“I love comedy so much, but I’m a sad person in general, so it comes out like this,” he says. Eisenberg assumed that everyone else was using jokes as a way to mask inner pain. At least, until he met Ricky Gervais. Eisenberg was depressed at the time, and recalls asking him: “Are you depressed? No? Well then, how are you funny? Is it that you’re self-conscious? Is it that you hate yourself?”
“And he goes, ‘No, it’s none of those things. I really love making jokes, and I love being around people who are making jokes,’” Eisenberg tells me now, at the speed you’re probably imagining, but faster. “It’s the first time I ever heard that. And I was thinking, ‘Oh, maybe that’s some kind of cultural difference’. Then I also remember thinking, ‘Oh, the reason he’s saying this to me is because I’m bringing him really way down right now.’”
Eisenberg pauses to think in front of his vegetarian stuffed cabbage, which arrived so large he had to quickly relinquish the menu he had held onto, and which tastes so good he is worried it’s surely going to give him food poisoning, because anything good will manifest something terrible. “His stuff I’m suspicious of though, because it’s really tinged with a lot of sadness,” he says. “So I don’t exactly believe him.”
If Eisenberg hadn’t been so prone to introspection then he thinks maybe he would never have had a career in the arts. He’d be a banker, living in the suburbs, which of course is totally fine, but it would be a less examined life. I tell him that, on balance, I would take my neurosis rather than living in ignorant bliss. “Or is that just a way you justify your own misery so that you don’t kill yourself?” he says. “I don’t mean to be glib about your impending suicide, but is that just what sad people tell themselves, that it’s giving them depth?”
There have been certain moments in Eisenberg’s life which he remembers as deeply happy. One was during the pandemic, when he volunteered at Middle Way House, the domestic abuse shelter his mother-in-law founded in Indiana. He spent his days painting walls, plumbing and learning to fix the garbage disposal from the building manager, Floyd. Working with a clear purpose and in service to others, he felt the calm of doing something that takes you outside of your own head.
