Tears of a Clown

“I’ve always had a lifelong battle with chronic depression,” he said recently over a drink on the Lower East Side.
The location — once home to Irish and Jewish actors and comedians — is appropriate. McEneaney’s father is Irish-American Catholic, and his mother is Jewish. And McEneaney, a 26-year-old Queens native, is acutely aware of how both ethnicities contributed to comedy in America.
“I really do come at it from two sides. Both have a history of being strangers in a strange land,” he said, pondering the two comic strands.
“Irish humor comes from a storytelling standpoint,” he said. “It’s very funny, it takes a while to unfold, and it’s dark. The Jewish humor is more set-up and punchline, very self-deprecating.”
Self-deprecating is what McEneaney does best on stage, to the point where a reviewer of one of his shows called him the “lovable loser.”
One of his favorite jokes is taken from the real-life experience of applying for basic, minimum-wage jobs, and not getting them. He once applied for a job as a janitor at an adult movie theater. His laconic punchline? He was rejected, even for something as menial as mopping a floor.
Society is well-aquainted with the notion of the unhappy comic, the joke-maker who is crying inside. For McEneaney, stand-up comedy has helped with his depression. It has been a form of therapy.
At the age of 20, he found himself weighing 400 pounds and contemplating suicide.
“I got suicidal,” he said matter-of-factly. “It was either do something about it, or. . . ” He did not finish the sentence. Eventually, he took himself in hand, after he found he was stealing money from his parents in order to buy candy.
“What I did was stopped eating any sugar. I was too poor to go to a gym, so I just walked everywhere,” he said.
When McEneaney would come into Manhattan from Queens, he would sometimes walk as much as a hundred blocks a day.
“My typical day would start at 53rd and Third and I’d walk down to the Trade Center,” he said. “I’d touch it then walk back uptown to whatever show I was doing.”
His longest-running gig is at the Old Tripple Inn on West 53rd Street and Eighth Avenue, where he performs to a student and tourist crowd around 10:30 p.m. every Saturday. He also does a gig at the Luna Lounge on the Lower East Side.
Most recently, he had a promising break with a slot on Comedy Central after a talent scout spotted him on stage.
When he first took a crack at stand-up comedy, it was the most nerve-wrecking moment of his life. “I was scared that I’d be bad at it,” he said, “and that my big dream would be down the tubes.”
His material, he explained, is generated by popular culture, religion, and some personal experience — how he overcame his self-destructive behavior. It is easy for him to look back and laugh today, although oddly enough, the off-stage McEneaney comes across as a very serious young man.
“My material is about being — I hate to say this — a generation Y person, dealing with life in the context of that. A lot of my jokes are about not being a very romantic person. I am a hapless guy loser. Everyone’s older brother. I think that makes me likeable.”
On religion, McEneaney says: “My mother is Jewish, my father is Irish Catholic, and I was raised Buddhist.” A pause. “But not everyone can be so lucky.”
Growing up, McEneaney was aware of his dual heritage. It is something that makes him proud.
“As far as the Jewish side goes,” he said, “we’d go over to my mother’s family for Passover, even though we weren’t raised Jewish.”
“But it affected me growing up a lot. The Irish side, well, my father’s side mostly came from California.”
“My first memories of Irishness were negative ones. People saying that Irish people were drunks, Irish people were crazy, they were always fighting.
“But there was always Irish music in my house when I was growing up — the Chieftains, Clancy Brothers, the Rovers. My dad was a fan of Black 47 before they were famous.”
St. Patrick’s Day often made McEneaney angry because so many people acted as if they were, he said, “Irish for a day.”
“There’s a lot in the culture that people ignore,” he said.
On stage, and also on his web site, McEneaney has been talking, but not joking about the World Trade Center tragedy.
The towers, he said, were his favorite buildings in the city, which was why when he would go on his long weight-losing walks he often went down to where they stood and touched them with his hand before heading uptown. The Trade Center was also where he went as a teenager when he cut classes. He put an account of how much he loved the towers on his website on the anniversary of Sept. 11, and a woman told him that it had made her cry.
A week and a half before Sept. 11, he got his slot on Comedy Central, the best day of his life, he said.
“And a week and a half later, it was the worst day of my life,” he said. “I was sitting watching the news and the Trade Center collapsing on TV, and suddenly my bathroom ceiling collapsed as well.”
He then recounted a moment in Washington Square, a few days after the disaster.
“As I was walking through, I must have looked depressed, because a guy shouted to me, ‘Hey, my brother, what’s wrong?’ To which I just sighed and gestured downtownward.”
“He replied, ‘Hey, I’m sorry. No offense, but do you want to buy some weed?’ “
McEneaney added that to part of his on-stage routine: “And that’s how I knew the city was going to be all right. Because as long as our drug dealers stand their own ground, these terrorists have lost.”
If he is as he calls himself a “hapless loser,” he is also highly self-critical, before anyone else can be critical of him, he said.
“I am a very judgmental person. Why? I guess I wish I was perfect,” he said. “The American ideal of perfection would be to be rich, incredibly good-looking and in incredible shape.”
His parents have always been supportive of his comic career, ever since his father would record British comedy shows such as “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” for him from TV.
One day when he was young, he was watching a Robin Williams special on TV with his mother, and at one point she turned to McEneaney and said, “That could be you.”
But then, it is not that surprising that he did end up in comedy. His mother also reminded him that as a baby, his first complete sentence was: “Do you want to hear a joke?”