There’s yet to be a support group for the children of comedians, but Melissa Rivers and Kelly Carlin might just start one. Or as Rivers — Joan’s 45-year-old daughter/producer/ co-star — puts it, “Who in their right mind would want to stand up in a room of people and say, ‘Laugh at me’?”
She and Carlin — the 50-year-old daughter of the late comic genius George, the subject of Kelly’s onewoman show “A Carlin Home Companion” (at Cherry Lane Theater Sunday, Thursday and Saturday) — met for the first time over the phone from LA, in a conversation moderated by The Post’s Barbara Hoffman. Not surprisingly, they bonded: Who else knows about having the run of Hollywood’s back lots and room service in Vegas? Let’s eavesdrop . . .
Melissa Rivers: We were gypsy children — you got thrown in the car and taken to the club date. And you grew up backstage. I still walk into NBC Burbank and there’s a smell that immediately brings me back to my childhood. When my mother hosted the [Johnny] Carson show, I spent a lot of time in that building.
Kelly Carlin: Freddie [Fred De Cordova, Carson’s producer] let me drive his golf cart inside that building! I remember running into Jimmy Osmond in the hallway when the Osmonds were rehearsing. He bought me a candy bar.
Rivers: You must have passed out!
Carlin: I almost did.
Rivers: I have all these memories of Vegas, and being on a performer’s schedule where you’d sleep half the day, swim in the pool . . . you had the run of the place, knowing where room service hid all the cookies.
Carlin: My dad got famously fired from Vegas for saying “s – – t” onstage. [Before that], when I was 5 or 6, he opened for the Supremes. They had these amazing sequined gowns that weighed around 20 pounds, and they put one on me and I tried to walk in it . . . My parents would be up all night and I’d get up in the morning and there’d be all these glasses from the party the night before.
Rivers: My parents were not party people. When we went on tour, I’d be dragged to the local museum to see whatever historical thing there was.
Carlin: We did that, too, even though my dad was high on drugs.
Rivers: What’s so funny is, even though my mother was so outrageous onstage, we lived a very conservative lifestyle. But she’s still trying to talk to me about sex and I still run screaming from the room, because that’s not a conversation I want to have with my mother.
Carlin: Amen! You’d think in a good, liberal, progressive hippie household [like my parents’], sex would be discussed. It was not. My most embarrassing memory is when we lived up in the Palisades in the early ’70s. Reagan is the governor, we’re in this conservative town, and my dad’s at the height of his counterculture days. He has hair down to his shoulders, [there was] lots of cocaine and psychedelics in our house. The Rand Corporation [executive who lives] next door is having a cocktail party on his front lawn, everyone’s nicely dressed — and my dad says, at the top of his lungs, “Hey, Kelly, look at all the a**holes over there!” I wanted to shrink!
Rivers: I say this with all the love in my heart: Comedians are inherently damaged people. Being that funny is usually a coping mechanism. You talk to any good comedian, and they all crave going out, even if it’s a little tiny club, because they feel the love.
Carlin: My dad said it’s “Look at me, look at me — look how clever I am!” He discouraged me from comedy. I imagine he wanted to protect me from hecklers, but part of me thought he didn’t think I was funny enough . . . When I went to grad school to get my degree in psychology, he wrote me the most beautiful email. He talked about how feeling joy can be a scary sensation, but that it takes a lot of courage to live the joy in your life. He loved being a dad and having those teaching moments.
Rivers: My mother tells everyone how to live their life and what to do. People come up to her and thank her and she turns to me: “See? Somebody listens!” I’ve learned to make it white noise.
Carlin: My dad was torn about being on the road a lot. He wanted to be with the family, but he felt the need to create new work, so even when he was home, it took him away from us.
Rivers: My parents made sure they were always there. I used to say, “Go on the road more! So I can have parties when you go out of town!” When you have a famous parent, people always ask if you have a different life. I don’t know — it’s not like I went to the neighbors’ house to see how they lived! Our lives were probably closer to the Addams Family than the Cleavers. But I think both of us are really lucky. We have parents we love or loved, who were frighteningly normal.
Carlin: True. There are a lot of our peers who didn’t make it through.
Rivers: And that says a lot of our parents as people. [Pause] I’m really thinking of renting my mother out!