![]() “I tried to take a few adult classes, and I was just like I DON’T CARE!” The last three words come in a sort of whispered roar, with her nose pressed right up against the camera, eyes popping. She recently made it at an after-school art class aimed at children, where she didn’t have to waste time on boring stuff like perspective. “It’s a portrait of narcissism,” she deadpans. In it, pugs surround a brightly daubed Bamford like fluffy cherubim. I notice a painting on the wall behind her. These days, “I live the life of the semi-retired,” says Bamford, video-calling from her home in Altadena, California, which she shares with her artist husband Scott and a clutch of elderly, adopted pugs. The second series (shot to a more forgiving schedule) was in large part a bite-the-hand-that-feeds satire about making a Netflix show. Ironically, while making it, Bamford “had a 12-hour turnaround” between shooting sessions, she told Variety at the time, “and doing that on such heavy psychiatric meds, I was just half-asleep almost the entire day”. ![]() The first series of her breathlessly inventive Netflix sitcom Lady Dynamite (2016-17) was inspired by a real-life breakdown. “As long as you can still function in the job, nobody cares.” She’s been let down in the past in showbusiness, “even if it seems like someone’s deteriorating in public, there’s no help, because it involves a lot of money,” she says. She’s made it known that, if she agrees to work on a TV show, her health means she has to stick to “children’s hours”. This month she begins her first ever UK tour, but is limiting it to just four appearances. Today, she’s wary about taking on too much. I’d rather be alive and not bananas-prolific than be dead and have ‘had an amazing run’.” Still, if mental health is now less of a taboo for a younger generation of comedians, that’s due in part to Bamford.ĭoes she feel being bipolar makes her more creative? “Yes, for sure! Ohmigosh, when I don’t take my medication I can stay up all night and have a thousand insane ideas, but I also don’t want to live,” she says, brightly. “I’m sure there are some comics out there who’d go, ‘Bamford’s not a comedian, that’s theatre’” – in her best beer-guzzling bro voice, this last word is spat out like an expletive. “But when I began, we were listed along with karaoke and strippers in the back of a free newspaper.” Her eccentric style and dark subject matter made her an outlier. “Now, comedy is seen more as an art form in the US,” she tells me. For decades, the 51-year-old has spoken frankly onstage about her struggle with mental illness: OCD-inflicted intrusive thoughts (she has a catchy song about trying not to imagine chopping her family into chunks), bipolar disorder, suicidal ideation, time spent “squatting in the psych ward”. ![]() ![]() Schizophrenia is, of course, hearing voices, not doing voices.” In her Netflix stand-up hour The Special Special Special – listed by The Telegraph as one of the five best comedy shows of the past decade – she had a ready put-down for someone who called her schizophrenic. She naturally speaks with a high Minnesota lilt – half Fargo, half Looney Tunes – but in conversation, as on stage, she switches between different voices at dizzying speed stoned surfer dude one moment, angry heckler the next. Maria Bamford both has, and is, the most distinctive voice in American comedy today. ![]()
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