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WORK TITLE: My Life as a Goddess
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 11/12/1975
WEBSITE: http://www.guybranum.com/
CITY:
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born November 12, 1975.
EDUCATION:University of California, Berkeley, graduated; University of Minnesota, law degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Comedian, television personality, actor, and writer. Creator of Talk Show the Game Show, truTV; writer and producer of The Mindy Project, Hulu; creator of the podcast, Pop Rocket. Has appeared on television shows and films, including Chelsea Lately, Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, and No Strings Attached; writer for television shows, including Another Period, A League of Their Own, Awkward, Punk’d, Billy on the Street, and Fashion Police.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to publications and websites, including the New York Times, Vulture, and Slate.com. Has released comedy albums, including Effable, 2015.
SIDELIGHTS
Guy Branum is a comedian, television personality, actor, and writer. He has written for television shows, including The Mindy Project, Another Period, A League of Their Own, Awkward, Punk’d, Billy on the Street, and Fashion Police. His writings have also appeared in publications and on websites, including the New York Times, Vulture, and Slate.com. Branum has appeared on the television shows, Chelsea Lately and Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, as well as in the film, No Strings Attached. He created the truTV program, Talk Show the Game Show.
In 2018, Branum released his first book, My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir through (Un)Popular Culture. In this volume, he discusses his childhood in the conservative small town of Yuba City, CA. Branum recalls finding an escape through classic television shows. Though he realized he was gay at the beginning of his teens, he chose to keep his sexuality a secret throughout high school. Branum goes on to discuss his undergraduate years and his time in law school before delving into his career in the entertainment industry. He explains how being gay and overweight led to a lack of self-confidence and explains how he overcame it.
Branum described My Life as a Goddess in an interview with Mitchell Kuga, contributor to the Them website. He stated: “It’s really just a guide to my survival. I mean, we all survive, we’re all around. I’m not saying it’s special or different, I’m just saying these are my specifics.” Branum continued: “I think I wanted the book to be funny but to also tell a larger story about who I am, so people understand where my funny comes from a little bit better. You also sort of have to lay out a plot—like in a comedy, the plot ends happily. You know, things are okay. I think as time has gone on I’ve gotten better at understanding my life as a thing that’s good and rewarding.” Branum also told Kuga: “I wanted the book to feel like I had two drinks in me and I had cornered you at a party and I was just talking your ear off about something, so I was indulgent in my digressions. I was like, this should be me. I don’t have a good understanding of who my audience should be.” In an interview with John Russell, writer on the Queerty website, Branum stated: “One of the issues that my book is addressing is the fact that, for a number of reasons—me being gay, being fat, the weird place that I’m from—like, my story just has not made sense. Or hasn’t fit into the structures of how we tell stories. And the book is kind of me using other stories and narratives to figure out what my story is. Because as gay people, we aren’t supposed to have stories of our own. We’re supposed to be features in somebody else’s story.”
My Life as a Goddess received favorable assessments. A critic in Kirkus Reviews asserted: “Keenly observant and intelligent, Branum’s book not only offers uproarious insights into walking paths less traveled, but also into what self-acceptance means in a world still woefully intolerant of difference.” Cori Wilhelm, contributor to Xpress Reviews, described the volume as “a funny account that most readers of modern comedic memoirs will enjoy.” Reviewing the book on the Lambda Literary website, Alex Tunney suggested: “This could have been a typical Hollywood memoir; the story of someone triumphantly making it from one side of the television screen to the other. But, Guy has rarely fit the expectations thrust upon him. This book is no different and all the better for it. Instead, readers get a tour of his life and the pop culture landscape with one of the funniest and wittiest tour guides in town.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, August, 2018, author interview, p. 25.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2018, review of My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture.
Xpress Reviews, August 3, 2018, Cori Wilhelm, review of My Life as a Goddess.
ONLINE
Guy Branum website, http://guybranum.com/ (October 10, 2018).
Hornet, https://hornet.com/ (August 1, 2018), Jim Gladstone, author interview.
Lambda Literary, https://www.lambdaliterary.org/ (July 15, 2018), Alex Tunney, review of My Life as a Goddess.
Queerty, https://www.queerty.com/ (July 31, 2018), John Russell, author interview.
Them, https://www.them.us/ (August 9, 2018), Mitchell Kuga, author interview.
BIO
Guy Branum is the creator and host of truTV’s Talk Show The Game Show, a hilarious mashup of two beloved television formats that pits comedians and celebrities against each other for the title of “Best Guest of the Night.”
Wanda Sykes on Talk Show The Game Show.
You may also know him from his recurring segment “No More Mr. Nice Gay” on Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, serving as “Staff Homosexual” on Chelsea Lately and his performance as Natalie Portman’s sassy gay friend in the feature film No Strings Attached. Noticing a trend?
Guy on the couch in No Strings Attached.
Guy has also appeared on @Midnight, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail, Road to Roast and Debate Wars. As a TV writer, Guy spent three seasons writing for Hulu’s The Mindy Project and was a producer during the show’s last season. Other TV writing credits include A League of Their Own from Amazon, Punk’d and Awkward on MTV, Another Period on Comedy Central, Billy on the Street on truTV and Fashion Police on E! That means he’s watched the Grammys at Joan Rivers’ house. Jealous?
Guy has also written culture and political commentary for Slate.com, The New York Times and Vulture.
Trevor Noah Learns Twitter Just Can’t Take a Joke
Pride After Orlando
Tear Down the Boys’ Club That Protected Louis C.K.
And his pop culture roundtable podcast Pop Rocket was named one of the best new podcasts of 2015 by iTunes. Guy’s debut comedy album, Effable, was #1 on iTunes and Billboard charts, and The New York Times called it “a contender for the best comedy special of 2015.”
Guy at a "photo shoot" for Effable.
