George Lopez - Why You Crying?: My Long, Hard Look at Life, Love, and Laughter

I must confessIm a crying mess.

A newly crowned Miss America, a Barbara Walters interviewee, your average second grader, they have nada on me.

Now, dont get the wrong idea. Im notNOT a blubbering fool or the kind of guy who cries at weddings. The tears I shed are often private. I cry sometimes thinking about the father I never knew, the mother I never really had. I break up thinking about how long I lived on the defensivenever smiling, never comfortable with myself or my body. I cry over the loss of the comic genius Freddie Prinze Sr. and the physical suffering of Richard Pryor. I still tear up at the thought of seeing my grandfatherthe only real man in my lifelaid out in the funeral home. I cry, believe me, I cry, over my deeply dysfunctional family.

My grandmother, Benita Gutierrez, inspired the title of this book.

Come over here. Why you crying? Why you crying? No, tell me for real. Why you crying?

Because you hit me.

Liar, I barely touched you. You want me to hit you for real, cabrn? You want me to HIT YOU FOR REAL? Mira, you cant even touch him because right away, he starts crying, hombre. Mr. Sensitive.

Actually, shes done more than inspire the title. My grandmother is the essence of my entire stand-up act and television show. She was hilarious and she didnt even know it;it was her attitude. I didnt know comedy could come so cold and often so cruel. She wasno other word does it justicejust mean. Her sarcasm ran deep. Like when I was I dont remember how old, and I asked, Where do babies come from? and she said, Whores. Now go play.

You know the saddest fucking thing? One day I found a picture at the house of me and my high school girlfriend with her arms around me. I weighed about 175 pounds at the time, damn near what I do now, having dropped 50 large over the last year. But all I can remember from those days is how fat I felt, and how every fucking ounce of that godawful feeling was fed day in and day out by my grandmother. How could I be like that? Be that tall and that thin and still feel like I weighed 300 pounds?

I became a comedian as a way to cope with this kind of wretched psychological abuse, a life so sad it had to be funny. These days, Im using all the tears and heartbreak to make folks laugh. Over the past two years Ive sent tens of thousands into gales of laughter, ripping up places one hundred times the size of the clubs I bombed in during the early nineties, otherwise known as the I Hate Me years when I was the Angriest Most Depressed Man Alive. Didnt have a manager, an agent, or much of a life, a stray cat on the loose, drowning my sorrows in alcohol, undone by the fact I had become what I swore to myself I never would: a nobody.

You see, Im as tragic as anyone out there. Maybe a little more so. As a little boy, I grew up angry, alone, teased, and tormented. I grew up around Nobodies as a Nobody wanting to be something else. And thats as true a statement as Ive ever said.

And now, after twenty-four years of struggle on the stand-up circuit, Im swimming in the mainstream. I have a family sitcom on ABC television, which has turned out to be the first Latino-based prime-time hit since the early 1970s when Freddie Prinze Sr. starred on Chico and the Man. My show, George Lopez, is powering into its fourth season on ABC, a lifetime for Latinos on network TV. In it I play what could have beenthe manager at an airplane parts factory married to a sassy wife with two challenging kids and a mother only my grandmother would love. Hailed by critics as a cross-cultural success (our audience, on average, is nearly 90 percent non-Hispanic), we regularly dominate the twelve-to-forty-nine-year-old demographic coveted by advertisers.

So, yeah, Im a crier. There are tears of sadness and tears of joy, tears of pain and tears of heartache. And these days? Tears of gratitude and tears of triumph. Yeah, Ive cried every last one of those babies, and Im not ashamed to admit it.

To me, tears are tiny drops of remembrance, portals to the past. They bleach the dirty laundry of my life. Theyre my release. A sign Im alive. Thats why people have tears in their eyes when they laugh, because the humor hits them deep in a place thats harsh but real. When Im onstage doing my thing, the audience and I are connecting to our individual embarrassments and pain. But this time, the tears let us know that weve moved on. That were strong enough to meet on the most intimate of terms, allowing someone into your heart.

Well, welcome to my heart.

Why you crying? No, tell me for real.

N o matter what the Secret Service says, I swear I didnt steal it, man. Why is it when somethings missing, the first face people look for isbrown?

Okay, so I did have it in my possession. In my jacket. After the president of the United States of America had already left the stageOh, all right, I took it.

What can I tell you? It was a once-in-a-lifetime moment: March 2003. Im up on stage performing for the pleasure of George W. Bush and his wife, Laura. It was probably the most important gig a stand-up comic could ever have, and I was a little unsure. Trouble was, I didnt think that much of my act would work in Washington. Now, at The Ice House in Pasadena or the Improv, say, in Brea, no problem. Id come out, like always, decked out in a suit, no intro, just my signature song, WARs Low Rider pumping through the speakers, and start right in.

The Chicano? Man, Chicanos are their own breed. Even though were born in the United States, we still have accents. I know, huh. I know, eh. You think were from Canada. I knew, eh. Tell em, eh.

We add words that arent there. We make up words. Other people say, Are you going? Chicanos say, Hey, are you going, or not?Or not? And how many times have you been in the store and your moms yelling, Mijo, is this what you wantedor what?Or what?

Or, How long you guys been here? We berly got here. I just arrived, eh. Im berly here ten minutes, eh? Berly?

They never let you get too confidentthats the mentality of the Mexican family. You know, you use a big word and right away, Hey, cmo est? Ah, I got a new job and I have to go to Orientation. Oh, youre the big man now. Toilet paper on your shoe, cabrn. Caca hand. Orien-tay-shun.

But at the historic Ford Theatre in Washington, DC, I was dealing with an entirely different group of people. I guess you could call it diverse. Out of the six-hundred-person crowd, there were about two hundred white people, three hundred really white people, and about a hundred people so white they were pink. The only Latinos within ten miles were either carrying trays or parking cars.