Comedian Rachel Kaly has been to the hospital more than 300 times. The Jury Duty actress has turned her years of mental health struggles and hospitalizations into what she calls “hybrid comedy,” a mix of brutal honesty and good writing that blurs the line between reality and fiction. Kaly has never been shy about oversharing, but her one-woman show, HOSPITAL HOUR , takes things to the next level. After a run at Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the show landed at Culture Club in Chelsea late last month, directed by Chris Fleming and produced by her friend Bob Odenkirk . It’s Kaly at her most unfiltered, and maybe her funniest. To celebrate, she called up Odenkirk to talk about suffering, cynicism, and the view from NYU Langone.—SIENA BERGAMO
RACHEL KALY: I look like shit, which you don’t have to comment on, but how are you?
BOB ODENKIRK: I’m good. How are you doing?
KALY: I’m okay. I’ve walked four miles so far today.
ODENKIRK: Do you find walking therapeutic?
KALY: Extremely. I don’t listen to anything, I just walk.
ODENKIRK: You don’t pump information into your head?
ODENKIRK: So the show is called Hospital ?
ODENKIRK: Hospital Hour . Because it’s an hour long?
ODENKIRK: It’s tight. Also, you say it fast.
ODENKIRK: I’m not observing that in a critical manner. When I see these kinds of shows, I want to cut out all the fat. But you already cut out all the fat, and what’s great about that is the audience very quickly realizes, “I have to listen because this is happening.”
KALY: I’m really spitting it out at them. It’s like I’m doing my version of Hamilton .
ODENKIRK: Your solo Hamilton , regarding not the establishment of the country, but rather the establishment of Rachel Kaly as a human adult, understanding herself.
ODENKIRK: You’ve been to the hospital, you say 300 times?
KALY: I think it’s more. I might be cheating a little bit, because a lot of these programs I went to are called IOP, Intensive Outpatient Programs. You go to the hospital to do them, so I’ve probably actually gone like 600 times, but I’m not going to say 600.
ODENKIRK: Well, I’m not going to ask you what your favorite hospital is.
KALY: My favorite in terms of vibe, is NYU Langone because it’s on the water. So when you’re laying down in your room, you have an amazing view and they have big TVs.
ODENKIRK: Those are two things you should have, a nice view and a large TV.
ODENKIRK: What’s the best show or movie you’ve ever watched in the hospital?
KALY: Wow. There was one day where I was doing a program and Ellen was on. It was an enjoyable episode. I don’t know if it was the best, but it was the most memorable. It resonated.
ODENKIRK: I want to tell you that there’s something very healthy about your relationship to the hospital, to me. I think a lot of people see getting medical help as something to avoid at all costs. I’m not going to speak for you, but I think you see it as a part of life to not feel any sense of judgment of yourself over it.
KALY: Yeah, it’s a resource in crisis that I use. But it has its limits, and you often have to advocate for yourself. Sometimes they’re actually not looking out for you and that’s hard, but I think when you have the ability to find the right care, the best thing to do is to use it. I always try to help people find the right care for them, because it can be lifesaving when it’s right. But I don’t feel any shame about it.
ODENKIRK: I mean, take advantage of it. It frustrates me when I talk to people and they’re having challenges and I go, “Well, why don’t you go buy five books about that?” And they’re like, “What?” I go, “There’s 10,000 books about any goddamn thing you are dealing with, go buy five of them and see what other people fucking figured out.”
KALY: Yeah. People can be avoidant, which is a strategy, but I think it’s worth investigating why you don’t want to deal with things. And sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you’re like, “If I think about this, I’m going to do something bad.”
ODENKIRK: And compartmentalizing it is healthy.
KALY: Yeah. There are times when people aren’t ready to confront things, but I’ve gotten to crisis points where it’s like, if I don’t confront it, then I can’t continue. So, it’s sort of like I’ve twisted my own arm a little bit, but now it’s like, do I want to go to the hospital? Usually not, but if I have to, I will.
KALY: Something that really helps me decide if I’m going to go is when you go to the hospital, they take your phone away. And I have to decide if I really don’t want to be with my phone for five hours, how bad am I feeling to not be able to scroll Instagram? And that is a very helpful metric for me in deciding when I’m going to go to the hospital.