Guy Branum, Author of ‘My Life as a Goddess,’ Is the Funny Gay Brainiac We Need Right Now
Written by Jim Gladstone on August 1, 2018 36 guys like it
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Guy Branum, whose My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture hits shelves today, is a stand-up comic. He created and hosts TruTV’s Talk Show, The Game Show.
He’s written for sit-coms including The Mindy Project and for comedians including the late Joan Rivers. Maybe you remember him as a frequent panelist on Chelsea Lately, his most high-visibility gig to date.
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But Guy Branum is also an unabashed intellectual, a country-fried Jew, an effortfully self-confident fat man and a sex-positive feminist with no time for your guff.
And its these latter aspects of Branum’s being — on abundant intersectional display in his singularly genre-busting literary debut — that have the potential both to thrill and perplex.
Guy Branum inline 1
“I worry about this book getting into the right hands,” Branum acknowledges. Not that its getting into the wrong hands would lead to a Russian takedown of the U.S. utility grid. But it might well create a buttload of flummoxed, average reading-skilled heterosexuals.
To be understood by a typical television-viewing American, books need to be written at a seventh grade level. Guy Branum has a law degree, and his sophisticated, footnote-spiked prose ain’t hiding it.
“There have been early readers who received the book through [promotional websites] GoodReads and NetGalley who seemed to only be interested because they knew me from Chelsea Lately,” Branum explained last week during a break from the writers’ room for a proposed television adaptation of A League of Their Own.
“They’ve left comments like ‘I don’t know what this is! I was expecting funny childhood stories and dish on celebrities.’ I’m not sure they were ready for all of my queer theory and stuff.”
While the book’s cover and title suggest it will be a fluffy, hardbound souvenir for fans of a bigtime comic, the facts are otherwise: 1) Guy Branum really isn’t a bigtime comic yet, so there’s got to be a reason to read him other than celebrity idolatry; 2) Guy Branum seems constitutionally incapable of fluffy.
guy branum inline 2
“Look, I’ve done lots of different kinds of work,” he says. “This book is the one project I really decided to write for myself. When I’m working on material for other comedians, or television scripts, or even my own stand-up I think about what’s palatable for the audience. But with the book, I just wanted to do something that’s, ‘Here’s who I am.’”
Coming from as multidimensional a guy as Branum, “Here’s who I am” can be deliciously headspinning, a latticework of interwoven tangents.
“Part of me feels that I should have spoonfed the ideas in this book to people a little more, but part of me is so fucking happy that I didn’t. I’m like, well, this is me.”
“You don’t to get to just hear what life is like for me as a fat person, or a gay person, without having to also hear about me as a person who cares too much about Canadian history.”
He’s not kidding.
Right between his eloquent, multifaceted analysis of Hairspray’s Tracy Turnblad as “Western literature’s greatest fat character” and a moving explanation of how his sense of identity was impacted by growing up in a small town with a significant population of Punjabi Sikhs, Branum offers a thoroughly researched ten-page tangent on Canada’s international relationships between 1763 and the present.
Remarkably, he then manages to send his digression looping back homeward:
“It actually does have something to do with me as a fat person and a gay person,” Branum reiiterates during our conversation. “Here’s this country of 30 million people who are right next to us and we never pay attention to them. Who do we choose to pay attention to? Who do we ignore? Those are questions that really point to cultural arrogance and self-absorption.”
“I want this book to read as if you were chatting with me at a party when I was two drinks in and really rolling,” says Branum. “I hope that maybe 70% of the time, I’m getting to my main points and 30% of the time I’m off on a tangent.”
“There’s a section where I write about Nurulagus, which is this giant rabbit that lived on the island of Majorca. If I was in an everyday conversation, I would leave that out. But if I was talking to a close friend after a couple drinks, I would definitely force them to learn about that rabbit in the middle of a conversation about my first time at a gay bar.”
Guy Branum inline 3
Branum says that unliked crafting gags for stand-up or sitcoms, writing My Life as a Goddess let him work in a form that closely matches the way his mind functions.
“I have a stand-up friend who used to tease me by saying ‘You don’t write jokes, you write essays about jokes.’ But its true. I’ve tended to write verbosely and then chop it down. I write the essay first and then try to figure out what the joke is.”
In My Life… we get to read those essays whole cloth, and for readers willing to engage with Branum’s complex arguments and thought processes, it’s a fascinating complementary experience to hearing his undeniably funny stand-up routines (Branum’s album, Effable, is widely available in digital distribution).
Among the topics that are addressed most extensively and insightfully in Branum’s stand-up and his book is gay sexuality. Earlier this month, when Branum had a My Life… teaser video rejected for paid promotion on Twitter, he spoke to Hornet about institutionalized cultural repulsion over sex between men. (The video, rejected for breaching community standards, featured three men — not nude — comically caressing each other and a copy of the book).
Returning to that argument, Branum says, “The thing that bothers me most is just the fact that mid-level gay contact is seen as extremely, problematically sexual. There’s no PG-13 for gay sex. The gay in PG-13 is a sassy gay friend. Unless there’s a straight guy onscreen being grossed out by it, its just not OK to have any gay physical contact.”
“I have a straight friend,” remarks Branum, “who said he just couldn’t understand how a respectable dentist or accountant could be gyrating in a Speedo on a float in the Pride parade. He needed to think of people who do that as somehow less than fully human. Well, some fine, respectable men I know happen to go-go on the side or have a very, very nude Instagram account.”
“I think straight people could learn a lot from our attitudes toward sex. Not just that we’re comfortable having it and talking about it, but that at the end of the day, no one is dehumanized or insulted by anything we do. You know, an important part of feminism is being able to see someone as both human and sexual at the same time.”
my life as a goddess guy branum cover
Asked about another hot button topic in contemporary comedy, Guy Branum says the recent slew of jokes and cartoons presenting Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as sex partners is anti-feminist as well as anti-gay.
“Nobody in our society thinks it’s a bad thing to have your dick in someone’s mouth but we all talk like its bad to have a dick inside of your mouth — or inside of you in any other way. Its deeply misogynistic, and it fundamentally construes straight female and gay sex as humiliating.”
