Title: Cray Cray Nayshun
Author: John Omaha
Publisher: self-published
ISBN: 979-8351115535
Cray Cray Nayshun, a “little” novel that packs a big political punch.
In the opening scene of Cray Cray Nayshun by John Omaha, the protagonist Barry Wild—a comedian who has never left California but has decided to go on a road trip comedy tour, believing that he has something to offer the rest of the United States—encounters a witch-shaman who tells him he doesn’t know who he is. Since you don’t know who you are, she says, you need to become acquainted with your country. That journey, she says, will teach him who he is. “Come see me when you return,” she says.
He hasn’t told her he’s about to embark on a road trip, but he recognizes that she knows more about him than she should, that there is something magical or spiritual about her abilities, and so he accepts the mandate she gives him to find himself by understanding the country that created him. This provides Barry—an extremely partisan, progressive liberal Democrat, a man who has never left California and fears and judges what he will encounter outside of it—with the necessary framework to consider the people he encounters outside of California with a slightly more open mindset.
Barry Wild embarks on his road trip across America with a strong belief that comedy brings healing. And with the country divided in the wake of the Covid epidemic and a difficult political season, Barry has a strong sense that comedy is the one thing that can effect change. Barry is fairly certain that he has a firm and considered and factual understanding of people who think differently than him. He only superficially considers that he has caricaturized the political landscape in such a profound way that he struggles to see his own belief system as problematic. Although the narrative never quite fully satirizes Barry the same way he satirizes his political opponents, readers can see the cracks in his own understanding—even after he experiences considerable change. Much like the proverbial “take care of the log in your own eye before you worry about the splinter in your neighbor’s eye,” Barry doesn’t realize that he needs healing, as much, if not more than, the people he judges without ever having encountered them.
After his first comedy set in his hometown of San Francisco, Barry thinks about what the witch told him. He realizes that he does in fact need to know America to know himself. He’s a son of America, he thinks. But his view of America is wholly negative: He thought, “I am the son of America.” He was shocked at how quickly and how negative his thoughts became. “My father America and my American lineage are murderous and genocidal. My father America is cruel and greedy and possessive….My father America is a narcissist. A misogynist. A racist. A Capitalist.”
The reader has to wonder, will Barry harness that negative viewpoint wholly to his comedy and his conception of himself and his country—or will his travels across America allow him to see more nuance among his fellow citizens?
“I’ve rarely left California,” Barry understands, “and I have realized I don’t really know much about the rest of the nation. It’s very comfortable here in California, but too much comfort is not conducive to good comedy. Discomfort breeds comedy that transforms. I want to know where all the American hatred comes from. And the cruelty. And the greed. America is my father, and I can no longer ignore that I am his son.”
Barry traverses the country from San Francisco to Reno, Nevada; to Salt Lake City, Utah; to Dallas, Texas; to New Orleans; to Florida; up the coast to New York; over to Chicago and other parts of the Midwest; and finally up to Montana and then back to San Francisco, where he concludes his trip. His comedy is marked by a consistent inquiry between Barry the comedian and what he calls his “inner” self, as encouraged by a fictional therapist. Barry interrogates his inner feminine, inner wife, inner therapist, inner narcissist, inner Black self, and others, all the while pointing his satiric gaze not only at his own self but at America writ large.
All of this is based on Wild’s belief that comedy—like writing, like art—can bring social change. “Comedy is one of the ways that we heal ourselves as a society. Comedy is always based on a subtext, but that subtext is never stated explicitly. The part you don’t say out loud.” This instinctive understanding of the way comedy works in society—as a healing balm, as a vector for social and perhaps political change—is a critical point the novel makes that we should all embrace.
Very early in his travels, Wild realizes that one of the core emotions he’s encountering among Americans is fear. There’s the poetry-writing cowboy in Elko, Nevada who feels like America is being taken from him, just like his ex-wife took half his ranch. The fear from the wealthy man in Reno, Nevada that the covid vaccine was just an excuse to microchip him. The point isn’t whether these fears are paranoid or valid—the point is the fear. Why are Americans living with so much fear? Where is it coming from? What motivates us? Is it elevated ideas (like democracy) as de Toqueville argued? Or is it more basic, primal emotions, such as fear?
At first, Barry encounters this fear with some amusement, even feeling a bit perplexed. But soon, he realizes that he’s also afraid. In Texas, Barry encounters a young couple who run a community supported agricultural farm. They cause Barry to face up to his own prejudices. He realized “that if he was idealizing California, then he was also projecting his own fears onto the world outside his home state. Something else dawned on him. The Millers had found a niche that supported them. Barry realized his own attitude toward capitalism was rigid and—if he was honest with himself—fear-driven. His father had been trapped by the capitalist world-view but that didn’t mean everyone was.”
