March 2005
No Child Left Unsmiling
Comedian Michael Pritchard uses humor to teach kids about grief, pain, and how to take care of each other
by Traci Hukill
It’s a sunny Wednesday, and a minor miracle is under way at Neil Cummins School in Corte Madera. A pudgy kid is standing onstage trying not to cry and the fifth-grade boys aren’t laughing.
Outside the cafeteria, the clouds over San Francisco’s North Bay are performing their winter tumbling routine. Puddles on the playground and green on the hills indicate it’s January in northern California, this place where life is so good for so many and hardship is asked not to track dirt on the rug.
Inside the cafeteria, hardship is making an appearance right now in the round visage of Sam. You might recognize Sam from elementary school. Big glasses, a head of soft, bushy black hair, a doughy physique that will in time either condense to stockiness or soften to obesity. He could be the one who’s thin-skinned and anxious, a little too quick to cry or fly into a rage. The other kids crane their necks to see what he will say.
Sitting behind Sam onstage is comedian Michael Pritchard. Even when he is seated, it is clear that Pritchard is massive — 6’4”, 300 pounds. A loud, perspiring John Goodman look-alike with wiry gray hair and a cacophonous laugh, Pritchard has spent most of the last hour pacing in front of the third-, fourth- and fifth-graders, alternating between cracking them up with impersonations of oafish big brothers and bratty sisters, hushing them with stories of mistreated kids, and rousing them to recite slogans: Pain shared is pain divided. I is illness, we is wellness. Now Pritchard is seated like the Santa Claus of testimonials, leading applause for every child who stands up to talk about being teased or left out.
“And I will — not — let — anyone — laugh at you,” he promised before the first volunteer came up, a boy nervously twisting his sweatshirt. If a kid starts to fade from stage fright, Pritchard is there to prop him or her up with a hand on the outside of each arm.
“I had this friend, and people used to make fun of him and call him fat,” Sam begins.
“And you were afraid they would turn on you too, that you would be next?” Pritchard asks. Sam nods. “And what do you want to say to these people?”
“That we really should be nice to each other, because it would be a better place,” Sam manages.
“Let’s give Sam a great big hand for having the courage to come up here and share with us,” Pritchard booms like a football coach. The room erupts in cheers for the 15th time today.
In the low risers against the back wall, where the moms are, several women sniffle and reach for tissues.
Pritchard likes to explain what he’s doing here by telling a story about a third-grader he met once. When Pritchard asked if anyone had any responsibilities, the boy raised his hand.
“He said, ‘I have a responsibility, that when my dad gets drunk and beats on my mom, that I would take my baby brother and hide the baby in the closet so he doesn’t hurt the baby and shake him like he did before.’”
“I said, ‘Taylor, I don’t know if I was ready for all that, buddy, but I guess you needed to tell me right away, huh?’ He goes, ‘Yessir,’ and he starts to cry and I said, ‘Why do you think you needed to tell me?’ And he goes, ‘Mr. Mike, everybody needs to meet a kind stranger to tell their secrets to so they can get help.’”
Comedy and Connection
Pritchard was born in a small town in southeast Missouri, the youngest of four boys in an Irish Catholic family. In his stand-up comedy routine, loosely based on his life, Pritchard conjures a hamlet so sleepy that the chirping of crickets and the passing of cars on the highway — sounds he mimics with startling accuracy — were the entertainment. He also portrays, through an impressive vocal repertoire, an ogre of a father, a shrewish mother and three huge, dimwitted brothers who filled the youngster’s world with terror. Eight- to ten-year-olds love it.
The reality was far sunnier. Pritchard describes his parents, a pump salesman and a schoolteacher, as “just wonderful Catholic people” who would sometimes bring in foster kids to live with their own brood. The house was noisy and fun, and its youngest citizen thrived there and in the outside world, thanks in part to a knack for comedy and a sense of religious conviction. He relates this with a disarming lack of false modesty.
“I was always happy, I was a happy kid,” Pritchard says. “I prayed all the time, I laughed all the time, I was class clown. I made everyone laugh. I was warm and compassionate and funny and connected to the greater good of my classmates. I worried a lot about their feelings. And this was in first grade.”
The good times skidded to a halt when Pritchard’s father died of cancer. To save money, he had insisted on coming home to die, a 68-pound skeleton racked with pain, groaning in the bedroom. The end was agonizing for everyone. Pritchard, then 17, and his brothers reacted to the trauma in time-honored Irish tough-guy fashion; they drank and brawled. It was the beginning of Pritchard’s understanding of grief, the linchpin of his work.