“I know that people think its adorable because they think Trump and Putin would be repulsed. Well you need to remember that when you make that joke, its pretty unlikely that Trump and Putin are hearing it — but a kid is definitely hearing it and that kid is learning why he should hate himself.”
“This kind of joke is tired and hack,” Branum says, speaking at length in a manner as passionate and momentum-driven as his written prose. “But comedy writers are largely older, white men who have been doing their job for a long time and are going to keep doing these jokes because they’re comfortable with it. It really takes strong negative audience reactions to make them thing about changing.”
“Even then, you hear these older comics whining and complaining about how audiences have gotten too PC. The world has changed! Your shitty fag joke worked ten years ago, but that doesn’t mean it was good. It doesn’t work now because its still not good — but now you also need to stop doing it.”
“Comedy is in a bubble today, just like politics.” says Branum, “We looove jokes that allow people to smugly pat themselves on the back People can hear what they want to hear and then feel good about themselves when they watch The Daily Show. But jokes that really ask people to challenge themselves and think twice about who they they are and what they’re doing — that’s interesting: Showing men in an audience ways that they are complicit in misogyny, asking a nice liberal audience about things they’re doing every day to prop up our government. I want to see comedy that makes people feel less smug and more uncertain.”
My Life as a Goddess, in all its gloriously shaggy discursiveness, provides a look into a mind that’s capable of making that very comedy. Guy Branum may tell you that he’s “a very frivolous person,” but he considers his frivolity with all due seriousness.
If a joke is a single polished gem, My Life as a Goddess invites readers to venture into the labyrinth of a diamond mine.
Guy Branum’s My Life as a Goddess is available now.
QUOTED: "One of the issues that my book is addressing is the fact that, for a number of reasons—me being gay, being fat, the weird place that I’m from—like, my story just has not made sense. Or hasn’t fit into the structures of how we tell stories. And the book is kind of me using other stories and narratives to figure out what my story is. Because as gay people, we aren’t supposed to have stories of our own. We’re supposed to be features in somebody else’s story."
By John Russell July 31, 2018 at 10:07am
Comedian Guy Branum‘s new book is all about reclaiming his magical powers.
Well, not literal magic.
More like the secret abilities that enabled a fat gay Jewish boy to survive a childhood in rural California where he says he simply did not fit—in any sense of the word. The humorous essays in My Life as a Goddess chart his unlikely path from his hometown—which he describes as “a place with no dreams”—to Hollywood, with a slight detour into law school along the way.
A former writer for Chelsea Lately and The Mindy Project, Branum is the host and executive producer of TruTV’s Talk Show The Game Show and of his roundtable pop culture podcast Pop Rocket, where he brings his razor-sharp wit and fierce intelligence to bear on film, TV, music and everything else he and his co-hosts “love to love.”
That obsession with pop culture frames the stories and insights in the book, out July 31.
Queerty chatted with Branum last week about standup comedy, LGBTQ representation in media and why Twitter didn’t approve of the ad for his book.
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I hear you had some trouble with an ad you posted for the book on Twitter?
So one of the odd things about being a gay male comedian is getting gay men to pay attention to me in any way. As a community, it never really crossed our minds that there could be gay guy comics. We like drag queens, we like female comics, and that’s pretty much it. So an effort for me has always been, how do I get gay guys to pay attention to what I do? I did a series of ads for my book with Alice Wetterlund from Girl Code speaking to angry feminists, Nicole Byer talking to women of color, Marissa Jaret Winokur speaking to the Tony-winning community. And what I did for gay guys was just hire some go-go boys to just rub on each other a little bit while holding my book. It was cute and silly and it got a decent amount of attention, so I was like, I’ll promote it [on Twitter]. But it didn’t run, and I didn’t understand. It turned out that some Twitter user had flagged it as being inappropriate because it was fully clothed gay guys who were kind of touching each other!
It’s just this problem that we may not think about that much, but the world sees low-level gay contact as much dirtier than it does low-level straight contact. And it’s something that has kind of come up in my career somewhat. When I was starting out in stand-up comedy I understood that most of my jokes that were about dating or sex wouldn’t be appropriate for television.
So, is the ad still out there? Did you get your money back from paying to promote it?
I think they didn’t charge me. And then I tweeted about [the situation] and it got way more attention than it would have just from the promoted ad. It worked out fine, but in the end, we shouldn’t have to do that.
Let’s get meta: As someone who pays a lot of attention to pop culture, what are your thoughts on the state of the celebrity interview?
Oh, it’s really like dead! It’s a completely moribund, uninteresting thing right now. Maybe that’s fine because we have bigger fish to fry when it comes to politics and stuff. But it also makes me sad that basically, most celebrities are wimps about interviews. They have publicists who have essentially ruined talk shows, who’ve made them completely uninteresting by scheduling everything. There is no magic. There is no discovery. Back in the 60s or 70s, people would come on talk shows and something unexpected would happen. The glory of the Tonight Show panel was that you had celebrities interacting and playing off of each other. And that just doesn’t happen anymore. You look at those games on Fallon and it’s such a rigorously scheduled game of charades where everyone makes two wrong guesses and then a right guess. It’s this attempt to create spontaneity, playing these little games where nobody is challenged and nobody feels questioned. I do think it’s part of a larger death of discourse in our culture where people can’t possibly be challenged anymore.
So, you get this book deal. I’m curious how you decided what kind of book you wanted to write.
It’s very interesting. I think when you are a standup comedian there is a temptation to write a book that is just going through the motions. When I was at Chelsea Lately I remember her telling us that she had gotten an imprint at a publisher, so we could write a book if we wanted to. But her dog had to write one first. I remember thinking, I would like to write a book, but not this way.
