessed with growing up was musical theatre. So all of the other kinds of adjacent nerd cultures, when I enter into them, I love them. I think that the part of my brain that loves sci-fi and fantasy is the same part that loves musical theatre, because it’s all asking, What if? What if the world were like this? What if people sang? What if people had hot-dog hands? It feels like the same muscle to me.
But I don’t know. I have impostor syndrome with a lot of things. Like, I’m Jewish, but I was raised really secular. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is a very Jewish show; that is a combination of my experiences and the experiences of Aline [Brosh McKenna, the show’s co-creator] and other people. I wasn’t bat mitzvahed. My family didn’t even really celebrate the holidays. We did Hanukkah, and that was it. But I was still an other, because Jews were a minority in my town, so I felt different.
And, also, the way my brain works—when I get obsessed with something, it’s all I do. Right now, I’m doing a binge of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” I gravitate toward stuff that’s comforting sometimes, as opposed to the new show everyone’s talking about. I’ve always felt kind of like an out-of-touch fortysomething. So actually, coming into that is interesting.
What you’re saying reminds me of a chapter in your book, where you describe your obsession with musical theatre being completely alien to the kids you grew up with. And you decided, O.K., this is my thing. I’m going to get really good at it. And then you get to N.Y.U. to pursue theatre, and suddenly you’re with your kind of person, and so it’s not your identifying characteristic anymore. Is that a version of the impostor syndrome you’re describing?
Yes. There’s a part of me that’s kind of lone-wolfy, and I think that sometimes I used excuses, like, “Well, I’m just a musical-theatre kid, people don’t understand me.” But then when you’re around musical-theatre kids and they don’t understand you, what’s your excuse? It’s something I’m still working through. I mean, to quote “Dear Evan Hansen,” there is a little bit of me that always feels “on the outside always looking in.”
I wanted to ask you about heckling. There’s a dramatic staged heckling at the start of your special. When I saw the show Off Broadway, I thought it was real, and I was ready to fight whoever that guy was. Have you ever been heckled?
Yes. It doesn’t happen often, but the weirdest heckling stories I have are with this show. I was doing a show in Boulder, Colorado, last year. I mean, it’s called “Death, Let Me Do My Show,” but the show starts out very comedic, and then gets more and more dramatic. Toward the end of the story about Adam dying, a drunk guy yells, “I just thought this show was gonna be funny.” This is after Adam has died.
Oh, my God.
And I work it into the show. I go, “Yes, you know what, sir? You are right. I thought the show was going to be funny, too.” There was a version of the show—it’s not in the special—where I kept trying to restart, but I would end up talking about sad things. So I segued into that: “We’re going to start the show over, because you’re right, sir.” It actually kind of worked. I’d be like, “I’m gonna restart the show, and tell a joke, but everyone’s going to die, and COVID’s still here,” and he was, like, “Tell a joke.” And then I had to stop the show, and I went, “O.K., I understand everyone in this audience probably thinks this is another plant. This actually isn’t a plant. This is a guy who’s being an asshole. Get the fuck out of the theatre.” But when I saw audience members after the show, they thought it was a plant.
They still thought it was a plant?
Yeah. So that was crazy. Usually, my form of heckling is more people who are really into the material, and they just shout shit out. I did the show in Los Angeles, and a woman in the audience had what I learned was an extremely rare form of Tourette’s, where you have to shout out the thing that would be worst to shout out in that moment. So we’re ten minutes into the show, we’ve already revealed Death, and I hear someone shout, “He has a gun!” And no one really reacts, and I don’t call it out, but for the next five, ten minutes, I’m doing the show on autopilot, because I think, “Am I about to get shot?” I’m scanning the aisles. Ten minutes later, this woman shouts, “He’s stashing cocaine!” And then I stop the show, and I go, “I’m sorry. What?” And her friend goes, “She has Tourette’s. This is going to be happening a lot.” Apparently, security was warned before the show, which is why she wasn’t removed from the theatre, because that would be discrimination. But I had not been warned.
And then, for the next part of the show, me and nine hundred other people are a little bit held hostage. We don’t know what this woman’s going to say, and she can’t be taken out of the theatre. I’m just powering through the show. It’s very tense. At some point, she shouts, “I’m faking Tourette’s!” I stopped and dropped to my knees. I said, “Well, this is a moral dilemma for us all.” Because what do you do when someone with Tourette’s needs to shout “I’m faking Tourette’s”? It was one of the most intense and funniest things to ever happen.
I would imagine that you, as the performer, are usually the one who sets the tone. You’re in control. You can exile someone, you can confront them. And in this situation, all those tools were neutralized.
