Bamfordtown

Maria Bamford ends her latest comedy special, Local Act (2023), with a story about her husband building her a Little Free Library in front of their house. After complaining that they got “Dan Browned” (“Take out your own fucking trash”), she says that she fell in love with a children’s book she found in the box, from Richard Scarry’s Busytown series:

If you don’t know what it is, it’s to teach kids how to read. And it’s filled with animals in human costumes. So there’s, like, a cat who’s a baker. It says, “Baker,” in big letters right next to him. But if you don’t read, he’s wearing a puffy white hat, an apron, he’s holding a steaming bun. You get it.

She imagines herself as a character in Scarry’s books:

I’d be, like, a grizzly bear…. It’d say, “Comedian,” right next to me, you know? But if you weren’t literate, I’d be wearing a hilarious rainbow wig, and I’d have a plastic flower squirting water in your face out of my lapel. And in that situation, nobody ever asks, “But is she any good?” “Yeah, but is this bitch funny?” She’s the Comedian. She makes the whole fucking town laugh.

This bit may be a gentle rebuke to comics like Hannah Gadsby and Jerrod Carmichael who have attracted critical praise for discussing the pain they’ve suffered from trying to make people laugh. For decades Bamford has treated the darkest subjects (depression, anxiety, and suicide; wage slavery and poverty in the Global South) with honesty and moral seriousness, but she never succumbs to sanctimony or rancor. She treats the pieces of her broken self and our senseless world as if they were juggling balls. “Why else be alive except to make fun of things that are important to you?” she asks in Local Act.

Bamford’s values are grunge: she became well known during the second wave of the “alternative comedy” scene, which began in the early 1990s as a rebellion against the inauthenticity of mainstream stand-up. Early in her career she seemed an heir to character comics like Emo Philips and Judy Tenuta, presenting herself as stuck in a prepubescent fantasy world in order to expose the hypocrisy and misogyny of those around her. As her material got darker and more revealing, the warped cutesiness of that persona remained—for example, in a bit imagining an educational cartoon character called Sid the Schizophrenic Squid.

Most importantly, her mode is silliness, which requires intimacy and surprise to keep the laughs coming. She’s a virtuoso performer, with unexpected intonations and emotional swings (using, say, a Sam Kinison scream to convey the most childish impulses or ending a disturbing story with a peppy self-help bromide), a rubber face, impressive clowning skills, and expert mimicry. Many of the voices she does are of confident upper-middle-class women, or upper-middle-class women desperate to sound confident. They are to her comedy what white people were to Richard Pryor’s: annoying, occasionally threatening interlopers who can be neutralized by ridiculing their sense of superiority. But whereas Pryor’s impressions were caricatures, Bamford’s are uncanny. She does a number of distinct, eerily recognizable voices that carry no trace of her normal speaking voice. (She’s also very good at caricature—most of her acting work has been in animated TV series.)

Bamford often speaks about bombing in front of the sorts of people she impersonates: a bachelorette party out at a comedy club that expected more conventional humor, or rich winos at a Napa Valley benefit who started clapping her off well before her set was over. For fans, Bamford’s unpredictability and occasionally obscure references are a large part of the appeal. At a performance I saw in Brooklyn in late 2024, she told a long story about her vexation over being asked to appear at an ACLU fundraiser by a major celebrity, whom she referred to only as Grimace, after the purple McDonald’s mascot. (Unlike herself but like the fast-food company, she explained, the celebrity has widespread appeal.) Coincidentally, Grimace had been the unofficial symbol of the Mets’ surprise play-off run that fall, during which some fans dressed up as him at games, but the Brooklyn audience didn’t seem to know or care. This was a crowd that laughed along when Bamford said that while she was being driven to the ACLU benefit in a town car, she felt like a work by the garish glass artist Dale Chihuly: “both fragile and atrocious.”