I was just structuring it as a memoir through personal essays. But that’s also kind of not how my comedy works. One of the issues that my book is addressing is the fact that, for a number of reasons—me being gay, being fat, the weird place that I’m from—like, my story just has not made sense. Or hasn’t fit into the structures of how we tell stories. And the book is kind of me using other stories and narratives to figure out what my story is. Because as gay people, we aren’t supposed to have stories of our own. We’re supposed to be features in somebody else’s story. We’re supposed to tell the heroine to go to the airport and get that man!
I think people expect books by comedians to be collections of humorous essays that are also sort of a memoir.
A lot of the time it’s just people writing down material. Or turning five minutes of material into too many pages of a book.
Whose essay collection/memoir are you eager to see happen?
Oh, yeah, there are a bunch of comics whose voices and perspectives I just love. Like, if Aparna Nancherla or Solomon Georgio wrote a book that would be thoroughly delightful to me. Aparna’s the kind of comic who doesn’t talk about her biography so much as her perspective. And Solomon just has this fascinating story of being born in Sudan, coming here and barely speaking English and having to learn about America by having it thrust upon him. Those are books I’d really enjoy because I feel like the best books by comedians have an agenda or something to say. The magic of [Tina Fey’s] Bossypants is that it’s really about how women face management and authority differently in our society because of an expectation that they do not have those things. That’s what makes all the stories of being a gay guy in college and otherwise being awkward and confused in life really fun. It has a purpose and a point.
I really want Jon Lovett from Crooked Media to write one.
Yeah! He is a lovely person with strong takes on everything, who also had just a really fascinating journey.
Back to you: You call the book a survival guide. What do you mean by that?
Survival is a question in the queer community. We live in a world that is very hostile to us and says we shouldn’t exist. A fair amount of our community takes that advice along the way. I think that to survive as a marginalized person in our society you have to put some things together. It was really my self-congratulatory way of saying, Here’s how I figured out how to see myself in culture and be guided by that when culture was saying, “There’s no place for you.”
That’s really interesting that you use the word “hostile.” As much progress as LGBTQ people have made, your book really made me think about all of the tiny, subtle ways in which culture is hostile to us.
I don’t know that being told that you’re gross and disgusting by most forms of media for most of your life is a microaggression. One of our obligations as gay men is to say, We can take it. The queer community prides ourself on this strength and this ability to push through, and we’ve prioritized other things. We have said marriage and adoption and basic civil rights are the things we’re gonna focus on. But all of this was conditional on, Hey, can’t you take a joke? It’s not just a joke, it’s the absence of any other kind of representation. It’s living in a world where Boy Erased is still made by a straight male director and a straight male star. Can we not have control over of our own stories? Think about what a revelation Pose is, that there just are trans people involved in telling a trans story. Before this, all of the trans people we had in media were caricatures that were built entirely by cis people. Of course, I’m not saying I’ve had the same struggle as them, but it’s hard when you never get to be a speaker when you never get to be a participant in the conversation when you’re just a thing that is talked about.
Right, and I think something that gets lost in that conversation about representation is that film and television are industries. That gay and trans roles are jobs that are not going to gay and trans actors who want to work.
There’s always this presumption that gay people are doing fine in entertainment, so this never needs to be helped. Because there have always been gay people behind the scenes and of course closeted on television. There is this weird misunderstanding that that also equals representation. I talk in my book about doing a podcast with this venerable comic and making the point that there are no nationally touring gay male headliners in standup. And they listed, like, eight or 12 names, like, “So-and-so is gay!” And we were on a podcast and I had to keep being like, “You’re not allowed to do that! That person is closeted!” It’s not just that we be present or get these jobs, it’s also that we be able to contribute some truth or what our experience is, and that has largely been denied to us.
So, how did you find standup comedy? And what has your experience as an out gay guy been like in that world?
I grew up in the 80s and early 90s when comedy was having a boom, and I really fell in love with the art form. It was so great, so compelling. I really enjoyed it. As soon as I had access to Comedy Central I was watching a bunch of it and had this very romantic connection to standup. I was, of course, closeted then in a way that was like deep denial, so I didn’t really understand that there was no one like me in standup. It was really only after I came out that I started doing it. But I started doing it in San Francisco, which was the rare city where there actually were all-gay shows—well, all-gay performers means half gay performers and half straight women. But still. I do sometimes ask myself, Why did drag not call to you? Because that is the tradition that takes that place in our culture. There are ways that that just comes down to arrogance on my part. It never crossed my mind that I would ever need to put on a wig and lip sync to have people pay attention to the funny things I had to say. That said, I do really like putting on wigs and lipstick. But only periodically.
Maybe we’re in another standup boom, but there’s almost no gay presence on all the Netflix specials and cable shows about the lives of comics.
I will give you an answer in three parts: First, culturally we are not that used to hearing a gay person’s perspective. Straight people, gay people, we are just not used to hearing a gay person talk about their worldview. One of the things that’s interesting about it—and this goes to the second part—is that it’s one of the few areas where gay women are actually much more represented than gay men. There was a Seeso show that’s now on Starz called Take My Wife, with Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher. Queer women have a much more significant place in standup comedy than men do. And a lot of people just don’t notice that or assume that if queer women are doing fine, queer men must be doing fine.
And the third part is that the industry just doesn’t know what to do with us. Entertainment still has a very crusty and mechanical understanding of diversity, which so frequently focuses on visible diversity. There is a notion that gayness is something you can’t see and doesn’t contribute to that. The thought that where someone coming from or what their perspective isn’t something people are thinking about. And the industry very sincerely doesn’t know what to do with us. The problem isn’t at the Netflix level. It starts much earlier than that when managers or agents are trying to look for who’s next. And when they’re thinking about that they’re looking at models for comedians who have existed before, and it’s only been in the last couple of years that you saw gay male comics at New Faces [at Montreal’s Just for Laughs festival]. It’s only been in the last couple of years that managers would sign gay male comics because they were like, “What am I gonna do with this person?” It’s been kind of annoying having to build a career where I was always having to sort of show them what to do with me. At a point in time when I had been making very good money for an extended period of time, I still had trouble finding a manager who would rep me. Where nice, attractive, funny straight men I knew who had never made a dime off of standup still had representation because they understood where the path would go. But when the path isn’t there yet, the industry is gonna be risk-averse.
