Christopher Titus: Norman Rockwell is Bleeding

by Dylan P. Gadino

A hero of American dysfunction, comedian Christopher Titus has given broken families and their broken dreams an artistic voice in a mass appeal way for nearly a decade.

To those not completely familiar with his rather colorful upbringing, here’s the beginning: Titus was raised in California by a gruff, hard drinking (but by most accounts, well meaning) father and yet bi-polar/schizophrenic mother – with a 185 IQ – who killed one of her husbands in self defense.

In 2000, the comic premiered his own Fox sitcom called Titus, based around his life, but more specifically, around the stand-up material in Norman Rockwell is Bleeding, the one-man show he brought to Montreal’s Just For Laughs festival that same year; the show would later be recorded and aired on Showtime and then on Comedy Central.

Four years after its original televised broadcast, the latter cable giant has just released a two-disc set of the 90-minute performance, which proves not to be a study in topical humor – the fact that the material is at least 10 years old doesn’t matter – but a study in what (besides a series of laugh-inducing bits) stand-up comedy can be. That is, timeless reflections on family foibles, introspection of one’s own ill-conceived life choices and pain. Lots of pain.

That Titus is able to seamlessly bare what most people would only discuss in therapy – some topics include his years-long abusive relationship with who would later become is wife, his mother being institutionalized, his dad being arrested for drunk driving on live television – and still generate a constant stream of sturdy laughs from a crowd who, as a whole, couldn’t possibly relate to the same degree of familial madness, is, in part, a tribute to the comedian’s deft understanding of the human psyche.

It’s also a nod to his theatrical treatment of themes that, in the hands of an ill-skilled comic, would do little more than send his crowd home early with chills and wondering why, in God’s name, they just didn’t instead make it a Blockbuster night. The smarter crowd folks – or perhaps the more insane – know better, however, to ride Titus’ crazy train to the end.