The morning after his son died, Barry Friedman put Minoxidil on his head.
It was reflex — the same automatic gesture he had made hundreds of mornings before, and the same he would make hundreds of mornings after. The world had just cracked open. His son Paul was gone, found face-down in his room at twenty-four years old on a Friday morning in February 2008. The grief was real, and total, and coming. But first, Barry Friedman stood at the bathroom mirror and attended to his hairline.
He would grieve, he reasoned. He couldn’t help that. But he didn’t have to be bald, doing so.
This small, luminous detail — offered years later with characteristic deadpan precision — contains everything you need to know about how Barry Friedman has moved through the hardest moments of his life. Not by rising above them. Not by finding the bright side. But by insisting, one ordinary morning at a time, that life keeps moving and that he intends to move with it. Shoulders back. Forward.
Six months after Paul died, a rabbi encountered Barry in passing and said: “I noticed, when Paul died, you threw your shoulders back.”
“I did it,” Barry told him, “because I didn’t want to be the father who fell apart, who couldn’t help the people in my life, my son’s life, who needed someone. I wanted to be the father to whom people said, ‘Look at his shoulders.'”
“You succeeded,” the rabbi said.
To understand what that took, you have to understand who Barry Friedman is — which, as it turns out, is a more complicated proposition than it might first appear.
He is, on the surface, a man of some renown. For roughly four decades, Tulsa, Oklahoma claimed him as one of its own peculiar institutions. He was the sort of person who had a dedicated booth at Mondo’s Italian Restaurant and a named table at New York Bagel Café — not because he owned either place, but because he was simply always there, nursing a Diet Coke with two orange slices, holding court in the way only a man who had spent thirty years making rooms laugh could do. He was the political columnist for The Tulsa Voice, a longtime commentator for Public Radio Tulsa, and the man who once opened for Rachel Maddow in front of 3,500 people using a Styrofoam ball and a joke about Senator Jim Inhofe. Charles P. Pierce of Esquire, who co-hosted a politics blog with him, gave him his nickname: Friedman of the Plains.
He is the author of eight books. A stand-up comedian who performed everywhere from a bar in Dewey, Oklahoma, with seven people in the crowd, to the casino stages of Las Vegas, Reno, and Atlantic City, to cruise ships in the Bahamas, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands. He received the Governor’s Arts Award for Media from the Oklahoma State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” by Oklahoma Today magazine in 2000.
His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and numerous other publications — and, perhaps most improbably, in AAPG Explorer, a magazine for petroleum geologists, which is, he notes, “all the more noteworthy, considering how little I know about petroleum geology and how I usually hurt myself filling my car with gas.”
All of this is true. None of it is quite the point.
It began on I-44, in Tulsa, in 1988.
Barry was driving past a motel that advertised a comedy contest on its sign. He did not slow down. He did not, by any account, carefully weigh the decision. He saw the sign, turned toward it, and entered. First prize was one hundred dollars. He won. He told jokes about peeing in a lake and girls eating corn dogs at state fairs, did an impression of Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker, and somewhere in the laughter of a nearly-empty motel ballroom he found the thing he had been looking for without quite knowing he was looking.
He would spend the next thirty years on the road.
What that life looked like, he documented with brutal and hilarious honesty in Road Comic and later in The Joke Was On Me — a memoir that Esquire’s John H. Richardson praised for having “all the wisdom and humanity of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, but with way better jokes.” It was a life of bizarre gigs and endless travel and the peculiar camaraderie of the comedy circuit. “They don’t pay you to be on stage,” Barry has said. “What they pay you for are all the things you have to go through to get onto that stage. Those forty-five minutes on stage — that’s the joy of it.”
Along the way, he made it to Hollywood, earned his Emmy nominations, made it back to Tulsa, planted himself at his booth, and kept writing and performing and talking and making people think. Kris Kristofferson once said: “I ain’t Bob Dylan, but I didn’t have to set an alarm clock either.” Barry has been known to quote this with some satisfaction.
Sometimes I miss ‘my son’; sometimes I miss Paul. They’re the same, obviously, except when they’re not.
The subject of Paul requires a different kind of honesty.
Paul Friedman died of a drug overdose on February 15, 2008. He was twenty-four years old. His father was devastated — and, by his own unflinching account, not entirely surprised. Paul’s death had been in dress rehearsal for years. The grief, when it arrived, was total. And Barry sat down in it and wrote.
Four Days and a Year Later: An Elegy covers the four days following the discovery of Paul’s body. It is not a eulogy, Barry has been clear about that. It is an elegy — a lament, written with the raw immediacy of a man who refused to wait until the edges had softened. It includes the time he struck Paul in anger. His decision to cut off contact as an act of tough love. His furious response to the rabbi’s eulogy at the funeral. The stand-up gig in Providence, Rhode Island, that he kept the Friday after Paul died — and how he ended up snowed in during a layover in Charlotte, and started writing, knowing that if he waited he would be tempted to smooth the rough edges and make himself come across better.
He did not smooth the edges.
Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry called the book “a haunting, achingly honest account of an experience every parent fears more than any other” and named Barry “a superb writer.” Charles P. Pierce, again from Esquire: “I haven’t been able to get five pages in without having to catch my breath. You’re a brave writer, my brother.”
He threw his shoulders back. He kept writing. He kept getting up in front of rooms and making people laugh, because when you eat, when you wash, when you enjoy a good joke — that is life moving on, and the alternative is unacceptable.
Then came Jack.