ODENKIRK: And there are times, no doubt, you’re implying, that you go, “Yes, please.”
KALY: Sometimes I go to the hospital just so they take my damn phone.
ODENKIRK: I think the simple way for a people to relate to it is having a sick day or two or three and going, “This is fucking great. This is just what I needed. Why did I have to wait to get sick to do this?”
KALY: Yeah. Sometimes you just got to catch your bearings a bit.
ODENKIRK: But I don’t want to diminish your challenges. I’m excited about the way in which your work makes mental health, and your personal pursuit of it, a subject of conversation of humor. And this is something I think about when I watch your show because the audience laughs through this whole show.
ODENKIRK: You write wonderful jokes, but your story is true. This is a true, traumatic series of events. I worry sometimes that people walk away going, “That was funny. I wonder if any of that happened.”
KALY: Well, I don’t care artistically if people think it’s true, because a lot of my more normal standup starts from a place of truth and then go somewhere crazy, where it’s the audience’s decision to figure out when I stop telling the truth. I have fun towing that line. Often my comedy comes from a place of truth and then I extrapolate on it because of my perspective and what I think is funny, but this show is my chance to be like, “Here’s how I remember stuff, and this is why I am the way I am.” I think as long as people are laughing, it’s okay if they’re questioning if I’m telling the truth, because some of it is so crazy, but I am.
ODENKIRK: I think it’s important. Sometimes I think there’s a dimension lost by saying, “These aren’t a joke. It’s hard.” These moments being described, they’re funny to laugh at, but a human being went through that. We just lost RJ Mitte, an actor from Breaking Bad , and I haven’t done many interviews about it, because just talking about it in a public way makes me feel like I’m diminishing it. But his struggles were very real. He tried to face the world with the bravest face he could find, which maybe didn’t help him in the end.
ODENKIRK: You must think about it sometimes.
ODENKIRK: I know the stories you’re telling are funny, but also when you think of that little girl that you were dealing with these conflicting feelings and sad feelings of—if I could use the word abandonment, but I don’t know if you feel that’s true.
KALY: I know. This is a show I’ve been doing for a couple of years, and in bringing it to Off-Broadway, I knew I needed to approach it with something new. And my mental health is something I didn’t really talk about in previous iterations of it. I was recently watching a Martin Short interview, and he was talking about losing his daughter to suicide. He said something that I thought rang very true, which is that having suicide be part of mental health is a little bit like having a terminal illness. You live with it and sometimes it doesn’t kill you and sometimes it does, but it’s just something that some people have to deal with. And that gave me comfort and gave me perspective like, “I might be someone who has to cope with this the rest of my life and I’ll figure it out, hopefully.” So doing this show and talking about it is a way to help me process it, and feel like I have a little more control over it. I love telling jokes and I love telling stories, and it just so happens that the ones that I think are most interesting and funny usually are things that have happened to me. I mean, I don’t know if I’ll ever do something this personal again. Sometimes I’m like, “Maybe I’m saying too much and maybe I don’t want people to know as much about me.”
ODENKIRK: Well, obviously I think it’s worth doing, that’s why I brought it up. You’re doing a version of CBT by doing the show, which is one of the things that can work and can genuinely help people.
ODENKIRK: What you just explained about Martin Short’s observation about mental health challenges—that verge on suicidal ideation is also giving a name to it, looking at it as a thing that is not who you are, but is a part of the stream of thoughts that run through you. And it will pass, but it will maybe come back too. You don’t have to feel connected permanently to it, which is great.
ODENKIRK: That’s true of everything that we think about ourselves or the world. To get that distance on these self-defining thoughts is really healthy. One of my favorite baseball players is Shota Imanaga. He’s a pitcher for the Cubs, and one of the things that’s great about him, Rachel, is when somebody hits a home run off him—and sadly, a lot of people hit home runs off him this year, he looks at it like, “Huh, look at that. Wow.” Then he does this little shrug like, “Oh, well.” There’s no alteration in his energy.
KALY: Right. You see things and you let them pass.
ODENKIRK: Yeah, you can’t do anything about that fucking thing.