She didn’t have on a rainbow wig, but she looked delightfully goofy. Her bangs and a few loose ringlets gave the impression of a poorly maintained Little Lord Fauntleroy cut, and she wore a tie-dyed T-shirt beneath a button-down with a neon palm frond pattern. Here was the Comedian performing for her fellow townspeople: not the efficient workers in Scarry’s books but dropouts, slackers, weirdos, freaks—anyone who finds most interactions a baffling ordeal or who believes that contented laziness is preferable to immiserating ambition. She told us that her new “affirmation for work” is “How is it my fault they hired me?” It could be the motto for Bamfordtown. The baker’s buns may be stale; the buses may never come; the grocery store may sell only lukewarm soda and expired candy bars. (“I adore a two-star experience,” she has said.) The Comedian herself may sometimes have an off night thanks to her meds. But you would never consider moving. In any other town, people might tell you to cheer up when you’re having a shitty day.

Bamford is best known for what she calls “mental health shtick,” which she says, half jokingly, has been a “cash cow.” She has talked extensively about being diagnosed with bipolar II, a form of the disorder that does not involve full mania or psychosis, during a period in 2011 and 2012 when she was suicidal and hospitalized three times. What makes the shtick work is her reluctance to draw lessons from adversity or claim that it has helped her grow. In her act, motivational language is merely a tarp with which people cover up an abyss of fear and uncertainty. (As if to emphasize her suspicion of tidy takeaways, she ends her 2016 album, 20%, with more than a minute of fart noises.)¹ She rightly insists that the cruelest things to say to a suicidal person are “Hang in there” and “It gets better,” because these clichés can be alienating and patronizing. Instead, perhaps remind them that things were never very good to begin with:

If you’re ever thinking, Oh, but I’m a waste of space and I’m a burden, remember, that also describes the Grand Canyon. Why don’t you have friends and family take pictures of you from a safe distance? Revel in your majestic profile. Oh, but I owe people a lot of money and everybody hates me. Hello, Europe! Oh, but I killed someone. So have onion rings, firecrackers—who gives a shit? Oh, but I’ve done some other unforgivable, unspeakable thing. Google it. There’s seven billion of us. Somebody has done exactly what you’ve done and is currently on a book tour.

The medications Bamford has been on since her hospitalizations—the antipsychotic quetiapine, the mood stabilizer valproate, and the antidepressant fluoxetine—have kept her stable, but they leave her tired and in need of at least ten hours of sleep a night. This has forced her to focus on her well-being at the expense of advancing her career beyond stand-up. Her Web series The Maria Bamford Show (2007–2008)—in which she plays herself, her family members, and every other role—demonstrates that she could have been one of the most successful comic actresses of her generation. With barely any help from makeup or costumes, she frequently makes you forget it’s a one-woman show.² Plus she’s a pretty, thin bottle blonde with a good singing voice—all still advantages in Hollywood.

Besides the enormous effort that her work requires, Bamford seems to genuinely fear fame beyond her own minor celebrity, and she sometimes self-sabotages. In 2008 she was hired as a spokesperson for Target, but she grew so concerned about its labor practices that she sent a letter to The New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist columnist in 2010 asking whether she should quit. The letter was printed.³ A Target executive saw it and asked Bamford whether she had written it. She lied, but she was never asked to shoot another commercial for the company. (Target could have saved itself some trouble if it had known about—or taken seriously—a bit from her 2007 album, How to
WIN !, in which she marches into one of its stores and demands benefits and an education for the five-year-old Guatemalan girl who made the sandals she bought there.) She views the ordeal as a precursor to her hospitalizations.

After her recovery Mitch Hurwitz—the creator of Arrested Development, on which Bamford had a small recurring role—asked her to do a series as part of his deal with Netflix. The result, Lady Dynamite (2016–2017), is loosely based on her life, and the first of its two seasons deals extensively with her breakdown. But she wasn’t a writer on it because of the strain that would have involved. Appearing in the show was difficult enough. The long shoots exhausted her, and for the second season she had a tent erected on set so she could take naps when she wasn’t needed. (That season also features a plotline in which her character’s decision to sell out to a company owned by Elon Musk almost leads to the end of the world.) She writes in her memoir, Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult, that “childbirth is the best analogy” for the experience of making the show: “After…you finally meet the baby, you think, ‘Is it mine?’ Yes, Ms. Bamford. You’re listed as an executive producer. ‘Oh! I guess I can see it a little now. Around the eyes.’”

Because Bamford’s impressions and vocal inflections are so important to her jokes, I worried that her personality wouldn’t come through in Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult. But she is a strong storyteller and a versatile humorist, and it’s a delightful and funny book. She does, however, use a lot of italics and all caps to approximate her speaking cadences, which can become distracting. (She also puts discussions of suicide in bold Comic Sans as a trigger warning, presumably because Comic Sans is triggering.) The audiobook of Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult, which she reads herself, may be a better choice for those who don’t already have her voices in their heads.