This is the beginning of Barry’s self-discovery.
In the South, Barry soon realizes that his humor can sometimes offend, even wound. But he persists. He goes to an African-American church, an Indian powwow, and learns just how little he knows. In an NA meeting, Barry is confronted with the uncomfortable truth that he thinks he’s better than everybody else, and that he only pretends to care for others. This is his “front.” He admits this openly, feeling vulnerable and ashamed. It’s a turning point in the novel, when Barry understands that while comedy is his gift, it’s also his shield. While comedy allows him to expose the foibles of others, he also uses it to prevent others from comprehending his own weaknesses.
For the first half of the trip, Barry had been mostly exploring America and his own feelings about the country of his birth. But soon, there’s a credible threat against Barry that he must grapple with. His comedy has made enough people so uncomfortable that a Q-Anon-affiliated individual, “The Critic,” seeks to kill him. After a close encounter with death, Barry realizes that “the nation that birthed him was paranoid, and they rejected—sometimes to the point of violence—what was true about them.” Barry realizes again that he too uses comedy to distance himself from the truth about himself.
Although there are moments of breakthrough in the novel, Barry never fully explores or exposes his own bias. He claims to have changed but, like many of us, he remains true to his original vision of America and people with different beliefs from him that he had at the outset of the novel.
Nevertheless, he’s had a fundamental breakthrough. During his time in Montana, he glimpses the night sky outside of the city for the first time in his life. The awe he experiences, and the connection to a grandiose universe so much bigger than himself, makes him understand that he has been participating all his life in a big lie: “…The lie that we live in a civilized world….We have one job, my fellow humans, and that is to love this beautiful planet we’ve evolved on and to care for it so that our children and theirs are blessed to live in the same beautiful uncontaminated world we have lived in.”
This revelation transforms Wild from a purely cynical comedian to a comedian-preacher, one who delivers comical sermons to his audience in order to truly change the world.
At the end of the novel, Wild returns to the witch in San Francisco who first charged him with his mission to figure out who he is by understanding his country. He believes he now knows who he is: “I am a healer of America,” Wild tells her. “I transmit healing through comedy. I am the resolver of tragedy into farce and finally into acceptance of the great Mystery of the infinite universe. I am soul.”
She asks him how people should acquire acceptance.
Acceptance requires compassion, Barry says. And the only useful skill he has to help Americans achieve compassion is comedy. Comedy, he believes, is a way of dealing with existential pain. And gratitude is the antidote to existential pain. He will use comedy to ease the world’s suffering, and to guide people towards gratitude as a way of alleviating their own fear and pain.
The main problem with Barry, ultimately, is that he always turns the humor onto the “other person,” the one whose outlook does not reflect his own, so his satire always reflects a caricature. To fully heal, and to create true compassion of his own and to inspire it in others, Barry needs to reflect on and satirize his own understanding of the world, or the understanding of the world by people exactly like himself—rather than only satirizing the world of people who think very differently from him. Only then will he come to a completely rounded journey of self-realization. But along the journey, Barry has acquired an insightful and gifted lover, Angie, the woman he plans to marry. Perhaps with her help, he will also begin to understand the depth of his own myopia, not so that he changes his viewpoint but so that he begins to truly understand that it’s simply not the only one worth considering and supporting—something he has yet to do at the end of the novel.
In Cray Cray Nayshun, John Omaha has presented readers with a gift: an examination of an opinionated man who sets out on a journey to another world (from progressive California to the “rest of America”) to understand his fellow citizens better, returning to his own enclave with an imperfect recognition of not only his own flaws but the motivations of Americans unlike himself.
Our current climate in America is rife with misunderstandings of the other. We may never achieve a perfect understanding of those unlike ourselves, but an honest attempt goes a long way towards healing not only our selves but possibly the nation. Using humor to deflect the pain of examining our nation’s wounds, Omaha’s protagonist Barry Wild observes in microscopic, almost painful clarity, the things that separate and divide us. Comedy can heal. Comedy does allow us to examine the things we generally hide or refuse to speak about. No matter what political side you fall on, we can all agree that humor has the potential to humanize those we dismiss or demonize. Although Cray Cray Nayshun was written and published before Donald Trump’s recent election in 2024, we need the humor and insights it provides more than ever to bring together this divided nation.
--Reviewed by Jessica Powers
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