But about Netflix and other venues, they don’t understand that there is an absence. And the other big problem is that there isn’t an audience. Gay women go to standup events. Gay men go get drunk and try to fuck. That’s wonderful. I love getting drunk and trying to fuck. But it has been interesting seeing the way that gay marriage and greater gay male domesticity has led to more gay male stand-up. Also, knowing that you’re not gonna go to a comedy space and hear someone talk about how gross faggots are—which is something that happened on the regular three years ago. We haven’t shown up and if we’re not interested in this thing and supporting it, it’s not going to have that additional economic energy. Most gay men performing standup today usually are performing for straight audiences, and that’s going to affect things. It leads to places like Neflix not understanding that this is a contributing voice to the standup scene.
Well, what do you think of gay men as an audience, just generally?
I think we’re not used to seeing ourselves represented. For us, there’s always a danger in exposure. We don’t think about it, but we manage the amount that we are coming out and being honest about our experience. When it’s somebody else, there is a danger in that. There’s this reaction like, That’s not what I’m like! When I was first on Chelsea Lately regularly, gay guys would say, “He shouldn’t be on there, he acts too gay!” Or “He’s fat! Gay guys aren’t like that!” Because there are so few honest representations it’s this question of, What does this mean about me?
But gays are so unused to having media that is for us. Gay male culture is so built around the consumption of media that we have to build ourselves. We like bringing our distance and our irony and our commentary to things. And standup doesn’t require that in the same way that drag or watching Clueless does. I think gay guys miss that. We hunger for it. And it’s been interesting watching the growth of the queer comedy scene in Brooklyn over the past five or six years with people like John Early or Julio Torres or Sam Taggart or Pat Regan, who are creating queer comedy that succeeds by feeling conspiratorial and requiring that you be savvy enough to be in on it. That makes gay guys feel like it resonates with them.
So, there are a lot of points in your book that made me think of The Velvet Rage—and to be fair I am someone who picked up that book thinking it was cultural theory and found myself reading a self-help book.
Those two things are not super distant when it comes to gay men, and I think that is a fascinating issue.
There’s a quote from your book, “If you’re going to risk it all, why not try to be magical?” And that almost feels like a rebuttal to The Velvet Rage, which to me seemed like it was all about not having to be special and magical.
Yeah…It is this question in gay male culture particularly: Is what we’re shooting for normalcy? Or what about this beautiful tradition of us being artists and thinkers because we’re not allowed to do practical things? With the understanding that a decent number of us will kill ourselves along the way. [Laughs] But I definitely didn’t think about it as a rebuttal to The Velvet Rage. The Velvet Rage is an astoundingly well-observed book, but I think the self-help-iness of, You should be fine just being normal, is a little bit impossible. We’re never going to be normal. We can be normal-er. Things can be way, way, way more normal for us. But we’re always going to be this weird, tiny subset of the population that is magically selected by some factor we don’t understand, to be different. I’m not saying we should have to be magical. I’m saying it’s neat that we are.
The thing is, when I talk about [My Life as a Goddess] being a survival guide, it is a guide to my survival. There wasn’t a place that I fit so I understood that I was going to have to transcend the boundaries that existed for people like me. I think that is a valuable power. I have a couple jokes in my act that are essentially about the fact that it’s gotten a lot easier to be gay in my lifetime and that’s a wonderful thing. But I think we should always remember those tools and powers that have enabled gay people to exist in this world because we’re still going to need them. We’re always going to be at least a little different. A lot of people don’t understand why I identify as Jewish as much as I do considering how culturally distanced I am from most Judaism.
I just think my mom raising me to understand that, You’re a little different and we have a culture that is about managing that difference, really made me see the importance of culture as a tool. Every couple of months there’s an article about the death of the gay bar or the death of the gayborhood or the death of gay culture because we’re being beaten and killed slightly less than we were 10 years ago. And look, being killed slightly less now is a good thing! But I think behaving as though the need for gay culture is over, or can be over is silly. It’s silly nonsense that straight culture is trying to sell to us. They’re trying to tell us that our culture is something bad that we only needed because we were marginalized and now we’re not, so it will all be fine. No. It is a magnificent tool that helps us see the world. Straight people have always been trying to keep gay people from communicating with each other and learning from each other, and it’s super important.
So to wrap up, what does being a goddess mean to you?
It really does come back to the story that I tell in the first chapter. It’s this story from Greek mythology of a goddess who was cursed to never be able to find rest anywhere, having some peasants be mean to her, getting pissed of and then remembering that she had powers and using them. It just comes down to so many times in my life I’ve felt powerless or alienated and had to be reminded, Guy, there’s a lot of shit you can do. Do some of it. Do something! Being a goddess isn’t about thinking I’m great or wonderful or shouldn’t be challenged. Goddesses are challenged all the time.
It’s just remembering that I have a voice and a perspective and the power to fight back and I should remember to use it.
QUOTED: "It’s really just a guide to my survival. I mean, we all survive, we’re all around. I’m not saying it’s special or different, I’m just saying these are my specifics."
"I think I wanted the book to be funny but to also tell a larger story about who I am, so people understand where my funny comes from a little bit better. You also sort of have to lay out a plot—like in a comedy, the plot ends happily. You know, things are okay. I think as time has gone on I’ve gotten better at understanding my life as a thing that’s good and rewarding."
"I wanted the book to feel like I had two drinks in me and I had cornered you at a party and I was just talking your ear off about something, so I was indulgent in my digressions. I was like, this should be me. I don’t have a good understanding of who my audience should be."
Guy Branum Is the Fat Gay Comic Goddess the World Needs Right Now
Author of the new memoir My Life as a Goddess talks depression, Nanette, and queer comedy.
BY MITCHELL KUGA
August 9, 2018
Guy Branum My Life As A Goddess by Guy Branum
Mindy Tucker
Guy Branum is a goddess.
