Quiet, please.

Maybe it’s the snow or the long holiday season. Maybe it’s encroaching old age. Whatever the reason, I’m feeling quiet of late. Less inclined to crack wise, more inclined to stare at trees. The trees are quiet, too, and companionable.

I don’t know if I mentioned it before in these pages, but I’ve spent the last month or so obsessively planning my retirement. I can only imagine this is a common exercise for people in their mid-50’s like myself looking ahead. Putting metaphorical pencil to metaphorical paper, peering into the future, adding imaginary sums.

What this exercise ultimately produced wasn’t so much a spreadsheet as a re-examination of my values and desires, both for myself and my family. What I found was that, more than anything, I just want to be quiet.

It was this desire that led to my retirement from stand-up and which, I suspect, may lead to my retirement from performing much at all when Have I Got News For You ends (hopefully no time soon but I have no illusions about the likely longevity of any television program).

When I thought I was appraising my finances, I was actually taking stock of my life. The obsessiveness of the activity, I eventually realized, was finally paying attention to the little voice asking me to lift my (adorable) nose from the grindstone for a moment or two. For thirty-plus years, I’ve been hustling. Auditioning, writing, pitching, selling, being lifted up and let down. Doing anything I could do to stay afloat in a relentless industry in which the unemployment rate among union actors always remains around 90%.

Zooming out from my own life to yours, I suspect most of you - of whatever age - have engaged in similar exercises of your own. Mine happened to begin with a financial question, but it just as easily could have been a family situation, a milestone birthday, some kind of lifestyle change. Something that makes you pause and go, what am I doing? And, more importantly, why?

Outside my kitchen window this morning.

I’ve joked before that I decided to become an actor at the age of nine, which means that my life since has been spent fulfilling the wishes of somebody who couldn’t even confidently tie his own shoes. While I have a lot of gratitude to that 9-year-old for giving me some kind of star to hitch my wagon to, it took me until this year to realize I no longer need to chase that kid’s dreams.

There’s an annoying question actors sometimes get in interviews: “When did you know you’d made it?”

I always answer the same way, “I’m still waiting.”

How do you answer a question like that? It implies some line of demarcation that doesn’t exist for anybody aside from maybe treasure hunters. Do dentists have to answer it? “Yeah, when I cleaned that final bicuspid, I knew I’d arrived.”

There must be some people who feel accomplished and satisfied. I am not one of them. Maybe it’s a cultural problem. In our go-go nation, we rarely grant ourselves permission to pause, let alone stop. My questions about retirement, I realized, were about seeking a way out.

This morning I found unexpected comfort from Marjorie Taylor Greene, profiled in today’s New York Times. She describes a moment when she was being interviewed by Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes:

“The funniest thing was when Lesley Stahl said, ‘You know, it’s hard to give up the limelight.’ I’m looking across at her, and I’m thinking, ‘I don’t ever want to be like that when I’m her age.’”

I don’t either, Madge. I don’t, either.

The “limelight” is different for each of us, of course. Maybe it’s your role as a parent. Or maintaining a professional reputation. Maybe your limelight is your bank balance. Whatever it happens to be, is that light still serving you? Does the person you are when the light is off align with the person you are when it’s on?

In my case, over the last several years, not really. A quick story to illustrate my point: when my daughter was home for the holidays, we were talking about funny people. My daughter happens to be quite funny and she has good taste in comedy. She told me doesn’t know any funny guys, which, itself, was a funny thing to say because it flipped the whole “women aren’t funny” argument on its head. I feigned a hurt look, as if to say, I’m a funny guy. She said, “You’re not funny at home.”

And she’s exactly right.

I have a lot of fears about stepping away from my own limelight. Who am I if I’m no longer a professional funny guy? Do I still have value? The intellect answers one way but the limbic system answers another.

Identity is a fungible thing. There’s the person we believe ourselves to be, the person we want to be, and the person we present to the world. We maintain different identities for different relationships and different situations but most of us have some fixed notion of “who we are.” For a lot of us, especially men, that identity is enwrapped with what we do for work. Mine certainly is or, at least, it used to be.

Who/what is your identity in service to?

Who are you if you’re no longer ____ ?

Today, I was up early. I made some tea, sat at the kitchen table, and wrote about staring at trees. Tomorrow, I will be professional funny guy again as we shoot promos for the upcoming season of our show. I like both versions of myself, but I know which one is returning with me tomorrow night on the long, quiet drive home.