The book—whose title comes from an early routine about being asked by a coworker to go to a self-help seminar—is structured around cults she has belonged to. But she defines “cult” very broadly, as any “strange and ritualistic” group. She includes her family, the Suzuki method (she played violin from the ages of three to twenty-two), show business, mental health care, and the many twelve-step groups she has attended: Overeaters Anonymous, Debtors Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and Recovering Couples Anonymous. (Bamford, whose intoxicants of choice are caffeine and sugar, seems never to have had substance abuse issues.) Many stories she tells are familiar from her stand-up; some of the unfamiliar ones have been incorporated into her recent sets. The threads connecting it all are Bamford’s simultaneous desires to belong and rebel. “I love social orders that I can push against while still being held by snug boundaries of membership,” she writes. “Like a baby defecating securely in a diaper.”

Underneath her defiant oddness lies a classic American striver. Success in the entertainment industry, of course, requires ambition, perseverance, and a desire to please, but it’s nonetheless surprising to discover that her routines about making “vision boards” and seeing a life coach aren’t merely jabs at America’s shallow self-help culture but a reflection of her own deep concern about doing things the “right” way. “I like the For Dummies series,” she writes, “because it’s a good idea to look up how to do things before you give it a whirl.” Or: “I love an itinerary, a laminated, bullet-pointed, cruise-director cheat sheet.” When she mocks confident, put-together types, she may also be making fun of herself.

Born in 1970, Bamford was raised in Duluth, Minnesota, the youngest of two daughters. Her father, Joel, was a dermatologist who suffered from depression and wrote poetry about it, some of which is reproduced in the book. Her mother, Marilyn, became a therapist after her kids left for college. Although never diagnosed as bipolar, Marilyn had a hypomanic episode in 2010 after stopping valproate, which she had been prescribed for epilepsy rather than as a mood stabilizer. Despite being a Protestant deacon, she called the Vatican, hoping to get through to the pope; the most senior cleric she talked to was a monsignor. When Maria suffered from hypomania soon afterward, she too tried to contact the pope.

Bamford’s impressions of her family members feature prominently in her stand-up, and she admits that this material is partly an attempt to air grievances and adjudicate spats in front of a sympathetic audience. Bamford’s Marilyn is a cheery, absentminded midwesterner whose faith in her favorite brands (Delta, Hilton, Nordstrom) is as great as her devotion to Christ. Bamford recorded a Web series, Ask My Mom (2013), as Marilyn, and at times she has expressed a desire to go “full mom” and perform entirely in character. Her version of Joel is “really just a series of sound effects” (grunts, snorts, throat clearings), with a snarky sensibility and a voice like a toothless Johnny Carson.

Over the years, the Bamford family has expressed misgivings to Maria about being used as fodder for her act. Her sister, Sarah, a pathologist turned shaman and life coach who still lives in Duluth, begged Bamford to stop impersonating her. Bamford waited years to heed this plea. “Biting the Hand That Feeds can be profitable and therefore healing,” she writes. Sometimes the hand bites back. Once, Joel arranged for her to perform at a motorcycle rally in Duluth and, despite never having done stand-up, decided to open for her. He told a joke about Maria refusing to pick him up from the airport. After the show she asked him why he had said it, since it wasn’t true. He replied, “Turnabout is fair play.”

What made Bamford’s work tolerable to her family, it seems, is that it brought her happiness and success. Joel and Marilyn may have also enjoyed the attention they received on account of it. She filmed The Special Special Special (2014) in her living room with her parents as the only audience members, both out of laziness and as a gesture of love. But it’s hard not to wonder about the nature of that love as Joel and Marilyn laugh uncomfortably while their daughter repeats an embarrassing message Marilyn left on Sarah’s answering machine: “Maria has disappeared, and I’m worried she’s killed herself, and I have a hair appointment in town.”