No, the 42-year-old comedian and creator and host of TruTV’s Talk Show The Game Show can’t destroy the fourth world by unleashing 52 years of rain, but he has developed a far more useful superpower: the ability to see himself. “Most people see a weird, fat, unsexy guy who is wearing cargo shorts even though he should know better,” he writes in his new book, My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through Unpopular Culture. “I can’t decide if you think I’m beautiful, but I do get to decide if I’m going to feel beautiful, and from the moment I first tried it, I’ve been addicted.”
My Life as a Goddess spans Branum’s journey from an unusually large, unusually smart, unusually effeminate child to his unlikely Hollywood ascendance, as an openly gay comedian and writer for legends like Joan Rivers, Chelsea Handler, and Mindy Kaling. It’s a story about transformation through poignant self-revelation, funny anecdotes, and dishy celebrity gossip — but the collection of essays is not your typical memoir.
Through the maze-like tunnels of his singular mind, Branum queers the structures of the genre, examining his life through a potpourri of references that include Ursula, Joan Didion, and the geographical history of Punjab. A shrewd critic, he connects a passage from “Bohemian Rhapsody” to his coming out story, arguing that Freddie Mercury’s lyrics represent “the emotional displacement of closetedness.” He wrestles with Delirious, Eddie Murphy’s casually homophobic comedy special, which both compelled him towards a career in stand-up and sparked self-hatred. And he zooms in on a tiny moment from The Graduate, pondering the nuances of Mrs. Robinson’s voice as she orders a martini, a fertile source of his gay liberation.
Over drinks at a bar in Brooklyn, Branum spoke with them. about My Life as a Goddess, his issue with Hannah Gadsby’s comedy special, and why it’s so hard to see ourselves reflected in queer comedians.
As the host of a show where you’re usually asking the questions, how does it feel to be on the other side of an interview?
Well I’m not just the host of a show — I’m the host of a show that criticizes people for not being good enough as guests, so I feel truly terrible when I don’t do a good enough job. So that is stupid pressure for me when I am being interviewed.
The book tackles a lot of different topics, but the throughline feels like you’re wrestling with what it means to love yourself.
It’s really just a guide to my survival. I mean, we all survive, we’re all around. I’m not saying it’s special or different, I’m just saying these are my specifics. I think I wanted the book to be funny but to also tell a larger story about who I am, so people understand where my funny comes from a little bit better. You also sort of have to lay out a plot — like in a comedy, the plot ends happily. You know, things are okay. I think as time has gone on I’ve gotten better at understanding my life as a thing that’s good and rewarding.
That idea of a happy ending reminds me of Hannah Gadsby’s recent comedy special Nanette. Like your book, she’s reconciling with the tension between comedy and trauma. Did you struggle with that?
No, because for me the way you make it funny is overlaying your perspective and saying, at the end of things, no one else gets to define your life without you also getting to define your life. I kind of disagreed with Gadsby’s point, which was fascinatingly constructed and built. It’s a great show that made me think so much about stand-up myself. But I don’t necessarily agree with her idea that jokes are restrictive or that jokes are violent. I think jokes are ambiguity. I think jokes are forces being set against each other and we laugh because we can’t make heads or tails of it, we don’t know which one is the right answer. I think if a joke doesn’t tell the whole of your story, write more tags, put more jokes in there.
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You also wrote that Nanette “continues the narrative that queer comics don’t do regular stand-up and that regular stand-up is not a place for queers.” What do you think it’s going to take for there to be a nationally touring openly gay comedian?
I think gay guys showing up. But also, we’re so bad at telling stories about ourselves. We’re just so bad at it. Anytime we make a gay thing it has to be generally appealing so that we can potentially sell it to straight women. That’s a little bit annoying. We have to figure out how to get better.
What else is getting in the way of gay audiences showing up for gay artists?
They’re not used to seeing people like them, and they’re too aware of the ways that it reflects them too accurately, and too aware of the ways it doesn’t. And it feels uncomfortable. They know how to watch a Robyn concert. But some sexy gay guy who is on stage — is he a proxy for you?
Whatever Troye Sivan is, it’s at least good that the person singing about sex is singing about gay sex and it’s an actual gay person who you could have sex with. And probably as time goes on, just mathematically, most of us will have sex with him. Although that is still a relatively restrictive view of what a gay person can be. It just takes more. I think we are hungry for this.
You’ve said that as a fat gay comic, gay people question why you’re given a microphone to speak on their behalf.
In most ways, being fat is perfectly fine in stand up. It is a rich tradition. But when I was first on Chelsea Lately, the reactions were either “He shouldn’t be there, he’s too gay,” or “He shouldn’t be there, he’s too fat, gay guys aren’t like that.” We’re used to looking at sexy people. The people we’re used to seeing on raised platforms at gay bars are gogo dancers and drag queens, just needing sexualization or some kind of distance to make it comfortable.
I think for such a long time gay guys have been told by society that you’re allowed as long as you’re perfect in every way. As long as you’re funny and sexy and have a perfect body and are in every way satisfying the needs of this heroine in this romantic comedy, you are allowed to be in the periphery. And it’s a wonderful thing to aspire to and be fascinated by. So many guys have successfully turned themselves into that, and I am so proud of them and envious and appreciate the degree to which those guys will sometimes have sex with me. But also I’m not that and I can’t be that. I also refuse to accept that I just have to know my place because of that. Like, it was an interesting step to be like, no one can dismiss me from homosexuality. I got my place at the table. Also, I think we overly tell this story of gay guys being bitchy to each other. In the vast majority of my experience gay guys are nice and sensitive and cooperative and want to have a good time. And that’s lovely.
People from my hometown are only going to hate this book. But everyone else has a fair chance.
When you were writing this book, was there an intended audience you had in mind? Did you hope that a certain kind of person would read this?