KALY: I play basketball and I spend hours perfecting my jump shot. When someone guards me, I can’t do it, but alone, I have an amazing jump shot. And just the act of doing the same thing over and over and feeling the differences each time can be so meditative. I feel like it’s like that’s just what life is a little bit, is we’re kind of doing the same thing all the time, but sometimes it feels better or sometimes it feels worse and you adjust, and hopefully you get into a flow. I guess I wish I was a basketball player.
ODENKIRK: That really speaks to me, because I’ve had these different chapters in my career, and there are times when I’m like, “This is me, I feel great.” But there are probably some chapters there where I was like, “I’m doing what I should be doing, and that’s what we do.”
ODENKIRK: I’d definitely say during making Mr. Show [with Bob and David] .
KALY: I mean, wasn’t that the coolest thing ever?
ODENKIRK: That show was so fully how I saw the world, and what I wanted to do with my day and my brain and my time. I knew I’d probably never feel this way again, and I’m very lucky that I got to do this even once for any time. When David [Cross] wanted to move to New York, HBO said we could do another season. But they didn’t say, “Please do another season.” They said, “If you want.” And he was like, “No, I’m moving to New York. I can’t live here anymore.”
ODENKIRK: I don’t blame him. L.A. is not for everyone, and it’s not really for me, although my house is so great.
KALY: You got to do Architectural Digest . Have you ever done that?
ODENKIRK: I don’t give a fuck about other people, full disclosure.
KALY: You love your house and that’s enough. I just want to see it.
ODENKIRK: I got a question for you. How do you deal with the challenge that all Broadway actors go through, of doing it over and over and keeping it alive? We talked about this.
KALY: Yes, and you had an amazing suggestion, which was to incorporate the crowd a little bit. I think it keeps it fresh every night, because you never know what’s going to happen. And the audience reaction is so strong that that keeps me going, and I actually discover something new every time I do it. But sometimes when you’re doing the same type of comedy, there’s other stuff you want to be doing, your mind goes to, “Oh, I wish I was like yelling on stage and doing other stuff that I think is funny in other contexts.” And it kind of makes you be like, “What am I going to do next that is really different from this?”
ODENKIRK: Well, your next show will be fundamentally different if you want. I actually totally relate to that. Whatever I’m doing in my career, I want to do the opposite thing, almost.
KALY: Do you know what your next thing is going to be or you’re still figuring it out?
ODENKIRK: I’m not sure. I’m in good shape still and I like it and I would do it again. I have a couple of things that are all interesting, and I certainly want to do something else before I do that. I’m taking a bit of a break, just writing stuff and fucking around. Your show is at Culture Club?
KALY: It is in Chelsea under the High Line. It’s where Sleep No More used to be, which is hilarious, or not. It’s a cool building. At first I was like, “This doesn’t feel like Off-Broadway,” but the more time I spend in the building, the more I’m endeared to it. It feels like I’m in New York in the ’80s a little bit, which sounds amazing.
ODENKIRK: Cool stuff, man. I was in New York in the ’80s. That’s when I got hired at SNL , in ’87.
KALY: That’s so cool. I just went to SNL for the first time.
ODENKIRK: Did you have fun or was it stressful?
KALY: I had fun because I was just watching.
ODENKIRK: When you don’t work there, it’s easier to turn off that part of your brain.
KALY: I’m sure. I want to say one thing to my credit that I thought of.
KALY: What I like about the show is it’s very vulnerable at a time when a lot of people are claiming to be vulnerable by sharing stories online. Sometimes it’s like, “You’re kind of just saying nothing. You think you’re oversharing, but you’re not really.” But I think I really am. A lot of stuff I want to do is hybrid comedy that blends talking to real people and situations. I think I’m good at that, because I am vulnerable with people, and so it gets them to be vulnerable with me. A lot of times people come up to me after and will share something extremely personal or traumatic.
ODENKIRK: That’s great. Everyone should see this cool, hip, hilarious New York show. If you read Interview , you are the person who should be seeing this show.
ODENKIRK: When do we get to meet Andy Warhol?
ODENKIRK: Do you like Andy Warhol, Rachel?
KALY: I do. I am fascinated by him. And that woman who shot him?
KALY: I go to the MoMA and see his shit a lot.
ODENKIRK: I love that dude. You know why? Because he’s funny.
Source: Fashion
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