Jack Friedman — accountant, nonagenarian, man of firm opinions about IRS audits, toupees, the horror of stretch marks, and the quality of the scrambled eggs on a soft roll — moved to Tulsa “kicking and screaming” at his son’s encouragement sometime in his eighties. Barry had spent years flying to Las Vegas to organize his father’s medications, locate liquified potatoes, and change the oil in a car Jack should not have been permitted to drive. Better, Barry reasoned, for his father to die across town than in a nursing home in Las Vegas. He needed to be closer. He needed someone to drive him to Panera.
What followed was fifteen years of caregiving that Barry chronicled with such affection and precision — on Facebook, on Substack, and eventually in the three-volume Jack Sh*t series — that Jack Friedman became something of an internet sensation. “America’s Comedy Dad,” the man whose dementia “just visited occasionally” at first and was “parenthetical, enlightening, and often marked by brilliant non-sequiturs,” before the fog rolled in and changed everything.
Jack died in 2022, at the age of ninety-six. He died, as Barry puts it, of being ninety-six.
The trilogy stands as one of the more remarkable acts of literary caregiving in recent memory — a son who understood that his father’s story was not just about aging, but about what is lost and what somehow endures. Barry wrung as much life as he could from those years, for both of them. He witnessed, and he wrote it down, and in doing so gave his father a legacy beyond erasure.
Throw your shoulders back.
There is also the matter of the cancer.
Some years ago, Barry was diagnosed with prostate cancer. When the diagnosis came, he made himself the usual promises: he would be more patient, love more and better, stop to smell the roses. He would become a new, centered person. He would change.
He beat the cancer. He left the doctor’s office. He got in his car to drive home. He got behind a driver going slowly enough that they both missed a light they could have made easily. Barry started cursing, pounding the steering wheel, screaming at a man who could not hear him.
“All my declarations about being a new, centered person,” he said later, “and I couldn’t make it through the first intersection.”
He tells this story on himself. He tells all his stories on himself. That is not the same as self-deprecation. It is something closer to radical honesty — the conviction that the truth of a thing, even an unflattering truth, is more interesting and ultimately more useful than the polished version. It is the same instinct that produced the elegy for Paul and the Jack Sh*t trilogy and thirty years of stand-up that made people feel recognized rather than simply entertained.
In 2024, Barry Friedman and his wife, Melissa, returned from a vacation in Portugal and sat together in their driveway in Tulsa.
They had traveled before — to Iceland three times, to Norway, to France. This was the first trip from which they were not really happy to come home. The country felt different to Barry; something had been closing in for years. He looked at Melissa in the driveway. “Want to move to Portugal?” She said yes.
A million things had to go right, and a million things went right: the timing, the paperwork, Portugal’s accessible immigration process, a landlord in the ancient university town of Coimbra who buys him lunch every month and includes weekly cleaning of the apartment, immigration attorneys who couldn’t have been more conscientious, and — Barry notes this with a certain gravity — a best friend in his building, a barber named Lucifer.
He chose Coimbra because he has always liked university towns. He was eight minutes from the University of Tulsa for years. Now he is eight minutes from the University of Coimbra, one of the oldest universities in the world. He does not need a car. He sits two or three times a week at Bellini on the Praça do Comércio, where the owner, Giovanni, bought him a Coke Zero on his very first day and has been his friend ever since. Barry orders an ice cream cone. He sits with it. He thinks: I wonder what it would be like to live in a place like this.
Then he walks home.
“If you’re the type of person to chase moments,” Barry has said, “this is one of those moments that seems worth chasing.”
At sixty-eight, Barry Friedman is still chasing.
If I’m missed, that will be enough.
On a winter evening in early 2025, dozens of Barry Friedman’s closest Tulsa friends gathered at Circle Cinema on South Lewis Avenue to say goodbye. Circle Cinema is itself a kind of Tulsa institution — an independent art house that has spent decades showing the films the multiplexes won’t, in a neighborhood that Barry had claimed as his own for the better part of forty years. It was, in its way, the right room for the occasion. A place that had always made space for things that didn’t quite fit anywhere else.
Someone had put a message on the marquee outside. In the same bold letters that usually announced the week’s films, it read: TULSA WILL MISS YOU BARRY FRIEDMAN — BEST WISHES & SAFE TRAVELS. Barry stood inside among his people, sharing what he later described as “clunky hugs,” and thinking — as he always does — about what this moment actually meant. The main thought that kept returning to him was that he might never see a lot of these people again. He did not think that was a reason not to go. But he held it. He let it be true.
That is the kind of man Barry Friedman is. He does not look away from the hard things. He does not smooth the edges. He stands in the middle of them, shoulders back, and he witnesses.
Not long ago, a man in Tulsa — a lifelong Tulsan, as it happens, a longtime friend of the person who brought you this story — was told with some excitement that Barry Friedman had agreed to share his story with The Encore Project. He listened politely. Then he asked: “Who’s Barry Friedman?”
The question stopped the room.
We hope this has answered it.
Barry Friedman is the author of eight books, including Four Days and a Year Later: An Elegy, The Joke Was On Me, and the Jack Sh*t trilogy. A veteran stand-up comedian, essayist, and political columnist, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, and numerous other publications. He is the recipient of the Oklahoma Governor’s Arts Award for Media and lives in Coimbra, Portugal, with his wife, Melissa. Visit his website at barrysfriedman.com, read his Substack Friedman of the Plains at barrysfriedman.substack.com, or browse his complete bibliography on Amazon.