I wanted the book to feel like I had two drinks in me and I had cornered you at a party and I was just talking your ear off about something, so I was indulgent in my digressions. I was like, this should be me. I don’t have a good understanding of who my audience should be.
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I want gay men to be better at understanding and appreciating culture that is about us and not through the proxy of a woman. I wish more gay guys had read David Halprin’s How To Be Gay, but I also know they’re on their own journeys. So my intended audience is people not from my hometown. People from my hometown are only going to hate this book. But everyone else has a fair chance.
What was the hardest topic in the book to tackle?
It was very strange, because the first chapter I wrote in the book was about my dad. I felt bad about writing it because he’s not here to be mad at me about it. And also it’s strange that I’ve now given it to strangers, and they now get to have an opinion about my relationship with my dad. And that feels weird. But really the hardest chapters to write were figuring out, in some honest way, my stories about celebrities that I’ve worked with. How to not be an asshole, but also not to be like, “everything was great.”
In the book, you discuss your struggles with depression. Do you think that’s a harder subject to breach for gay people, particularly gay comics, because of this pressure to be carefree, happy and funny?
I think there’s a reason we’re called “gay.” It is always the question of “What is the fucking point of me?” and that can turn into depression sometimes. I think in lacking the structures that constrain and guide straight people’s lives there are a lot more questions, and that means we can answer them however we want, which is really cool. But it also means we don’t have the security of those things. That’s why gay men and women have been making culture, and have always been creating reasons for themselves and ourselves to exist. And that’s exciting and cool to me.
What would you score yourself for this interview if you were on Talk Show The Game Show?
I was late; I was a little befuddled. I would say a four or five out of 10.
That’s not very good.
People rarely get below a four or five. Look, there have been times at the live show where people have gotten ones or zeroes, and god knows it was earned. Usually by that time they’ve just been thrown out of the game because they were boring.
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Print Marked Items
meet GUY BRANUM
BookPage.
(Aug. 2018): p25.
COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
Q: What's the title of your new book?
My Life as a GODDESS
Q: Describe the book in one sentence.
A Boy Learns His Way Out
Q: What's one thing everyone should know about Yuba City, California?
Yuba City, CA and environs produce more Peaches than the State of Georgia
It is also sad anti-intellectual & Boring
Q: What are three books that influenced you as a young reader?
1. From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsberg
2. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
3. The 1980 World Book Encylcopedia volume "M"
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Q: What's your proudest accomplishment?
Publishing This Book
Q: What three things would you want with you on a desert island?
1. Flint & Steel
2. A newly gayandinto big guys Henry Cavill
3. A Ritz Carlton Hotel
Q: Words to live by?
"A great artist is never poor."- Karen Blixen
MY LIFE AS A GODDESS
In the hilarious and poignant My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture (Atria, $26,
288 pages, ISBN 9781501170225), comedian Guy Branum finds humor and inspiration in his search for
belonging. Branum's delightful stories cover everything from the truth about Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the
real meaning of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." Branum is an accomplished TV writer, podcast host and
host of the very funny "Talk Show the Game Show" on truTV.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"meet GUY BRANUM." BookPage, Aug. 2018, p. 25. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A547988078/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=165ba69b.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A547988078
QUOTED: "Keenly observant and intelligent, Branum's book not only offers uproarious insights into walking paths less traveled, but also into what self-acceptance means in a world still woefully intolerant of difference."
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Branum, Guy: MY LIFE AS A
GODDESS
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Branum, Guy MY LIFE AS A GODDESS Atria (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 7, 31 ISBN: 978-1-5011-7022-5
A gay stand-up comedian considers his life through personal essays that also ruminate on problems and
paradoxes of modern American culture.
Branum was a born misfit who found early solace in Greek mythology. He especially loved Leto, a
beleaguered goddess who taught him the importance of believing in himself when no one else did. HalfJewish,
overweight, and "intellectually aggressive," the author struggled to find a place in his hometown of
Yuba City, where Oklahoma Dust Bowl descendants fired "guns into the air and yell[ed] racial slurs" at
Indian immigrants. Branum educated himself about the outside world through reading and watching old
sitcoms. Suburban witch Samantha Stephens, of Bewitched fame, became his symbol for the magic he
sought in order to escape a hated blue-collar existence. By high school, Branum could no longer deny the
desires that had surfaced in his early teens. Still, he remained closeted. He found comfort in friendship with
three Punjabi girls trapped into asexuality by the conflicting demands of their culture. At Berkeley, he wrote
for the humor magazine, ran for student office as a member of his own party (CUM, the "Cal Undergraduate
Masturbators"), and wrote an article about Chelsea Clinton that resulted in a visit from the Secret Service.
He attended law school at the University of Minnesota only to realize that he "had no business" becoming a
lawyer and mimicking straightness. After graduation, Branum stumbled into adult functionality, discovered
his passion for stand-up comedy, and moved to Los Angeles. There, he worked his way into writing jobs for
Chelsea Lately and The Mindy Project, all while learning to love himself in West Hollywood, the
"ketamine-stoked crucible of shallow gay self-consciousness and derision." Keenly observant and
intelligent, Branum's book not only offers uproarious insights into walking paths less traveled, but also into
what self-acceptance means in a world still woefully intolerant of difference.
Wickedly smart, funny, and witty.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Branum, Guy: MY LIFE AS A GODDESS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543008852/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4ec41e6f.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A543008852
QUOTED: "a funny account that most readers of modern comedic memoirs will enjoy."
