Author Interview by Jessica Powers
Title: Cray Cray Nayshun
Author: John Omaha
Publisher: self-published
ISBN: 979-8351115535
1. In Cray Cray Nayshun, your protagonist Barry Wild, a comedian, goes on a tour of America. He has never left California and the trip affords him an opportunity to understand the rest of his native country in a new way. Meanwhile, he learns and grows to understand himself within the context of the greater American character--American desires and fears. How did the initial idea for this book come to you?
I have always loved comedy. I watch a lot of standup. I grew up on comedians like Red Skelton—his sketch "Guzzler's Gin" is hilarious. Abbot and Costello—the skit "Who's on First makes me laugh every time I watch it. It is a classic. Later I watched Shelley Berman, listened to Redd Foxx's adult humor on records, and more recently George Carlin, Anthony Jesselnik, and Dave Chappelle. Also, there are a host of excellent female comedians that include Wanda Sykes, Taylor Tomlinson, Ali Wong, and Amy Schumer. My professional life as a psychotherapist focused on emotion. I wrote a non-fiction book, Tools for Emotion Regulation, and gave workshops widely—Australia, Sweden, UK, and all over America—in which I taught skills to recognize, tolerate, and regulate emotions.
I wondered about comedy, what is it about comedy that motivates people to spend money to laugh. I realized that comedians raise issues in their acts that everyone in the audience has experienced at some point in their life and that they don't talk about because it's too emotionally painful. Take Skelton's "Guzzler's Gin" sketch. Many people in the audience have started out to have a good time with a drink of alcohol and then have drunk too much and gotten hammered. People who've drunk more than they intended to and gotten sloshed feel shame about losing control. The genius of comedy is that it allows people to identify with Skelton's character getting sloshed and then to laugh about it. The laughter discharges the painful emotion of shame. The explosive action of laughing releases the pent up tensions the audience has held in. In the communal setting of a show in a theater, each member of the audience feels safe in acknowledging their commonality with everyone else. As individuals, they're discharging the suppressed emotional pain, and collectively they're all acknowledging their shared humanity.
After I retired from my therapy practice, I set out to write novels. I am unashamedly politically radical. I want to change the world for the better. I feel compassion for forests and animals including humans. I want to help. I addressed murderousness in Murder Chronicles. Requiem for a Dying World focused on the looming collapse of our environment and the end of the way of life we take for granted. The Lodge was my homage to spirituality. With Cray Cray Nayshun I decided to use comedy in place of dramatic narrative to make my points. I also intended to focus on individual people and what they're thinking and feeling rather than just looking at the consequences of society's actions. So that is what motivated me to write this book.
2. Have you ever practiced as a stand-up comedian? If yes, what did you draw on to write this book? If not, how in the world did you come up with these hilarious jokes?
I have never done stand-up. I am an author, not a stand-up comedian. I have great admiration for comedians who fulfill the social role of the Fool. Comedians have strength of character sufficient to take a room full of people on a healing journey.
I am more comfortable putting pages of print between me and my audience. I am a ponderous thinker, not an extemporaneous improviser. I'm also too emotional to reveal my feelings in public. Writing was always calling to me, but I could never figure out how to make a living doing it. I tried. I wrote screen plays; a novel called Good Night, Los Angeles. Authoring called to me throughout my life. I've also written non-fiction—I was trained as a molecular biologist—but I had never written jokes before.
To accomplish my goal of writing comedy, I had to do two things: first, I had to learn how to construct a joke, and second I had to find my own schtick. I searched the internet and found Judy Carter's The Comedy Bible and Scott Dikkers' How to Write Funny. Both of these authors teach the craft of joke writing. They offer exercises, which I did. The second part was more difficult. I had discover my own schtick. I am really good at understanding human behavior, but it took me a while to discover how to make comedy out of that understanding. Eventually I brought together Judy Carter's and Scott Dikkers' teachings with my extensive experience doing psychotherapy and struck comedy gold. A key aspect was creating Dr. Gold, the character who encourages Barry Wild, my main character the comedian, to get in touch with his inner parts. Everybody has inner parts—Wild discovers his inner Black man, and his inner feminine, and many more—and realized I was creating something readers could identify with. I'm not going to do slapstick or physical humor, but I tried out my jokes on myself, and I laughed, and since I am a tough audience, I realized I had something worthwhile.
3. Barry Wild is a satirist. He satirizes himself by interrogating various "inner" selves (his inner wife, his inner feminine, etc). How did this trope occur to you as a great way for a comedian to mine new material, exposing both himself and others in the process? Was your work as a therapist integral for your understanding of this process and this kind of humor? A therapist's job is to help clients develop insight. Insight into their childhood experiences; insight into their emotional responding; insight into their attitudes and behaviors. To accomplish those goals, the therapist must develop the skills to "read" the client. Now, clients often hide those insights because they are so painful. The therapist must approach the client's hidden material gently and with care.
One of the techniques therapists employ is called "empty chair." Here's an example. Suppose I have a client who is angry at his wife, always yelling at her, berating her. He is projecting his own attitudes onto her and then yelling at her. It's not going to work to just say, "Why do you yell at your wife?" He doesn't know anything about projection. He doesn't realize that he has attitudes toward women, attitudes formed in childhood, that he attributes to his wife and then yells at her for having those attitudes when in fact they are his own attitudes. By yelling at her, he can externalize his own guilt as a defense against anxiety and shame. In the empty chair technique, the therapist might set an empty chair in front of the client and ask him to imagine his wife in the chair. The therapist asks, "What do you want to say to her?" The client might say, "I hate you. You are so selfish. You don't care about me at all." Next, the therapist says, "Okay, now I want you to go sit in the chair where you had your wife sitting and become her. Leave your own self in the chair you're in right now. Good. Now I want you to become your wife. Tell me, what does you wife want to say to you?"
