Fans of “Freaks and Geeks,” the high-school dramedy about Midwestern teens in the early eighties that ran for one glorious season, on NBC, in 1999-2000, will likely remember what is, to me, its most indelible scene. In it, one of the titular geeks—the bespectacled Bill Haverchuck, played by Martin Starr—returns home from school and slaps a grilled-cheese sandwich and a slice of Entemann’s chocolate cake on a plate. Bill is the child of a single mother, a gawky and awkward latchkey kid, and television is part of his solitary after-school routine—one that is, if not especially invigorating, at least dependable when nothing else is. But then, for once, something unusual happens: Dinah Shore, whose talk show Bill is idly watching as he mechanically shovels his food, invites the young comedian Garry Shandling to the stage. We don’t hear the jokes—the scene is scored to the Who’s “I’m One”—but we see Bill experiencing Shandling’s routine for the first time. His initial chuckle turns into laughter, which then turns into a full-on, open-mouthed cracking up. To viewers, it’s clear that Bill has recognized, perhaps for the first time, that there might be a community of like-minded individuals somewhere in his future.
Patron saint of the lonely and the alienated, Shandling, in his comedy and in his person, showed that it was O.K. to hate yourself if you were hilarious about it; that, in fact, there was something honest, even honorable, about the endeavor; and that this honesty might even turn into something like love—for yourself, for others, for the world. Judd Apatow, who directed and co-wrote the Haverchuck-Shandling episode, was Shandling’s friend and mentee until the influential comic died of a heart attack, in 2016, at age sixty-six. His latest tribute to the comedian—“The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling”—is a two-part, four-and-a-half-hour-long documentary, on HBO, which uses extensive archival materials to recount Shandling’s life and legacy, alongside interviews with his comedy-community peers (Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld), and younger friends and disciples (Sacha Baron Cohen, Sarah Silverman). The through line are excerpts from the handwritten diaries that Shandling kept—which are both shown onscreen and read in mellifluous voice-over by Michael Cera. In the documentary’s first moments, Shandling is seen crouching on the floor of what looks like a TV room, rummaging through dozens of old journals overflowing from a wooden chest. “Here I’m on my way to Hawaii, and I say I like the weather,” he says, reading from one of them. A beat, a grin that is also, simultaneously, a grimace, and then, wryly: “So, you know, they’re filled with that kind of depth you can’t get anywhere else.” Off-camera, Apatow laughs, and Shandling continues: “I’ll let the whole thing go for two installments of nine-ninety-five, that’s where I’m at. But here’s what you get:”—he thumps the pile of diaries, suddenly more sombre—“my entire fucking life.” For Shandling, this life was, on the one hand, a near-worthless joke, and, at the same time, something almost too meaningful, its every single moment bursting with potential for growth and self-realization.
Shandling was born in Chicago, but, soon after, his family moved to Tucson, Arizona, hoping that the dry climate would improve the health of his older brother, Barry, who suffered from cystic fibrosis. Barry’s death, when Shandling was ten, is figured in “Zen Diaries” as his life’s structuring trauma. The repressed Shandlings didn’t discuss Barry’s death, and Shandling, his friends say, never talked about his brother, but excerpts from his diaries make clear that the loss was a wound that never healed. “Nobody ever told me, let’s stay with the pain and walk through it,” he writes in one entry. The work of comedy, Apatow suggests, provided a lifelong avenue for Shandling to walk through that pain, if obliquely.
After studying engineering in college, Shandling moved to Los Angeles, where he became a successful young TV writer. But he wasn’t satisfied; he wanted to find “a true life path,” as he noted earnestly in a diary entry. In 1977, a car accident in which he was seriously hurt marked the next turning point in the spiritual-quest narrative that “Zen Diaries” lays out. There is something strange, almost perverse, about the attempt to start over and find enlightenment on the comedy scene, portrayed in the documentary as cutthroat and dispiriting. But, for Shandling, standup was, from the start, a way to express his niggling anxieties openly. He toured and performed incessantly, developing the persona of a self-obsessed neurotic and charming audiences with his heightened self-awareness.
The diary entries in this period come fast and hard, and, for a man as instinctively funny as Shandling, they are shockingly serious, their messages a mixture of California-ish, spirituality-tinged pep talks (“Just be Garry”; “Relax and have fun”; “Nothing ever felt so right”; “I am Garry Shandling and I am free. FREE. Free at last”) and business-samurai-style missives (“Commit to killing”; “Commit to the performance”; “Become one with the tonite show”). Shandling took voluminous notes, but his mien was loose, his rhythms unhurried and natural. He was thick-lipped, his squinty eyes and fleshy face expressing equal parts dread and hilarity, his hair a bristly helmet, his distinctive honk of a voice steadily serving punch line after punch line, delivered with a precise, easeful facility. Much of his material was about being a loser with women (“My girlfriend moved in with another guy, so I dumped her, because that’s where I draw the line”), or about being a loser with women but still horny (“We go back to her place; I’m on the couch and I’m really getting into it . . . and then she comes into the room”), or about trying to pretend not to be horny but still being horny (“Do you have ‘Zen and the Art of Archery’? O.K., so just give me that Hustler”).
Shandling, who reminded his ardent admirers that it was totally cool to be a little bit ugly and neurotic and funny and smart, had a penchant for jokes about hot stewardesses and nagging, nightmarish Jewish mothers that left some of us with complicated feelings. Comedy, in Shandling’s heyday, was a boy’s club, and, save for the inclusion of Silverman, and the inimitable comedy writer Merrill Markoe, the documentary reflects this. (In her new memoir about coming up in the industry, Nell Scovell recounts how Shandling, reading a spec script of hers in the eighties, told her appreciatively that she writes “like a guy.”)
As Shandling’s career turned back toward TV—this time as the creator of his own shows—his understanding of women characters, and the complexity of character in general, grew increasingly nuanced. His most stellar contributions to both comedy and television were the fourth-wall-breaking “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” which ran from 1986 to 1990, and in which he played a self-obsessed, self-doubting comedian who is also aware that he is an actor on a sitcom, populating a set alongside fellow actors, in front of a live studio audience; and, later, the truly brilliant talk-show satire “The Larry Sanders Show,” which ran from 1992 to 1998, in which Shandling played the self-obsessed, self-doubting titular character, a late-night host, who interacts with the equally self-obsessed and self-doubting characters who surround him behind the scenes. “Sanders” was great because of its downbeat naturalism: its depictions of the everyday humiliations, frustrations, and desires of people interacting under the ego-inflating and -shattering conditions of the entertainment industry. This, as the television writer Al Jean says in an interview, was “the dawn of what they call the golden age of TV.”
The final hour of “Zen Diaries” sags. This might be because the humiliations and frustrations that dogged Shandling for most of his life relaxed their grip in his last decade: the magic that is needed to turn mundane experience into art went missing. Shandling’s creative output was lean, but he was happier. He wasn’t chasing Zen, but embodying it—mentoring younger comics, meditating, and getting increasingly deeper into Buddhism. Speaking about “Sanders,” Shandling said, “some people mistakenly think that’s a dark show about people trying to get what they want. No, it’s a show about people trying to get love and that shit gets in the way.” At the end of Shandling’s life, the documentary suggests, love had won.