Branum, Guy. My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture
Cori Wilhelm
Xpress Reviews. (Aug. 3, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
Branum, Guy. My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture. Atria. Aug. 2018. 288p. notes. ISBN 9781501170225. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781501170249. MEMOIR
With a foreword by actor and comedian Mindy Kaling, this collection of essays by stand-up comedian and actor Branum (Talk Show the Game Show; Chelsea Lately) is a humorous memoir full of anecdotes, trivia, and entertaining observations on American pop culture. Branum offers insight into the life of a gay, overweight man finding his place in the modern world, including taking a "wrong turn" by enrolling in law school, coming out to his mother, writing an article as a Berkeley student journalist that resulted in a visit by the Secret Service, and, finally, earning fame as a comedy writer. The book is rife with footnotes, containing both bits of trivia and Branum's sidebar commentary, adding context. While the footnotes could be potentially distracting, readers will get used to them quickly and even look forward to them in subsequent chapters. The author's intellect and vocabulary, paired with the extensive footnotes, might make the book slightly less accessible to mainstream readers than its contemporaries (such as Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?), but its wit and short chapters will keep readers going.
VERDICT A funny account that most readers of modern comedic memoirs will enjoy.--Cori Wilhelm, SUNY Canton Coll. of Tech. Lib.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wilhelm, Cori. "Branum, Guy. My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture." Xpress Reviews, 3 Aug. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A550013862/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a4967996. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A550013862
QUOTED: "This could have been a typical Hollywood memoir; the story of someone triumphantly making it from one side of the television screen to the other. But, Guy has rarely fit the expectations thrust upon him. This book is no different and all the better for it. Instead, readers get a tour of his life and the pop culture landscape with one of the funniest and wittiest tour guides in town."
‘My Life as a Goddess’ by Guy Branum
Review by Alex Tunney
July 15, 2018
Guy could have taken an easier route. He could have slapped together a book of funny essays, really leaning into being #relatable while dishing a little dirt. It would have been fine.
However, Guy has always been interested in the relationship between real life and artifice as it manifests pop culture, what it illuminates and what it warps, which can be seen and heard as he hosts Talk Show the Game Show and the Pop Rocket podcast, or in his stand-up. So instead of simply being some stories put to page, My Life Is A Goddess is a collection of field notes from a life lived alongside the worlds presented to him in television and movie screens, creating something that is equal parts storytelling and media criticism.
Throughout the chapters, readers follow Branum’s life as gay Jewish man, starting with his childhood in a rural town outside Yuba City, in Northern California. Looking to escape a place that doesn’t understand him, he searches for interesting places in books and on television. Then, he gets his ticket out–physically, not just metaphorically–by attending Berkeley College. Later, while attending University of Minnesota Law School, he finds himself deeply miserable and fearful of a future ahead that consists of him in the closet and trying to make it as a lawyer. After coming out to his parents and finishing his law degree, he does a soft reboot on his life by returning to his college town. It is there where he begins doing stand-up comedy, eventually landing one gig after another writing for TV shows.
Strewn through these tales are various thoughts on television, which serve as either a bizarre window to the outside world or a funhouse mirror reflection. He discusses how most fat people in media only seem to exist as characters who struggle with their weight, how the witches on Bewitched subversively played with the structure of the suburban household, the complicated relationship gay men have with their own representations on screen, and the queer narrative of My Best Friend’s Wedding.
The undercurrent of this book is Guy’s veneration of words and stories. From an early age, there was reverence to the power of words. Reflecting on a situation when he forgot the word of something he wanted, he captures his realization of the importance of language:
This strange little hunger of mine changed me. The same way my hunger for snacks made me fat, my hunger for words engorged me. It made me fit into spaces differently. Whether I realized it or not, I had wanted these words for the power they would give me. […] But there were more private and subtle powers I wanted, too. I wanted to be able to explain ways I felt that did not make sense. I wanted to put words to loneliness, desires, and fears that it seemed my classmates and cousins didn’t have.
It is no surprise then that Guy has been focused primarily on television, a tool for telling stories to a mass audience. Stories often, in one way or another, tell people what society expects of them. They also provide windows to other worlds, possible alternatives. There is a power in an understanding of the former and a power in the imagination of the latter.
What elevates the writing beyond an assortment of thoughts and anecdotes is Guy’s honesty and the heart at the core of the book. Regarding the former, this not a book in which he trumpets himself to be a pure hero, nor is it a story of his triumph. Guy fully admits to bouts of pettiness and less-than-savory moments. There’s a reason why the book is called My Life As A Goddess and not My Life As A Saint: goddesses through out mythologies are often beings of great power, but not always of great nobility. (That and the bookends of the book are about how he’s inspired by the stories of Leto and Durga, respectively.)
As for the heart, I think the best example of this is the chapter, “The Man Who Watched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” Through his understanding of the titular movie, Guy explores the complicated relationship between him and his now late father–the story of two men who don’t quite understand each other as way to understand the real lives of two men who never fully understood each other. This early chapter makes it clear that Guy is not throwing out these discussions of pop culture solely because he has a wealth of knowledge about it, but because he uses it as lens to view the world, even with the most personal of experiences.
The book is a cocktail of asides, digressions, footnotes, hyper-specific references to somewhat obscure pop culture items, and a voice that is equally self-deprecating as it is proud. If the list prior appeals to you, then absolutely pick up this book.
But while I have this cocktail metaphor, let me extend it by saying: one should take a metaphorical sip before reading by watching/listening to his shows and comedy. If you’re familiar with his work, the book can take the vibe of a friend sharing stories, discussing things at brunch. Without the context–knowing that he regularly bounces off people and generously loves other people’s contributions–I could see the sharing of his thoughts coming across as pontificating. That, or wait for the audiobook.
Even though it is labeled as a memoir, it’s a better read as an essay collection, one that also happens to detail a life in chronological order. It may seem like a distinction without a difference, but it will make his digressions, such as a chapter that initially purports to be about football but ends up being a briefing on the history of Indian-American culture in his rural hometown, feel less like detours and more like taking the scenic route.
Again, this could have been a typical Hollywood memoir; the story of someone triumphantly making it from one side of the television screen to the other. But, Guy has rarely fit the expectations thrust upon him. This book is no different and all the better for it. Instead, readers get a tour of his life and the pop culture landscape with one of the funniest and wittiest tour guides in town.
My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir through (Un)Popular Culture
By Guy Branum
Atria Books
Hardcover, 9781501170225, 288 pp.
July 2018