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This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Cheech Marin, a Mexican American comedian, actor, musician, and art collector. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles as a third-generation Mexican American. The South Central neighborhood I grew up in was very loud and violent. My dad was a police officer — LAPD for 30 years — so you're right there next to the action.
I saw many violent things, but I had the love of my family, especially Chicano families. They tended to stay and become very close, especially larger ones.
I was nurtured at an early age by my other cousins who were very smart and educated. My older cousin, Louie, was the head of the group, and he instituted a program where we were all assigned subjects to learn about and bring back to the group. I was assigned art, and that's how I became familiar with art at a very early age.
Louie's father, my uncle Bono, was the family nicknamer. When I came home from the hospital as a newborn, he looked in the crib and he said, "Looks like a little chicharrón" — deep-fried pig skin chips that are always curled up. As a newborn, I was a little curled up, so the name stuck.
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My family was funny — very quick-witted and sharp. That was the currency dealt. If you wanted any time to speak at the dinner table, you needed a tight two, three minutes to entertain the folks.
Everybody went back and forth, and that family banter prepared me for everything in the public sphere that I was going to experience as I moved forward.
Laughter is the best feeling in the world. Laughter expands you. I was always the class clown, but I got straight A's. Teachers wanted me to shut up, but not too much.
Courtesy of Cheech Marin
I went to Canada in my early 20's as part of the draft resistance movement during the Vietnam War. I started doing comedy because they paid me more for doing comedy than for delivering carpets, which is what I was doing in Vancouver before I met Tommy Chong.
We were really just trying to get paid so we could make rent. We moved to Los Angeles, and our early goal was, "How are we going to find $1.50 every day?" That was the amount of money we needed every day to buy a bag of rice or some beef and greens to make a Chinese meal.
We went from club to club, trying to look for a gig while carrying this little red wagon with us. Whenever we found pop bottles or soda cans, we'd throw 'em into the wagon to get the five-cent deposit per can.
By the time we finished our journey, sometimes we had $1.50 and we could go buy something to eat. That was our quest. If you want to see motivation, that's motivation.
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I think what audiences loved about Cheech and Chong was that we represented what was going on at the times in a kind of benevolent way.
We learned how to create this inoffensive, pointed humor. When creating our shows, we used what we call the "Omni Burger" approach, where the show has just the right amount of meat, the right amount of tomatoes, a little bit of that mustard, because you could serve it in an appetizing way in Atlanta one day and in New York City the next.
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Cheech and Chong also reflected what was going on in our age group's consciousness at the time. At first, the war was a big deal. I adopted the universal soldier outlook, where if you didn't participate in the war — if we sent no soldiers — there wouldn't be a war.
What is the most practical thing to do to actually effectuate change? To stop this machine from rolling forward and running over you and everyone else?
When you're making comedy, there's no defense against a really good joke. It makes you laugh, or it doesn't, because like Walt Disney said, there are two emotions you can't fake: fear and laughter. Laughter is inescapable. It's like a genie coming out of you. It's got to escape and it's much stronger than you.
