Adam Carolla - Daddy, Stop Talking! - And Other Things My Kids Want but Won't Be Getting

My father would read a book in his living room every Friday night. Ironically, the light by which he was reading was partly supplied by the lights from the North Hollywood High football stadium where I was playing. He never worked on Friday nights, he just preferred to stay home and read Leo Buscaglia rather than see me play for the North Hollywood High Huskies. He wasn’t interested in football and that was that.

This is a trend that continues today.

Last year, my dad called to say he wanted to come over and see the twins. I told him they were out on one of their many activities; I believe it was seeing the Harlem Globetrotters. I started going into how the kids were constantly jet-setting and doing amazing stuff. As an example, I casually mentioned, “I just did the voice in a big Disney movie, so they were walking the red carpet last night.” I waited a moment for him to ask the name of the movie, and what my part in it was. Never happened. He just moved on. That, or he thought I was lying.

It’s not like Dad hates the stuff that I do. It’s just not on his radar. He’s not the Great Santini, he’s the Great Doesn’t-Give-A-Shiti. For the entire time I have been doing my home-improvement podcast Ace on the House he’s called it Ace on the Roof . And on the very first morning of my radio show after I took over from Howard Stern, I famously gave him a ten-thousand-dollar challenge. There were five questions of Adam Carolla trivia. I told my dad that if he got the first one right, he’d walk away with ten grand. My very own ten grand. It wasn’t money the station had put up, and we didn’t have a sponsor. I had my checkbook next to me as I gave him the questions. I was that confident in his impending failure. With each question, the payday would be cut in half. So if he screwed the pooch on the first one he still had a chance at five thousand, then twenty-five hundred, and so on.

Now, bear in mind, this is my father. His best financial year ever was about forty-seven thousand dollars. He now had a chance to make more in one minute than in two months of the best year of his life, and all he had to do was provide some well-known facts about his own son.

Here was the first question, for ten thousand: “Your son was on a legendary radio station for the past ten years. Name that radio station’s call letters and number.”

As the drum roll rolled, he stammered out an answer. He knew it was K-rock but couldn’t spell it: KROQ. He went with KROC. I decided to be merciful, and see if he could pull out the number, 106.7. He said 950. Jimmy, who was in the studio that day and sitting next to him, noted he didn’t even have the right frequency.

Then, for five thousand, I asked, “I did a television show on a popular cable network that had to do with puppets making phone calls. The name of that show was…” After a good minute of his hemming and hawing, I pulled the plug. I told him it was called Crank Yankers and then noted that Jimmy, again sitting nineteen inches from him, was wearing a Crank Yankers T-shirt. I was stunned on the third question when he was able to pull out my Loveline partner’s last name: Pinsky. Now, before you give him too much credit, Dr. Drew had recently given him a referral to a urologist and he needed Drew’s full name when he filled out the forms.

Credit where credit is due, my dad recently came over to see the kids and I had him watch the documentary I made on Paul Newman’s racing career. I was floored when he not only liked it, but said, “If you never do another thing, that will be enough.” I was astonished. I’ve never gotten a reaction from him like that on anything I’ve ever done. It felt like an Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment. He could have come out of the closet and broken cover as the world’s top gay CIA agent and it would have been more credible to me.

But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. When I showed the same film to my mother, she piped up with, “I’m not interested in the subject matter, but it held my interest.” I loved the documentary King of Kong . I’m not into arcade games but I enjoyed it. That’s the point of a documentary; it’s supposed to capture your interest in something you know nothing about. But that’s about as much of a compliment as she was capable of. She gave me what the great Albert Brooks, when doing my podcast, called “the complisult”: a compliment couched in an insult.

The saddest part is that in my mom’s mind, this was a compliment. But the message conveyed is that the thing I cared enough about to make a documentary about she was not interested in. The thing your son is passionate about is of no interest to you. Maybe I should do my next documentary on her, because I find her lack of interest in my interests very interesting.

Ultimately the lesson is this: whether it’s their finger painting when they’re three or their salesman-of-the-month award when they’re forty-three, you have to put in some telenovela-quality acting to pretend you give a shit. Because you do. Maybe not in your kids’ hobbies or minor accomplishments. No, the thing you give a shit about, or should, is your relationship with them.

3. DON’T BE A BUMMER

My parents were both total downers. My mom was a hippie who, ironically, had friends named Sunshine and Happy, but was a dark cloud and never mustered a smile. There was a constant bad vibe in my house growing up. I was inundated with messages about the indigenous people and how we were oppressing them, how horrible white people were, how it was all going to end in a nuclear holocaust anyway. These were great motivators for getting your kid up and ready for school. “Sure, son, you can go to school but it doesn’t matter. Khrushchev is going to nuke us all anyway.” You probably think I’m joking, unless you grew up in the sixties. Two of the most popular songs at the time were “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” by Peter, Paul and Mary, and “Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire. Here are a couple of lines from the McGuire tune.

This isn’t coming from some unknown singer/songwriter at a coffeehouse. This was a Billboard number-one song the year after I was born. This is what I grew up with. My parents lapped this shit up.

When I was somewhere in single digits my mom read one of those 1970s parenting books about how not to fuck up your kid. She must have fallen asleep before the end. I guess there weren’t enough pictures. When you’re reading one of these books, it’s already too late. The damage is done. Somewhere in the book it told her not to say, “I don’t like you,” but rather, “I don’t like what you do.” So at one point she used that line on me and I fired back instantly with, “I am what I do.” I must have been seven at the time, but I already knew that she was feeding me a bunch of hippie nonsense.

This is the same “love the sinner, hate the sin” mind-set that Christian conservatives have about the gays. Something I’m sure my uber-liberal mother would be completely against. Moreover, if on that day in the early nineteen seventies I had asked her to separate Nixon or Henry Kissinger from their actions and see them as people, she would have given me a dozen reasons why the logic she had just spat out didn’t apply in those cases.

So I bring the opposite of this message to my parenting. My kids are their actions. I’m never going to pull that “no matter what you do, I love you” bullshit. If Sonny decides to shoot up his college I’m not going to think, “Well, he’s still my son…” By that logic, we all could have been friends with Hitler. “Adolf, I love you man. But I don’t like what you do. The whole ethnic cleansing holocaust thing I don’t like. But you, as a person and a painter. Terrific.”