First of all, I think your No. 1 job as a performer is to take care of the audience. It’s not your only job, and sometimes you want the audience to feel uncomfortable, but especially when you’re doing comedy, you want them to feel like you’re steering the ship. So when stuff like that is happening—and that’s a very extreme example—I’m trying to remain captain of the ship, but also to communicate very openly that I’m at a loss. Thank God I had been doing the show for two years at that point. It was in my bones. But it was very hard. It was probably the most present I’ve ever been, even though, for ten minutes beforehand, I was anything but present because I heard the word “gun.” When I got offstage, I was shaking.
Do you feel like, after that, you could handle any heckler who comes your way?
Short of them actually having a gun? Yeah, I think so. What’s interesting is that the reason I put a heckler in the show in the first place is not only because Death feels like a heckler but also because the heckler character was always me battling, as RuPaul would say, my inner saboteur, which takes the form of an entitled dude in a writer’s room. Because those are the people who make me feel the most insecure: entitled comedy bros.
Oh, I love that. So Death is a double antagonist.
When the show was a lot longer, there was much more of him being an entitled comedy bro and also kind of an incel, because there’s a lot of overlap between them. It’s men who make me feel less-than, but who aren’t overtly sexually harassing me, if that makes sense. The type of dude who’s insulting you, but not in a way that you could pursue legal action.
It really gets under the skin.
Yeah. And he feels sharper and cleverer than me, because I don’t have the muscle of [producing] quick insults in the moment. That’s not how my brain works. There are some comedians—and there are some women comedians like this, too—who can be so fast with insults.
And just cut someone down.
I’m not a cutter-downer, so that’s an insecurity of mine. I’m sure you’ve dealt—I mean, journalism is not—
You don’t deal with a heckler, usually. The inner voice, you deal with that all the time.
My inner voice is the men in my first writer’s room, fifteen years ago. The reason bullying works is that they basically are your inner voice. That’s when bullies really fuck with you, when they latch on to an insecurity and explode it, which is one of the reasons that, in my comedy, I call myself a dork. I try to call out the things about me that I think are make-funable before someone else does, as self-protection.
What was the writer’s room that you had that experience on?
It was on a Fox animated show. I was the only woman, and I was twenty-three, and it was just a really mean room, as a lot of writer’s rooms are. It was my first job, and I got it based off of a spec script of “30 Rock” that I’d written. I didn’t have an original script under my belt yet. So I went into this room with low self-confidence, to be honest. It wasn’t entirely those guys’ fault. I went in insecure, like I didn’t deserve to be there, and then certain people were like, Yeah, no. You don’t deserve to be here.
Was running your own show a kind of purging experience?
Aline ran the room, but, yeah, I was the co-creator. Look, when I was in the room, I still had jokes that bombed. However, it was a healthier environment. I think the thing that really helped was, I wrote on the show “Robot Chicken,” and there you were rejected all the time, but it didn’t feel mean. I’m not saying it was overly compassionate. It’s not like people were like, We value you so much, but we’re going to say no. It was just very matter-of-fact.
But yeah, having my own show, there’s pressure: Oh, I better be the funniest person. But it’s like, no, not always. And then there’s being the rejector: How do you compassionately reject ideas? It’s kind of similar to breakups. I read a book about that, as research for “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” Part of the problem with breakups is that we have a template for the rejected—this is how you should feel—but we don’t have a template for the rejectors. How do you kindly reject someone, break up with someone, turn someone down? It’s a hard skill.
What did you learn from the book?
I try to be more considered. If there’s an idea that I don’t vibe with, I at least try to be like, O.K., where’s that joke pitch coming from? Sometimes you go, I don’t think that’s quite it. But you don’t need to be like, Wow, kill yourself.
I would like to talk about the Rainbow Bridge. I had misunderstood the Rainbow Bridge before your show. I thought it was a place where only pets go, and then they’re all happy together. I didn’t realize there was a human cosmology involved as well. Can you just explain the Rainbow Bridge?
So, it’s based on this poem that was written by, I think, a nineteen-year-old Scottish woman. [She pulls out her phone.] I’ll paraphrase it. “Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge. When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends, so they can run and play together.” Blah, blah, blah, “the animals are happy and content, except for one small thing: they miss someone very special to them. . . . The day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. His bright eyes are intense. His eager body quivers. Suddenly, he begins to run from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster. You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. . . . Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together.”
What are your feelings about the Rainbow Bridge?
It’s the sweetest thing in the world. I mean, I’m near tears. I can picture my dog seeing me and running to me. And also it’s the cheesiest thing in the world, and it brings up so many logistical questions, which is really what my song is about.
Yeah. I mean, you solved the loophole of the Rainbow Bridge in your song.
When you don’t have a pet, you become someone else’s pet. There was a part of the show that I used to have that’s gone, but I think it really explains my feelings about the Rainbow Bridge, and also being a parent, which is that love makes you lame. Love makes you crave cheesy art and mugs on Etsy and poems about the Rainbow Bridge, and it’s the same thing when you’re loving a child. You regale in the cheesy. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
