“I was such an insecure, warped creature that I needed that laughter to feel good about myself.”
This was the actor Rainn Wilson’s response to my question about why he’d always made jokes as a kid. He explains that when you are in a lot of pain but figure out that you are naturally funny, you start making jokes to distract yourself and others from your misery. It’s a kind of “emotional substitution,” he said.
Wilson’s childhood was completely unstable. The family’s economic situation was precarious at best. His mother abandoned the family when Rainn was 2 years old; he didn’t see her again until he was 14. Desperate and despondent, his father quickly entered into a tense, loveless second marriage and converted the family to the Baha’i faith. Wilson’s upbringing was, in his own words, characterized by “confusion, anxiety, and alienation.”
At 18, Wilson escaped to college in New York City and studied acting, resolving to be finished forever with his dysfunctional family and their weird religion. He could not outrun his demons, however. Depression, loneliness, and anxiety hunted him relentlessly. He drank heavily and used drugs throughout his 20s and 30s, a form of self-medication that led, inevitably, to addiction.
At 40, his luck seemed to change when he scored the role of Dwight Schrute in the television comedy The Office. Almost overnight, Wilson became internationally famous. You might think that having people shout “I love you” from passing cars would fix his depression and give him an incentive to kick his habits, right?
