‘Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story’ Shares the Tears, Fears, Insights of a Unique Clown

Stand-up comedy is best live — and often lived. Judd Apatow and comedy appreciator Neil Berkeley know this. In their admiring, at times achingly funny documentary “Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story” premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, the co-directors celebrate a comedian especially good at mining her life — including her struggles with mental health.

The film builds the arc of Bamford’s life and career by utilizing clips from decades of her stand-up. Augmenting that spine are family photos and home movies, copious insights and praise from fellow comedians, anchored with interviews — awkward and endearing — with the comic herself, as well as her parents and older sister, Sarah Bamford Seidelmann.

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Born and raised in Duluth, she’s the second daughter of a doctor and a formidable mother. Around the time Bamford was 8 years old, she began experiencing a form of OCD that is marked by dark, intrusive thoughts that can be violent and or sexual. She also began having suicidal thoughts.

Even so, Bamford might be an exemplar of Minnesota nice. She’s got a whispery, high-register delivery, seemingly sped up by anxieties 1.5 times. She’s modest, even mousy, but her self-deprecating revelations have a kind of muscular courage behind them. After sharing that she has a mild tremor from a medication, someone suggest she take another drug to counteract whichever one is causing the tremor. To which she responds, holding up her mildly quivering hand “Weakness is the brand.” That retort was also the title of her 2020 comedy special.

If you don’t know Bamford’s work, then “Paralyzed by Hope” serves as an affectionate introduction. If you’re familiar with her stand-up, then it’s fun to listen to the parade of comics and friends try to get at what makes her such a great comedian in their estimation. In that sense, this is something of a comic’s comic appraisal.

Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn and Zach Galifianakis along with Bamford made up the nerdly-hip comedy tour called The Comedians of Comedy, which was a Comedy Channel special and then series in 2005. Oswalt confesses being bewildered by Bamford at first. “I didn’t get it,” he says. He has since called her “the greatest living comedian.” And there are times in the clips from her stand-up when you might get why he didn’t. Singing ever-so-familiarly the Old MacDonald tune Bamford swaps “Pterodactyl” for “farm” and why not? “Old MacDonald had a Pterodactyl E-I-E-I-O. With a…” she sings. Then she lets out an unexpected and ungodly screech. Maybe you had to be there. Apatow and Berkeley make sure we are.

Netflix’s Ted Sarandos counts himself a fan. He greenlit the first season of her series, “Lady Dynamite,” and then doubled down for a second season. That he’s proud of doing the first and stumped by his impulse to do a second season, is amusing and perhaps says something about the well of fondness Bamford taps.

Tig Notaro, Ron Funches and Sarah Silverman also offer thoughts, sometimes smiling with a kind of incredulity as they do. Apatow tells Stephen Colbert and a few others that to test out new material, Bamford invited strangers to sit across a table from her at a café and listen to her work her material. She then — wait for it — paid them.

While the film leans on other comics to celebrate Bamford’s unique delivery, deft timing and exquisite plying of vulnerability, it’s the time with her family — her parents and her sister — that grounds the documentary. Her husband, painter Scott Marvel Cassidy, also makes an appearance.

Those moments give voice —their own — to the people who figure mightily into Bamford’s comedy. She also wrote about more deeply about them in 2023’s “Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere.” (The book is an intentional tribute to the self-help genre and 12-step programs.)

Bamford helped raise the profile of a micro-comedy club in Altadena, Calif., where she lives, called PDA (Public Displays of Altadena) by staging a morning set. It burned in the Eaton Fire last year. It’s not the only loss she faces in “Paralyzed by Hope” — a phrase that comes from Bamford. But toward the end of Apatow and Berkeley’s documentary, we know two things: She’s a comic’s comic; kindness keeps her moving.