Like most others, I learned of Louie Anderson through his stand-up comedy. His 1987 special, “Mom! Louie’s Looking at Me Again” was a classic. Known as a clean comic who rarely cursed or told off-color jokes, his work was considered “family-friendly.” But I never cared about that. What made Anderson special to me is that he understood and could relate to what it means to be in a family, warts and all.
As the tenth of 11 children, much of his comedy focused on his experience with his siblings, how older ones would torment him, and how he, in turn, passed down that same torment to his younger brother, Tommy. The relationship he had with his parents—dysfunctional in a way many of us can understand—made for good comedic material.
It wasn’t all laughs, though. Louie’s father was an alcoholic and this affected his formative experiences. The addictive personality likely influenced Anderson’s own problems, including his relationship with food and his never-ending struggle with his weight. Anderson didn’t just turn that into comic material, he made it a lifelong quest for personal healing. In so doing, he helped others along the way.
In 1989, Anderson published Dear Dad: Letters from an Adult Child, a book of letters he’d written to his father, long-since deceased. Anderson’s father was not just an alcoholic; he was a mean drunk, abusive to the family, and endangered their lives on multiple occasions. Although he finally quit drinking when Louie was a young adult, it didn’t seem to help much; he was now sober, but just as mean.
The letters Anderson wrote must have been therapeutic. It was a way of trying to understand his father: the difficult life circumstances that made him who he was and who wasn’t available even when he was in the same room. He tried to understand without excusing, to empathize, while still expressing his pain and to communicate across the ether to someone no longer available. It was a fine line to tread.
Many of the letters, though, were simply mundane, talking about his day-to-day experiences as a working comic, as a member of the family, discussing his life in ways that he hadn’t been able to when his father was alive. This was a valuable lesson for readers: that the simple, the boring, the details few would care about must be talked about, especially if you never had the opportunity.
Anderson’s book caught on in ways he’d never imagined. He got letters—not fan letters, but at least ten thousand missives from people expressing how his book had helped them understand their own parents, and helped them heal. He shared some of them in an updated version of the book and the outpouring of emotion in those letters is as visceral as the experiences he, and the letter writers went through.
Anderson would continue this work, along with his comedy, through his remaining years, until his passing in January 2022. A follow-up book, Goodbye Jumbo: Hello Cruel World, related his own struggles with his weight, which were lifelong. F is for Family: How to Survive Your Family, 49 Survival Tips would continue his work depicting how love shines through dysfunction, and how we manage both. His last book, Hey Mom, Stories for My Mom, but You can Read them Too, continued the same tradition he’d begun with Dear Dad, sharing daily experiences, while reminiscing about, and seemingly with, his mother, who had passed on, all the while struggling with her legacy, both positive and negative.
Anderson would honor his mother in the best way possible, by playing her on screen. In the TV show Baskets, he played Christine Baskets, mother to twin sons, each played by Zack Galifianakis. But it was really his own mother, Ora Zella, whom he was channeling with every hilarious scene.
Behind the scenes, comics are often an unhappy bunch, but the prime value of any art form is how it generates empathy by making specific experiences universal. In teaching us that we can both honor and mourn the past, including the struggles within our own families, Louie Anderson provided a service for us all.
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This post is republished on Agents of Change on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock
