People often ask comedians, “Were you the class clown?” Only a few of us can answer, “yes.”

I think many comics start out not as class clowns, but as serious class weirdos, class problems and class misfits. I remember wanting to fit in so badly, just hungry for validation and attention. I didn’t want to just be pretty. I wanted to be funny like the boys so that the boys would like me.

I came from a privileged background. We lived in a big, Victorian house on the top of what the townsfolk called “Snob Hill” — my two brothers, my sister, my parents, and me. My parents gave us everything: We had horses, snowmobiles, boats and lots of nature.

My father was a doctor and a strict disciplinarian. Dad had a sort of gallows humor I loved. He talked about making his rounds at the hospital to see what he called “the O’s and the Q’s”- the “O’s” were the poor souls lying in bed with their mouths open, and the “Q’s” were the ones with respirator tubes coming out of the corners of their mouths. My mom took care of us with flair and fun when she was happy. When she was unhappy, it seemed to cast a pall over the entire household for me. I loved when she would have a few glasses of wine with her girlfriends. They would sit around our big, wooden kitchen table and laugh uproariously about the absurdities of being homemakers of the 1950’s. They would get giddy and ridiculous about everything.

My mom dressed my sister and me up in little flowery dresses with crinolines under them and thick, white tights and shiny, white patent leather shoes and had my brothers looking spiffy, too, for church every Sunday. But I hated the God that was presented at church. He was the two things kids hate most: Mean and boring. It was here where I really felt strong sense of phoniness.

It all didn’t make sense. My parents had everything and were miserable. My brother Bryan drowned in the town reservoir at age 15. Six years later, my dad died in a car accident at age 48. It felt like an existential, unanswerable, red hot “WHY?” lodged in my throat, a sadness that I tried to run away from for years. It was weird to me that this whole creation went on and on no matter who lived or died.

It felt like an existential, unanswerable, red hot “WHY?” lodged in my throat, a sadness that I tried to run away from for years.

I was troubled and I was a rebel. When I was 17, I ran away from home and lived on the streets of New York City. I got in lots of trouble. It was around this time that I discovered the comedy of Richard Pryor. Pryor’s work was a departure from the uptight, appropriate, Catskills kind of funny of the day; he was radical funny. When I saw his film “Live on the Sunset Strip” I had a physiological laughter reaction in my body that I had never felt before. I had never heard an adult tell the truth like that.

I didn’t consider that I could be a comic at first. It didn’t even occur as possible. A few years later, I saw comedy live at a club. It took me a few years after that to get up the guts to do it. I didn’t think I was smart enough or funny enough. I took a class. I learned how. EVERYTHING is possible with a support structure and an environment that pulls for you to be greater than your fears. Once I did it onstage in public, I was hooked. EVERYTHING is possible with a support structure and environment that pulls for you to be greater than your fears.

I began to look at other explanations and belief systems about life, exploring “fringier” ideas outside of the paradigm in which I was raised. I began to look into transformational work, shamanic work, yoga, spiritual stuff, quantum physics, channeled stuff, theosophists, New Thought churches, etc.

I had a sort of “enlightenment” experience during one of these courses, when I relinquished the scariness, drama, victimization and significance of some of the more difficult moments in my past. I saw that whatever I couldn’t laugh at owned me. I just laughed so hard at all of the pain and suffering and in a single moment, threw off the chains of self pity and fear.

I actually wouldn’t trade any of my life experiences for the world now, even though it’s very popular in our culture to be a “victim.” The trick was putting myself in an environment designed to have me try on a new perspective. As Parmahansa Yogananda says, “Environment is stronger than willpower.”

What was immediately there for me after taking this big chunk of my past out of my future was a great void … in which anything could be created. Now it was possible to create relationships where I was not trying to be interesting, not asking for “credit” for having lived such a hard life. I don’t walk into a room with a big question mark over my head anymore wondering if people like me. I don’t go onstage like that. I’m more of an exclamation point. I can have relationships that are spacious enough to be whimsical and present. Without agenda. I will not be using people as scratching posts for my unfulfilled needs.

That is the possibility I am creating to this day… Being an Enlightened Goofball.

I started doing comedy about spiritual and transformational stuff around this time, because the only thing you really want to do when you get freed up is give it away to others. We are generous like that, we human beings.

My personal sense of spirituality is sort of aligned with Socrates. He apparently had a mantra: “I know nothing.” I like that a lot. The great Indian saint Ramana Maharshi once asked “Why do we need beliefs?” I was wowed by what a good question that was. Why, indeed? I also like Byron Katie‘s idea of “God.” She says, “My God is reality because it rules … but only 100% of the time.” I’m attracted to non-dual, non-moral ideas of the Universe beyond our senses, the view that there’s a big soup of stuff happening and none of it is right or wrong. We’re here for experience and a lot of us want to experience extremes. It has to be sort of challenging, too, because we don’t want to play a game we know we can win.

The challenge is in riding the horse in the direction it’s going … that is my “religion,” I guess. That’s a metaphor. There’s no actual horse I refer to here. So, wherever I have a “should” or a “shouldn’t” about anything I’m disrespecting the great Way it is, also known as the Tao.

When I say “acceptance” a lot of people don’t like that because they hear “tolerance” and that’s intolerable to them. Acceptance isn’t tolerance. It’s acceptance. Here’s how you know if you’re in a state of non-acceptance or acceptance about anything or anyone: Either you’re disgruntled inside, or you’re 100% at peace.

So I wasn’t the class clown. I was the class disgruntled person feeling like a victim, trying to figure stuff out and hungry for approval. Now I’m a whimsical nutbar with a tendency toward self-righteousness who knows she doesn’t have any of the answers, loves people and laughter and truth. I’ve evolved into a clown. Serious!