Jay Mohr doesn’t spank his son, but he might advocate spanking yours.
“I see kids on the subway and I’m like, if that was my kid, I would totally believe in spanking,” says Mohr.
“But my son is a very sensitive guy.”
Fatherhood is something Mohr has become an expert on over the last few years of raising his son, Jackson, and even through his character on the CBS sitcom, “Gary Unmarried.”
Mohr’s son is the subject of his most recent book, “No Wonder My Parents Drank” — a memoir of the wild ride of raising a child.
“If you have kids, you don’t have to have a wandering eye to find madness,” says Mohr. “It’s right there in front of you all the time.”
The book also deals with the struggle Mohr and his wife endured with infertility, which seems like an unlikely subject for comedy, that is, until you get Mohr in the OB-GYN office.
“I had no idea how many times a doctor could say, ‘Scootch lower,’” he says. “I didn’t know about the foot-long Q-tip that makes you feel like you have to cough. If men had to do that, it would be a disaster. We don’t even floss our teeth.”
As for the title of the book, Mohr does admit some jealousy toward his parents’ generation, who could get away with drinking and smoking away the frustrations of raising a child.
“If your kid didn’t want to get out of the bath, you’d just say, ‘OK,’ and go downstairs and fix yourself another apple martini.”
He also observes that kids today get punished less harshly than generations before, but there’s a beneficial flipside to that.
“This is the first generation of fathers who will look their kids in the eyes and say, ‘I love you,’” says Mohr. “And that gives me great hope that 30 years from now, everyone running the country had parents that not only loved them unconditionally but was able to express it.”
