Q. Mark Twain once said that the secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow.
A. True, in my case. Humor was a coping skill, I guess you could say. A way of responding to the intense agony of my family. Performing was a way of being O.K. in a world that largely disgusted me. A friend once told me, and it's true, that one foot onto the stage and you're suspended in another world, a world you control totally.
Q. Why the need to escape?
A. I grew up Jewish in Salt Lake City, a very conservative Mormon place, in an apartment building full of Holocaust survivors. It was very painful to be different and not understand why. I heard things as a kid that were horrifying. I thought the world was like that. It was also the blacklisting time, full of anti-Semitism. The only positive images of people like me were the comedians on Ed Sullivan. That show was the lifeline to the Jewish people, maybe even more important than Israel. It gave a positive, warped view of what it was like to be Jewish. I'd ask my father if Totie Fields was Jewish. He'd say yes. Bob Hope? "He used to be."
Q. Was your family a very religious one?
A. Nah. My father was actually kind of an atheist. He sold crucifixes and 3-D pictures of Jesus door to door. Our house was full of them. You'd walk by and Jesus would blink or his hands would spread out. My mother liked Mormons. I'd go to church on Sunday and synagogue on Saturday. Later on, when I became a member and got baptized, my mother told me not to take it too far, that it was just the way we stayed safe.
Q. How did that affect you?
A. For one thing, I got a pretty good course in comparative religion -- all based on xenophobia. And since I felt on the fringe anyway, people's approval never mattered to me much. In fact, I thought it was my God-given mission to shock and upset people. I was always smart. I always knew what to say. When I was eight, I'd go around to churches talking about being a Mormon and a Jew. They call it manipulation when women do it. With men, they call it will.
Q. When did you first get in touch with your will?
A. After a car accident I had when I was 16. That was a big one. Some lady had the sun in her eyes and ran her car into me. The hood ornament rammed into my head. I had days of semiconsciousness, an out-of-body experience. I saw the tunnel, the light, the whole deal.
Q. Were you frightened?
A. Nooooo! It was better, in a weird way, because everything was O.K. There was sense in the world. I went deep into my subconscious and had access to two different vantage points. I still feel that there are two worlds: the mirror world and the other one. Reality is the one that I see, not the one most people see, except in their dreams. Because I'm from that world, just pretending to fit into this one, the creative space in my head is freed. There are no limits. Nothing is imposed.
Q. Any aftereffects of the accident?
A. Ten years of nightmares, dreams of not waking up. Feelings about being buried alive. Once, when I was 17, I'd been walking around days without sleep and collapsed on the living-room floor. I realized that something was really wrong with me, that I needed to be hospitalized.
Q. You told an interviewer in January that your parents forcibly initiated your eight-month stay at the Utah State Hospital.