Marilyn died of lung cancer in 2020, Joel of Covid in 2023, shortly after Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult was completed. Bamford keeps telling jokes about them:

My mom has always been weight-focused and she did express satisfaction about reaching goal weight in the year before she died. I DID tell her that even if a coffin is tight around the hips, eventually it fits! She told me not to use that in my act. But the joke’s on me: She got herself cremated and now she’s just a POUND! She can wear ANYTHING!⁴

The day after Marilyn died, Joel

took a box out of their bedroom, opened it to show the contents to myself, to my sister, and inside were a very large purple plastic vibrator-dildo, and then a small butterfly-style vibrator with a remote. And he said, “I…I think your mother would have wanted you girls to have these.”

At thirty-five, years before her hospitalizations, Bamford was diagnosed with intrusive-thought OCD, which she had struggled with since she was about ten, when she started worrying that she would give girls “titty twisters” and, eventually, hurt or kill anyone she was close to. As a child she tried to deal with her anxiety by avoiding eye contact and staying up all night sitting on her hands, in order to prevent herself from “mammary-maiming.” She developed bulimia around the same time, binge eating to numb her worried mind and then secretly and obsessively exercising:

I don’t want to start a war between bulimics, but I think doing calisthenics for four hours after having eaten an entire birthday cake takes a kind of dedication that throat-knucklers just don’t have. And yes, I did just throw down. If you’ve ever been in treatment for an eating disorder, you’ll understand it is a competitive sport, even though there are no real winners beyond getting to have a therapist watch you go to the bathroom.

She writes in detail about her eating disorder, though when she brings it up in her act, she pretends to fall asleep out of boredom. “What? A white woman was bulimic?” she says before collapsing to the stage. “I’m sorry. I lost interest in my own narrative.”

When she was sixteen, her father took her to a Dale Carnegie course to build her confidence. She credits the sales tricks she learned there with both helping her win the crown at her high school’s Winter Frolic and getting her a boyfriend. After breaking up with him during their sophomore year of college, Bamford saw an article about bulimia that listed the number for the suicide hotline. She called it and was referred to Overeaters Anonymous (OA), her first twelve-step program. OA got Bamford to stop bingeing, though she kept starving herself. A year later she went through an outpatient program. The insurance claim investigator was a member of her dad’s practice who called her to make sure she actually needed treatment: “‘You looked fine at Christmas!’ Dr. Friend of the Family said…. I wish I had responded: ‘Is “looking fine at Christmas” a diagnosis?’” Soon after, she left OA. “Some of the stuff…started to feel punitive, dogmatic, culty,” she writes. For example, her sponsor believed that eating sugar is “SLOW SUICIDE.”

In her stand-up Bamford explains her ambivalence about twelve-step programs:

Pseudospiritual, paternalistic Judeo-Christian language…. Peer counseling, always a terrible idea. I brought my husband to one of the meetings, and he said, “These people need professional help.” Yes. Yes, they do. And yet none is forthcoming…. Here’s what I love about these meetings: number one, free; number two, free; number three, they can’t kick you out.

Attending OA meetings “promptly (and miraculously?) freed [her] from a nine-year pattern,” and she kept turning to other groups for help: “I cannot recommend enough going to a place where you’ll find people who almost fall asleep when you reveal frightful stories of disgusting behavior, or chortle and snort in response to something you thought you’d never tell anyone.”

After Bamford moved to LA in the mid-1990s, she incurred $5,000 in medical debt because an allergic reaction to antibiotics required a hospital visit. She had no insurance, couldn’t hold down a service industry job, and was loading delivery trucks, barely making enough to eat. The guidance she found in Debtors Anonymous (DA) allowed her to keep living in LA while pursuing a comedy career. She repaid her debt over eight years by temping, including at studios where she was also making some of her first TV appearances. She landed a role on the Nickelodeon animated series CatDog shortly after being fired from a secretarial job there, and she worked reception at the NBC affiliate in LA the day after doing a segment on The Tonight Show: “The weatherman walked by and said, ‘You were on Leno last night!’ and kept walking.”

The struggle to stay motivated while pursuing a life in the arts is the subject of You Are (a Comedy) Special, a satirical self-help audiobook that purports to teach listeners how to devise an hour of stand-up. (Bamford is adapting the audiobook into a print version, which she plans to self-publish.) “I’m not a person for whom enjoying creativity or life has been an apt description,” Bamford says. “I think life is OK, and now that I’m on meds, it’s tolerable. But I’m not a joyous, energetic person who loves to create.” It’s hard, thankless work that most people almost certainly won’t care about. Sometimes you might not either: “Anything you see a lot of…eventually will reveal itself to be the tiresome attention suck it really is.”

