Why Is This Man Smiling?

Gary Gulman ’93 leaned forward and began speaking into the recorder. He’d read enough lousy celebrity profiles to know exactly how they’re supposed to begin. “This,” he declared, “is your first paragraph: Gulman sipped on an iced venti Americano in a personal cup. We were in a bookstore and he wore a Boston College hoodie and a schlubby hat that covered his unkempt hair.”

All of this was true, actually. Lousy celebrity profiles do start this way, and Gulman, whose recent HBO comedy special The Great Depresh has transformed him, at last, into one of those decades-in-the-making overnight sensations, was indeed wearing a maroon BC hoodie and an odd mesh hat. It was January and we were talking in a Barnes & Noble in Burlington, Massachusetts, a location picked by Gulman because it was halfway, more or less, between the BC campus and Peabody, where he was spending the night with his mother.

He likes to stay there when he’s in town for shows. There’s a lot of love, he said, even though—as anyone who’s seen the HBO special can tell you—their relationship is “complicated.”

When I became editor of this magazine, I couldn’t wait to introduce Gulman to the members of the BC community who’d yet to discover his comedy. A little more than a year later, an introduction is no longer necessary. The Great Depresh, which powerfully—and hilariously—details Gulman’s lifelong struggle with acute depression, has been a critical triumph and, more gratifying to Gulman, has been celebrated by many of the comics he admires. He’d spent the week prior to our meeting in Los Angeles, negotiating with Hollywood executives who want to do a movie, and he had just signed a deal for his first book. Gulman, it's fair to say, is red hot.

That's about the last thing he expected to be three years ago. At that point, his depression had become so severe that he’d moved back in with his mother. Gulman was more than two decades into an enviable career as a professional comic, with multiple specials and latenight TV appearances to his credit, yet just getting out of bed suddenly qualified as a successful day.

Gulman’s battles with depression go back to childhood, and may be hereditary. “My father was actually born in a mental institution,” he said. “It was like a family secret. I didn’t find out until my twenties.” His paternal grandmother, meanwhile, had bipolar disease, and then there was this other family member—“I don’t know if he would be considered depressed,” Gulman deadpanned. “He was more criminal. He dealt in stolen merchandise, stereos and TVs.”