Marlon Wayans is opening up about how dealing with copious amounts of loss has affected his life and his work.
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During a recent appearance on the School of Greatness podcast, Wayans talked to host Lewis Howes about not only losing both of his parents, but a total of 57 loved ones.
“I had a great life… and then my parents died and 57 people I loved died,” the comedian revealed. “That’s the sad part about getting to be my age.”
Despite losing so many people close to him, Wayans went on to admit that his mother’s death was particularly difficult for him.
“I started having this different vision of myself because I was rescuing myself with my comedy,” he explained. “The expression became different. The expression became therapeutic. I’m bleeding inside, but I’m literally pulling myself from depression, because my mother’s death shattered me into a million pieces. Biggest heartbreak of my life.”
Wayans previously spoke about the great amount of loss he’s dealt with in his life during a sit-down with the New York Times back in March. During that conversation, the comedian said, “I lost 58 people that I loved in a matter of three years. It felt, like, biblical.”
Marlon also talked about the loss of his mother in that interview, revealing she’s the reason he never got married.
“My mother’s death broke me,” he told NYT. “It shattered me into a million pieces, because that was my girl. I never got married, because I never wanted my mother to be jealous of a woman. I never wanted my mother to feel second to any woman.”
He also revealed that he told his mother on her deathbed that he always wanted her to feel like his “No.1 girl.”
While dealing with so much death and grief, Wayans told Good Morning America in 2023 that “the only thing that saves me is the stage.”
“In my life right now, I have so much stuff that can be depressing,” the comedian explained. “I lost my mom recently, I lost my dad three days ago…When I’m hurting, those laughs that I hear from other people healing from my pain, I realize my purpose. And I think it’s important for all of us to do what comedians do, which is look at this world, look at this life, and always try to spend your life trying to find smiles. And that’s what I do on the stage.”
Still, that doesn’t mean he’s free from any pain while onstage. While on the School of Greatness podcast, Wayans also talked about his latest standup special, Good Grief.
The comedian says he “broke down onstage” while talking about his late mother, ultimately deciding not to cut this part out of the final footage.
“I broke down. I cried. Because the reality of my parents being gone hit me,” Wayans told the host. “It did [hit me before] but it wasn’t supposed to hit me in a show when I’m filming a special. And it did and I was like, aright cool. I was going to cut that out but I was like, no. Keep it in. Because I need people to understand that I, like you, I’m hurting. But life goes on and we still look for smiles.”
He continued,
“I get so many messages in my inbox about Good Grief on Amazon Prime, about how it affected them, how it helped them, helped them grieve. They lost their parents too, we’re in the same club, gang gang. And how they cried with me and they thanked me because they were in a place of depression and I helped them see their way out because I showed myself my way out. So, that’s healing.”