Denis Leary: The Upside of Anger

“No, I didn’t. It was a young kid. You know what it was? He was on that ladder carrying a saw that weighed forty pounds. When it swung out, it just yanked him off. He didn’t have a chance. What a waste. And it was two cents’ worth of fire.”

“When that weight shifted, he came down,” says Leary. “He did a cartwheel.”

“When that thing goes, you’re going.”

“I heard he hit the ground, his heart was still beating.”

“Sad.”

“Twenty-three,” Leary says.

“Twenty-three,” Jorgensen says.

And then they go back to work.

Leary didn’t perform comedy onstage until af­ter graduating from college. It was 1990. He spent his time playing in a faux punk band called Vomit and teaching a com­edy-writing course at his alma mater. Nothing much was happening. But then he found stand-up. He went right at it, bombed, bombed and bombed again. He didn’t care, his skin was that thick, his defenses that solid. He took as the basis of his act something he’d read in Richard Pryor’s autobiography, about his onstage persona just being an exaggeration of his everyday self. In Leary’s case, this meant taking his old family screamfest and hit­ting the stage in an overblown, free-as­sociative, potty-mouthed rage. After a while, he started to get noticed, but it didn’t amount to anything until after he and Ann, who was pregnant at the time, went to London in 1990, where her bag of waters broke and she gave birth to Jack three months prematurely. The child’s health was so delicate that the Learys were forced to stay in England for six months. During that time, Leary wrote No Cure for Cancer and debuted it at the annual Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. The response was so positive and full of sweet, outraged howls that when Leary returned to the States, he put the show on here too, with similar results.

“Actually, the thing with my son was life and death,” Leary says, in one of his rare contemplative moments. “But if that hadn’t happened — you know what I mean? After that, everything just sort of fell into place. It’s hard to look back without thinking that there was some kind of plan in place.”

He pauses for a moment and smokes.

“What do I get out of doing stand-up?” he goes on. “I’ve got all these things in my head, and when I get out there, they come out, and I start to make sense of my own personal views. People don’t realize how therapeutic it is. And then it’s the ranting that makes it comedy. You know what, though? Even when someone is just talk­ing to me, I’m on.

Unless you’re my wife or an incredibly close friend of mine, it’s impossible that I’m going to be the person I normally am when I’m not on.”

Being on also seems to let Leary main­tain control of any given conversation and its direction. Indeed, take a tack he’s not entirely comfortable with — about, say, the issue of Leary family secrets and how many there might be — and he’ll turn up the “on” until it almost begins to seem desperate. To his credit, though, once cornered, he doesn’t clam up. In­stead, quite reasonably, he stakes out his boundaries and the reasons for them.

“Listen,” he says. “I’m sure there . . . there are tons of family secrets. But that’s private information, unless I make it public in a funny way through my work. What I want to tell is in my work, like my son’s precarious birth and my father’s death. That’s where you get the informa­tion I’m willing to give up.”

There’s something kind of great and noble about this, of course, but it’s also great that he has a wife like Ann, who at times seems willing to tell more about her husband than maybe he ever can.

The first revelation, though, is Leary’s. Sitting by the pool and moving the ashtray around on the table in front of him, he says that cigarettes and coffee are his only real vices these days. He no longer drinks. He has given it up. This is astounding news, given that booze has long been a regular part of his stage act and that he once said, “I have a great form of anger management. It’s called Jameson Irish Whiskey.” So, the news begs for some kind of amplification. But all Leary will say is that he stopped “a while ago” and “for various reasons.” That’s it.

Right around then, with this shock reverberating through the warm Connecticut air, Ann Leary comes out with some sandwiches (turkey for her husband). She seems relaxed, fun and easygoing, in such a way that you might soon wonder if she has any choice pet names for her notoriously prickly husband.

“No, no, we’re not an incredibly adorable couple in that way,” Ann says, glanc­ing at Leary. “Do you think we are?”