Birth The Piss Chalice

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In 1998, I took a comedy writing class at SVA in New York City. It was my senior year as a cartooning major and I had started to tie up all the loose ends of what credits I needed. Thal year i tried everything from surrealist literature to acting, I even gol to play the devil for my final exam… a part that made me realize I loved performing but that I had a problem being serious. Any part that I excelled at was way over the top or insanc.. so I decided I was funny. I figured I would try my hand at comedy writing. I wasn’t funny.

At least to everyone else in the class, save one person… That day the assignment was to take a classic work of literature and make a joke of it. I decided to take Mark Twain’s “The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn” and write a short story exactly as Mark Twain would but add one single moment where Tom, while on a raft floating down the Mississippi River, describes the summer breeze getting him excited in a certain way. No one laughed at this… except a guy wearing an Avengers T-Shirt. Not the comic book Avengers, but the classic 60’s spy show Avengers, something I took notice of that day. Over lunch break I leaned over and broke the ice with a particularly inappropriate subject to see if this guy was legit. He was.

This began a love affair between, in my opinion, the only two people in the class that were actually funny. The next few weeks saw us pushing the envelope of what would make each other laugh. There was nothing sacred, nothing we wouldn’t try to tie a punch-line on. I had never laughed so hard in my life and we became fast friends, writing for an audience of one.

Jon and I have been friends now for 9 years. We have seen each other at various stages of our lives, through numerous relationships and turmoil, and have sat up until 6am talking about zombies and Asia Argento every single time I have come off the road. He is like a brother.

All of these stories are true, and all of them have happened to all of us …Jon and Nick are just more honest about it. We have all fallen in love, we have all had people fall out of love with us, but the stories in Heartbreak paint these moments with such authenticity it makes you remember all of the glorious self-deprecation. The blood and guts and the long drive home alone… the years spent aimlessly searching for someone.

Heartbreak is a snapshot of those years. It isn’t pretty and it isn’t glamorous… but it will make you laugh- at these guys and at yourself. At the things we do to be loved, at the depths we will sink to get someone to say those three words back to us.

And that, my friends, is funny.

-Gerard Way