Culture That Made Me: Ruby Wax on Gay Byrne, Gaga, and Zelenskyy
Author and comedian Ruby Wax at her home in London in 2020.
Born in 1953, the comedian and TV presenter Ruby Wax grew up in a suburb of Chicago. She came to international prominence in the 1990s interviewing in a strident manner the likes of Donald Trump and Madonna.
She’s a prominent practitioner of mindfulness; in 2015, she was awarded an OBE for services to mental health. She has written two best-selling memoirs.
She is touring her show, I’m Not as Well as I Thought I Was, at the Everyman in Cork, on Thursday, October 17, and various other venues in Ireland. See www.rubywax.net
Growing up, I loved the anarchy in Dr. Seuss books – where his characters destroy the house and the parents lose their minds. Reading The Cat in the Hat was the first image I had of freedom. I stayed that way – that love of anarchy – with my books in my taste. I was sort of in the American Revolution – I was a troublemaker in my childhood, always.
I identified with Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. We’re in a similar situation now – the bringing down of the country and the underbelly of mayhem we have. It had a character in it – very Trump-like – who was a charismatic figure, and the reader saw the sham and the destruction that was possible with him. It ends in mayhem; if Trump wins, that's where we're gonna end up – each man for himself and the rich stay rich. It’s the dystopia that we're in now. The way Tom Wolfe wrote was so anarchic. Every line was rebellion.
Gay Byrne was a magnificent TV presenter. He did it with edge and he did it with compassion. He was sharp. That's the way to go. He challenged you. He was hilarious. Presenters have to have a good sense of humour otherwise it’s boring.
Mark Rylance is the best actor out there. He can completely change his persona. There's no sign of acting.
It's magnificent when you see him in, say, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem and then you see him in Twelfth Night and he becomes a female, playing Olivia. Nobody acts like that. He’s completely imbued by that character without any showy offing frills.
I loved Philip Roth’s American Pastoral – the discomfort of having everything, but something's wrong in the state of Denmark. Slowly, you see the cracks, the disappointment and the tearing down of this illusion of the American Dream. I could feel the earthquake underneath, the twists. All Philip Roth’s books were like that. Jonathan Franzen writes like that in his books too – total dysfunctionality. I felt I was living that life – the family being dysfunctional, and yet they think everything's normal on top.
Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance is my favourite book of all. It takes place in India in an unidentified city. You follow four characters from the underbelly of India, and you watch how they navigate turmoil. Some go under, some survive. It's little people and watching them scamper for safety, which reminds me of my parents being refugees, escaping from Vienna to the United States in 1939. Some survive, some don’t.
My clinical psychology professor at Oxford, Mark Williams, wrote a book called Finding Peace in a Frantic World. I gave him the title because mindfulness book titles can get too airy-fairy. He describes what mindfulness is, but without the woo-woo. Basically it's mind training the way you would physically train. It liberates you from your internal, nagging voice that says you're not good enough or trying hard enough. Mindfulness teaches you to watch thoughts not as a phenomenon, not as proof that they're you. Thoughts are not your identity. They come and go. If you don't hold on, and let them pass through, in seconds everything changes. Somebody said that mindfulness takes you from being upset about something to finding it amusing.
Lady Gaga is a genius. She's completely herself. There's no fakeness to her.
She's the most human of all pop stars, and yet she knows how to dress up, but she's totally human underneath. And her music – that voice is operatic.
Jennifer Saunders is a great comedian. She can write like a dream. I remember a line I had in a scene in Absolutely Fabulous: “She gave herself an accidental clitorectomy with a hand fan.” She has that ironic, vicious way of seeing human beings, but with great compassion. That's why I could write for her. I loved those characters.
A film I loved was Clockwork Orange. I'm always for the troublemaker, and these were the ultimate gang members and very sexy.
People found Clockwork Orange disgusting. I found it sexy. It aroused me as a child. I thought it was erotic, but vicious erotic.
I wept at the end of the David O Selznick black-and-white version of A Tale of Two Cities. It was about rebellion and the underdog taking revenge. I always feel like the underdog; I'm on their side. It’s a great love story. The Sydney Carton character at the end is about to be guillotined and he declares his love for the noblewoman played by Elizabeth Allan. I found that so dramatic.
The Wizard of Oz is my favourite film. It was the most exciting thing I'd ever seen – that they let Munchkins sing and the look of it and the witch. I could play that witch. Dorothy is lost. She finds somebody who gives her heart and somebody else who gives her courage and so on. That's sort of what my show, I'm Not as Well as I Thought I Was, is about. I go on journeys to find meaning. I meet various people. I joined a Christian monastery to find faith. I joined a 30-day silent retreat to find peace. I swim with humpback whales to find awe and amazement. I go on these big journeys, but I end up in a madhouse and Dorothy ends up in Kansas. They're the same thing. We’re always looking for something.
The Zelensky Story is a very good recent documentary. First, you see Zelensky as a comic; then you see him playing a president in a film and the audience are so enthralled that they make him the real president. The whole country, Ukraine, fell in love with him.
He’s total charisma. He performs in front of Putin as an actor and then you see Putin's face later as he's facing a president. It's magnificent. It takes you back to his original roots – to see this comic at work, who was a clown, and then you see the clown become a heavyweight.
Sam Harris is a Renaissance man – a neuroscientist, a mindfulness advocate, a biologist and a historian. In his podcast, he talks to, say, the great philosophers or somebody who's an expert on urban guerrilla warfare or the biggest brains there are now in AI and he dissects the topic. Whatever guest he's on, he's totally informed. You have to listen to Sam Harris.