During Vietnam, he served as a medic with the Air Force Reserves, unloading bodies from planes. “You want to know what a war veteran is?” he says. “It’s somebody who sees a lot of their own peer group dying.” Afterward, Pritchard went to work as a juvenile probation officer, first in St. Louis, then San Francisco. What he saw in his charges confirmed his suspicions: grief was driving people to harm those around them. It was tearing up whole sections of the social fabric.
“It happens every day in poverty areas of America,” he says. “All this grief. In the black communities where the violence level is up, they’re consistently grieving and therefore consistently angry because nobody hears their cries of pain. And then the cycle of grief: pain, anger, rage, violence.”
As he watched and learned from his wards, he also continued doing comedy. In 1980 he won the San Francisco International Stand Up Comedy Competition. As it happened, the same year he was named California Probation Officer of the Year. It seemed only a matter of time before day job and night sideline would come together.
It didn’t happen immediately. The comedy award launched him onto the stage with Robin Williams, Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld. He appeared in an Emmy-winning episode of “Taxi” as a gay man who drags Judd Hirsch’s Alex onto the dance floor, whereupon hilarity ensues. He was on “The Tonight Show” and “Roseanne.” His voice was featured in the Star Wars movies and on “Sesame Street.”
In 1987, the year Pritchard and his wife had a daughter, he shut the door on Hollywood. Instead of accepting more bit roles and guest appearances, he made a 12-part video series for high school students titled “The Power of Choice,” with volumes on topics like self-esteem, drugs, dating and parents. In 1991 a version for elementary students followed. A series for middle-schoolers came three years later. In 1996, seeing a ripening business opportunity, he and two friends formed Heartland Media to make and market more Pritchard videos. Now he tours year-round, speaking at schools, colleges and professional conferences across the country.
A key part of his act — besides the astonishing sound effects and impersonations of familiar character types, which always draw laughs — is frank discussion of the private wounds people nurse, be they from physical, sexual or emotional abuse at the hands of parents or from torment by a peer group. The follow-up is that people need to take care of each other.
“The most powerful gift that I teach, and the reason we have all this violence in the world right now,” Pritchard says, “is we’re not familiar with people’s grief and the sadness they carry around.
“It’s about connection. People just need to feel connected.”
Tending the Wolf at the Door
Pritchard laughs a lot in conversation, sometimes at things that aren’t that funny. Take the story of the crippled homeless guy with no arms who cussed Pritchard out after he fed him a bowl of chili. After the punch line, which is the guy calling him an asshole, Pritchard cackles with delight.
“I’m laughing because I know what he means,” he says. “If you know street talk, it’s ‘Thanks, brother.’ He just didn’t have those words.”
In Pritchard, the ability to laugh and the ability to reach out to other people are outsized features of his personality. But running beside them is also a powerful stream of anger. It surfaces when he talks about the executives of Enron “who hold the working class in malignant contempt.” It’s present when he talks about the education system’s misguided neglect of life skills, tools to help kids overcome suffering.
“Violence is an angry wolf at the door. If you don’t address it, you create it,” he says. “And there’s this frozen group of men at the top of the mountain talking about test scores, test scores, no child left untested. They’re worried about the brain and they’d better start talking to young people’s hearts, because we’re losin’ em.”
Pritchard likes to tell a story on himself. Five years ago, he was in a restaurant in San Rafael with a group of kids when a drunk ex-con from Atascadero, the state prison for the criminally insane, broke a beer bottle and cut two people. Pritchard grabbed a chair, hit him with it and chased him out of the restaurant. The next day, James, a Haitian kid who often hung out at the Pritchard house, confronted him. Pritchard tells the story with a thick faux-Haitian accent and palpable attitude:
“Yo, Mista Pritchard, I notice you didn’ use nonna those conflick resolution skills you’re always talkin’ bout. You just whack that guy inna head with a CHAIR. I guess you can’t use conflick resolution skills on crackheads, huh?”
At the memory, Pritchard dissolves into laughter. “I said, ‘James, there will be moments in your life when you realize that evil flourishes when good people stand by and do nothing. We don’t let evil come our way. We fight it.”
The bigger fight is against the sin of indifference, against isolation, against cruelty and greed. It’s against cynicism.
“We ought to be believers,” Pritchard says, “and when we’re believers, when we’re people who are taking care of each other’s heart, that’s when peace and safety fill a community.
“Like Carlos Castaneda said, when we find love, it’ll be like the fire that changes the world.”
Traci Hukill is a freelance journalist who lives in Monterey.
Pritchard’s videos are available from Heartland Media in San Francisco. 415-642-5828. www.hlmedia.com www.michaelpritchard.com.
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