As Bamford suggests over and over again, there’s really no help anyone can offer. The work itself is often unpleasant and repetitive. Success, however defined, is a fleeting relief from deep-seated doubts. Why go through the trouble? “I think making things keeps me busy and pleasant,” she says, “or at least a little less likely to punch people in the face.” Nevertheless, it takes creativity to be creative:

I have to trick myself into writing, performing, or, frankly, doing anything. I have to call a friend every five minutes to check in that I’ve completed five minutes of doing something, and then tell them that I’m gonna call them in another five minutes. (I have some very nice, self-employed friends.)

She tests out her material over lunch with a fan or at small early morning shows near her house. It’s been working for her. Although she worried that she wouldn’t be productive after her breakdown, she has developed an hour of tightly wrought new material about every three years, not to mention the three books under review. And sometimes a friend uses her as a subject for their own work. Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story, a documentary produced and codirected by Judd Apatow, will premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Bamford still attends DA meetings and sponsors other members. The group made her eager to share her own financial information as widely as possible, not to brag but because transparency reduces money-related anxiety and shame. She had hoped to print how much she was paid for writing Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult, but her publisher wouldn’t let her. “Just ask me and I’ll tell you in person,” she writes. (She has said in interviews that her book deal was worth $150,000.) She includes a month of her revenue and expenses and says she wanted to share more, but her editors talked her out of it with the bizarre argument that no one would be interested. I bet a smaller press would love to publish a book-length account of her finances, though certainly for less money than she received for her memoir. She freely advertises her and her husband’s net worth ($3 million when the book was written, about a half-million more after her dad’s death).

The story of her marriage, to the artist Scott Marvel Cassidy, is told from the perspective of their dogs in the graphic novella Hogbook and Lazer Eyes. Illustrated by Cassidy and named after the OkCupid handles they used when they met, it was initially sold at Bamford’s shows as a zine before being purchased by Fantagraphics and expanded. It’s thin on details, however, and is best read as a companion to her stand-up and Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult.

Hogbook and Lazer Eyes mentions some of Bamford’s terrible ex-boyfriends (a clown from New Zealand who performed a nude one-man show about discovering that he was gay; a writer who told her in a romantic tone, “I would never hit you”), but not her time in Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. From 1989 until 2004 Bamford’s primary romantic activity involved picking up a stranger once a year and having sex with him at a motel: “They were always drunk. I was always stone-cold sober. It was planned. It was cyclical. Those are a few of the signs of a predator.” Yearly sex hardly constitutes an addiction, but Bamford “felt like I couldn’t stop myself,” so once again she looked to a twelve-step group for help and soon entered her “first semi-real relationship since the age of nineteen.”

Cassidy and Bamford met in 2013. She fell for him after he told her that his mom grew a beard when she was hospitalized and that if Bamford ever landed in the psych ward again, he’d come and shave her face. Like her, he’s depressive and anxious: “My husband and I found out that we have a pastime in common that we both developed at an early age…. And that hobby is longing for death.” He grew up in a violent home and can erupt when he gets angry; when she’s mad she feels ashamed, withdraws, and wants to destroy herself.

They started going to couples counseling after only three months of dating and now also attend Recovering Couples Anonymous meetings. “Scott and I have both fought for what we have,” Bamford writes, “which (and I’ll let him speak for himself) in my mind is a very loving, fairly moody monogamous relationship that works for us.” They make up songs about their marital problems, which she includes in her act, and they keep a signed agreement not to kill themselves on their refrigerator, because “nothing prevents impulsive self-harm quicker than paperwork.”

Bamford is often praised for destigmatizing mental illness, but she should really be praised for destigmatizing the difficulty of recovering from mental illness. Therapists and doctors can be incompetent. The cost of care can be prohibitive. Talking to someone or taking medication isn’t going to turn you into a buoyant, efficient person, though it might help alleviate a great deal of suffering. Anyone who tells you that there’s a permanent way out of the maze of depression and anxiety probably hasn’t been very deep inside it. Bamford helps us recognize that even though we may never find our way out of that maze, it can be a weird, horribly comforting place.