Whitney Cummings Talks "Whitney" Criticism

[JamesG]

Can Whitney Cummings Get Some Respect?
by Vanessa Grigoriadis
11/18/12


Whitney Cummings' tendency to worry made it particularly hard for her to deal with the vitriol directed her way last year, plus she felt like she was the last to know.

“I was working so hard—either at the office or home, and never going out or online—and then one night I went to an NBC event,” she says.

“Everyone was treating me like I had cancer. ‘Are you hanging in there?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, this is the best time of my life!’ They said, ‘Everyone hated Seinfeld when it first went on the air,’ and, ‘You stay strong, girl.’ I Googled myself, which never ends well. I started realizing what was going on, and I went through trauma.”





For Cummings, some of the criticism, particularly that she was a poor role model for women, was hard to understand.

“I wasn’t trying to make a perfect character who has it all figured out,” she says.

“I’m interested in flaws. We’re allowed to have flaws. To me, the idea that women aren’t allowed to have flaws is the most anti-*feminist thing imaginable. Plus, I’m someone who just put two shows on the air with strong female leads, and I’ve got a writers’ room here with half women and half men. I’m inherently very good for women, or certainly well-intentioned for women.”





Cummings began frantically trying to turn the show around—but as a kid who learned a lesson that she had no one to rely on other than herself, she had a hard time listening to others. She tried softening her character and taking the focus off her by emphasizing the rest of the cast but felt that nothing worked. She began refusing to attend social events.

“I wouldn’t leave the house because I became so paranoid about who thought what about the show,” she says.





Soon after "Whitney’s" production began, her mother had a stroke, paralyzing the left side of her body. Later, she told Howard Stern, her sister, who had substance-abuse problems over the years, started doing heroin. Cummings called the dealer she was hanging out with, then sent her to rehab in Los Angeles, with a stop at the ER to treat pneumonia and gangrene.

“I just got lost last year,” she says. “And one of the biggest mistakes is that I didn’t keep doing stand-up because I physically didn’t have time.”



(Cummings made her name on Comedy Central roasts of David Hasselhoff and Joan Rivers, although she says she won’t do any more of them: “When you’re the underdog, it’s fine,” she says, “but now I'm like like, ‘Pick on someone your own size.’”)

“I moved to the Valley, and when you move to the Valley, your life ends. But there’s no place I want to be more in life than in the back room of the Comedy Store, with a bunch of comics, ripping on each other. That’s the closest thing to family I will ever have.”









But pity was not the feeling people had about Cummings last year. There was also jealousy. Because she became very, very rich. The fees for creating and starring in your own show, as she did on "Whitney", are sky-high, and then, in the spring, the news came out that "2 Broke Girls", for which she had co-created the show as well as co-written the pilot—she came up with the horse—had been presold into syndication for $1.7 million an episode. I’d heard the take could eventually be about $45 million for Cummings.

“So I can afford the chef—I can afford this!” she calls out, to no one in particular.

“That’s a lot of money,” I say.

“Here’s the thing about that,” says Cummings. “My family will always make sure I am poor. My investments manager says he represents NBA players, and he’s never seen anything like this. The money comes in, and it just goes out.”

She pauses. “I haven’t processed it. It’s just a number on a piece of paper … and when I got the call about it, my first thought was embarrassment. That’s how co-dependent I am: I felt sad for people who had to feel like, ‘Why don’t I have this?’ It bummed me out.”

Later, when she says “I feel so blessed” in reference to another topic, she stops herself. “Who says that? Only *******s. Only people with $45 million. Ugh.”









This year, Cummings is going to have the Whitney character on the show grow:

“Whitney will finally get a moment where she’s like, ‘You know what? I’m done being crazy,’” she says. “‘I’m done with my damage.’”





And though her sister is now her “life,” she may not be *totally done with co-dependency and looking for family in other places. She normally films "Whitney" before a studio audience on Wednesdays.

“If I don’t hear noise from the audience, I get panic attacks,” says Cummings—but they’re accommodating the schedule of John Cleese, who plays a couples’ therapist. A crew of *several dozen stands in for the studio audience, offering loud guffaws. “So, Alex,” says Cleese, turning to Whitney’s onscreen boyfriend, “you lied to Whitney because you wanted some alone time. Seems extreme. If you wanted some alone time, why didn’t you just take your laptop to the bathroom?”

There’s a lot of laughter for that line, and then a break for lunch. Cleese signs DVDs for the crew while his daughter Camilla, who was in the audience, runs up to greet him. “Oh, stop with all that,” she says to the crew getting him to sign autographs. “I spend my little time with him trying to beat his ego down,” she jokes.

“She never kisses me!” says Cleese.

“It’s like a Brillo pad!” says Camilla, pointing at his mustache.





They start talking about Cleese’s ranch in Santa Barbara, where he had an emu named Gwyneth Paltrow. “I went out with Blythe Danner,” says Cleese.

“I know, and you thought she was too old for you,” says Camilla. “And they tried to set you up with Jake Gyllenhaal’s mother, and you were like, ‘She’s nice.’”

Cummings puts an arm around both of them. “I love you guys,” she says. “You’re like my family.”

http://www.vulture.com/2012/11/whitn...u-mean-it.html