Louie Anderson has many lessons to teach from his life and career. Like the majority of his contemporaries in the comedic landscape, Louie Anderson draws directly from real life to create jokes that linger and bring a laugh long after his crowds leave a local venue. With 40+ years in comedy, there is no more fitting person to debut the new CBS “Sunday Morning” summer segment, “Leave ‘Em Laughing,” which debuted on the July 8 broadcast. It has been over 30 years since Louie’s breakout performance on Johnny Carson's “Tonight Show,” and his humor remains as grounded as ever.

The ever-self-effacing humorist is having the best time of his life playing a woman, Christine Baskets.

Anderson feels that the role resonates with lots of women, but only one woman serves as his complete inspiration—his mother, Ora Zella. She not only inspires his character as the maternal force on the FX series, “Baskets,” but she undoubtedly is responsible for his resilient and affirming view of life. The show itself has been critically acclaimed, helping FX have the second-most nominations for the 2016 Emmy Awards.

All because of mom

Everyone alive remembers the jokes concerning mothers and wearing clean underwear in case of an accident. It's no surprise that Louie Anderson started out his conversation with correspondent Lee Cowan by remarking on his “big underwear” before moving to much deeper subjects for his comedic content.

He keeps a small portrait of his mother in his makeup trailer as he undergoes the two-hour transformation process to become Christine Baskets, and his reasons are far beyond the physical perspective.

So much of Louie Anderson’s brand of humor that is generally never bawdy revolves around his ability to capture the mother every audience member knows, down to the lips, the eye rolls, and the comments that leave a son with nowhere to go.

All of that is directly from his mother, and he sees every gesture as a nod to her strength and protection. He is much more revealing about his feelings toward his alcoholic and abusive father, relating from the stage how when his mother check the status of her husband’s breathing amidst a stupor, Louie would say “I'm not really concerned.”

The famous comic now refuses to be weighed down by the hurts that are excised through his comedy, and instead, he focuses on the healing that comes to those in his audience who make come from similar circumstances.

“If people know I had my butt kicked, and I'm still going, maybe they can keep going,” stresses Anderson. The comedian completely leaves Louie behind while on set, preferring to be called only Christine during production, and putting on all the persnickety habits of the attentive parent.

More than one star

Zach Galifianakis is co-creator of “Baskets” and plays both Chip and Dale Baskets in the series has no problem with his “momager” on camera being the one who gets the attention over the “Between Two Ferns” moderator. He quips about not being the main draw of his own show, but it was Galifianakis who made the choice to cast in Louie Anderson as Christine, and he's clearly pleased that fans and the critics have embraced her.

Galifianakis has been through a transformation of his own on the show. It was Anderson, though, who won an Emmy in 2016 as Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series and was nominated once again in 2017. Deadline Hollywood reported three weeks ago that “Baskets” has been renewed for its fourth season.

In the same feature, the comedy was touted as “a real love letter” to California, because of its setting in Bakersfield, and characters who are ordinary, from an ordinary family, and not always so nice. Christine Baskets is likely the exception to that declaration because everyone wants this mom to be ok in the end. “There's a whole bunch of Christine Baskets in the world, and nobody's representing them,” asserts the comedian, until now.

Ora Zella Anderson passed away more than three decades ago, but her son remembers the “sweet” that she constantly stirred within “the sweet-and-sour stew” of his childhood and that of his 10 other siblings in the projects of St. Paul. He relishes that his role now is a “great repay” and an honor to the woman who “protected us -- she took the brunt.” The stand-up great has echoed further emotional recollections in four books, including his latest, “Hey Mom.” Louie Anderson has taken all the loving memories of a son and transposed them into a mother everyone can love.
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