What I've just described is the origin of the "inner selves" sketches that Barry Wild uses. The technique is also called "parts work" because the therapist is working with parts of the client's personality. Readers of Cray Cray Nayshun will be able to identify with the parts they're reading about. As I worked with this, I became aware that I could use the approach for much more than just inner wife or inner girlfriend. Racism is a component of America's cray cray, and I was able to have characters get in touch with their inner Black man, for example. So, yes, my work as a therapist was integral to developing Barry Wild's schtick. What I love about authoring is that now America is my client. Psychotherapy is part of my identity. Now I am trying through the book to heal the whole nation.
4. You have worked as a therapist. Barry creates a fake therapist, Dr. Gold, as a trope he can use to examine uncomfortable truths about himself and society. Barry sees comedy as a tool for healing. As a therapist and a writer, can you talk about comedy as a tool for healing? What is the healing power of humor? Barry mentions that comedy allows us to sit in discomfort, when we otherwise run from it. How can comedy help us examine the disquieting truths about our country?
America needs comedy now more than ever. Comedy can accomplish what politics cannot. Politics divides. Politics creates an environment of Us versus Them. If you're a Republican, then you and all Republicans are the Us, and Democrats are the Them. In America, if you're a Democrat, then you and all other Democrats are the Us.
We're living in a time where that divisiveness has hardened. Barry Wild's comedy helps his audience realize that the divisiveness is within them. Each Republican has an inner Democrat, and every Democrat has an inner Republican. Barry Wild's comedy entails some risk, as he found out during a show in Texas when a drunk man jumped onto the stage and clobbered him. The healing doesn't always work.
Doing couples therapy, sometimes the couple decided to divorce no matter how much effort I put into trying to heal them. I began my work as a therapist doing addiction counseling. In my view—and in Barry Wild's—addiction is a disorder that begins with traumatic childhood experiences. The trauma can be relational, physical, or emotional. Sometimes the childhood experiences are buried so deeply, they are not available to be healed. I believe the disquieting truths about America are a cumulative phenomenon. As a nation, the childhood traumas have accumulated in many, many families over at least two generations. Citizens who are now adults were raised in dysfunctional families, and on January 6, 2021, many of them stormed the capitol and tried to stop the counting of votes. That represented the national dysfunction.
I fear for my country's future. The national dysfunction already erupts in violence periodically. School shootings and mass casualty events are not isolated incidents. They are like a cancer spreading through an individual's body, only this cray cray insanity is spreading through the nation. New Orleans, Columbine, Las Vegas. I have a column on a website called Substack where I occasionally publish updates on Barry Wild's comedy routines. I am also writing another novel in which some of the characters from Cray Cray appear including Barry Wild. I'll have the opportunity to rework some of his routines in light of events of the two years since I published Cray Cray.
5. Although Barry examines himself to a degree, when he analyzes and satirizes the political landscape, he has a laser focus on Republicans and Conservatives. Did you ever consider whether to have Barry turn the satire onto Democrats, Progressives, and Liberals? Why did you choose to keep that element out of the book?
If I were going to satirize Democrats, Progressives, and Liberals, I would focus on their tendency to play by the rules in a contest where the adversary is gouging eyes. I began my responses to these questions by stating I am an unapologetic Progressive and Liberal. I do not want to get trapped in Bothsidesism and Whataboutism. What I do know is that both Conservatives and Progressives are hurting. They hurt for different reasons, reasons that I suspect trace back to their different early childhood experiences.
A fundamental rule of psychotherapy states that if you want to know what someone's early childhood experience was like, just examine their adult behavior. The human unconscious is formed in the first four to six years of life. Early childhood experiences condition the formation of one's unconscious. What we have in our Cray Cray Nayshun today is a conflict between two populations with vastly different childhood experiences and hence vastly different unconscious motivations.
I did turn my authorial laser on Liberals when I had Barry Wild meet David and Darla, the organic farmers, in Abilene. I also focused on another benign population when I had Barry meet the Cherokee medicine man Wayaha. What's to satirize? David and Darla are providing fresh organic fruit and vegetables to their community through a Community Supported Agriculture they founded. David and Darla were not going to attempt to seduce and murder Wild. Wayaha invited Wild into his very nurturing, kind community.
Returning to the hurt the two communities experience. Liberal and Progressive communities appear to hurt because America does not have Medicare for all; because LGBTQ people are marginalized and attacked; because women are harmed; because racism exists; because teachers often have to work two jobs because their salaries are so meager; because of the wealth disparity; because of police violence; because of homelessness. And the Conservative community? They hurt because in 2021 their candidate was not elected in a free and fair election. The Conservative community hates what they're told to hate. They appear to hate that they have not benefitted from the American economy.
I will incorporate these themes in my Substack that reports on Barry Wild's current comedic observations. 6. What are your hopes for readers who engage with Cray Cray Nayshun? What do you want them to take away from the novel? I hope my readers get a good laugh, a transformative laugh. I want them to find themselves in my sentences, paragraphs, and scenes. I want them to know that I care about them, that I understand them, that I have compassion for them. I am a healer just like Wild. I wrote Cray Cray Nayshun to heal America's divisions. Wild uses standup; I use authoring.
As with all my books, I hope my readers learn from the stories I invent. I hope they appreciate the enormous breadth of our nation and its people. I hope that they find their own higher power, just as Barry Wild did under the dark skies in Montana. I hope they develop insight and the ability to laugh at themselves, to admit their faults and limitations, and to care for one another and for the beautiful world we've been born to.
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