Lizz Winstead, a comedy writer on the team that created the original “The Daily Show”, grew up in Minnesota as a progressive in a conservative Catholic household. Her series of “messays” (messy essays) shows how it shaped her ambition. As the youngest, she was the family comedian. I always wondered what happened to Catholic girls who grew up in a relatively happy and safe family. It looks like this one drove herself too hard, became very angry and hard to work with, burned out on a couple of important jobs, and developed writers block.
How very interesting! I thought all this only happened to people with unhappy childhoods! But no, Lizz talks about how “Lizzilla” developed and breathed fire not only on the job, but on her Moroccan vacation. Lizz got a lot of pushback as her early career evolved from ordinary girl humor to political humor but she got a luck break to develop a daily TV show of satirical news reporting. The bad news is: they made her the head of the writing team and she had no experience with (1) TV or (2) leading a team of writers. As she tried harder, she got more stressed, her jokes got meaner and she got gone before Jon Stewart arrived.
It was hard to make a living afterwards, but she finally landed a job on Air America, the new liberal radio network that was supposed to counter Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck. Problem was: (1) she did not hide her scorn for the network’s owners and (2) she didn’t know radio. On the plus side, she persuaded a talented radio personality from Northampton, Massachusetts to move to NYC to join their network. Rachel Maddow.
I liked Lizz’s writing and her inventiveness with language. I certainly agree with her anti-Catholic politics. I think she might have been a casualty of the “you can have it all” myth that was going around in the 70s and 80s. It took her a year longer than she expected to finish the book because it was so hard to stay focused when she was simultaneously trying to write comedy routines.
I understand feeling scattered and I wish I blogged more. Sigh.