Dry

The adage that comedy is tragedy plus time is appropriate in Burroughs’s case. Few comedians would have a career otherwise. Emotional distance creates perspective through which we can examine past trauma through a fresh lens, and that lens for Burroughs is humor. Certainly, he is not lacking in raw material. His childhood was bizarre and abusive enough to send anyone to the therapist’s couch. With an abusive father addicted to alcohol, and a mother who abandoned Burroughs to her unethical psychiatrist when the boy was 13, Burroughs existed on the fringes; he lived in chaos and squalor, never attended school, fended for himself, and survived the abuse of a 33-year-old sexual predator who lived on the premises. The author’s stories—vividly recounted in his memoir Running With Scissors and synopsized in Dry—are grist for Burroughs’s tragic mill, and yet his tone throughout both memoirs is detached and comic. During the intervention at work where he tries to defend his indefensible behavior, his humorist’s eye can still observe his co-worker: “Rick is doing his best imitation of somebody who is not a psychopath” (21).