Carrying Monsters : Review

Available at Christopher Titus’ website.

Full disclosure: I have seen this show live three times, from its infancy when it was called Stories I Shouldn’t Tell, where Christopher Titus was working off sheets of paper on a barstool, to its finished form under a new title: Carrying Monsters. Filmed this year at the El Portal Theatre in Los Angeles, Titus has released this as a demented Christmas present for us all, calling it in the opening minutes “the darkest show I’ve ever written. I want you to know that upfront. I am not bragging; I am warning you.” Having seen every one of Titus’ full shows, I can say without doubt that he is not lying.

You see, Titus has a signature style when it comes to stories about himself, his family, and the trauma he’s endured throughout his life, from being raised by a womanizing alcoholic father and a “manic-depressive schizophrenic” mother (his own description, hence the quotation marks) with a 185 IQ to his tumultuous teenage years to his first marriage and acrimonious divorce (which took more than a decade to resolve) to finding his way in his new marriage to Rachel Bradley to raising his own children. Usually, Titus knocks us over with laughs and punchlines while outlining the harsh realities of each situation he presents to us. With Carrying Monsters, he does much the same, but sometimes, the punchlines almost can’t top the demons he’s calling forth, which are unlike any we’ve seen so far in his specials, taking us back to his first memories as a child all the way through to a post-divorce dinner with his kids.

These stories aren’t rough; they’re brutal. Here’s the thing, though: This isn’t just comedic trauma-dumping, the kind of thing that jokingly gets tossed to an audience, laughed at, and quickly dismissed for the next setup. This isn’t therapy through comedy, although it comes close. We sit through these ghastly reminiscences, these memories of a stolen childhood that Titus hopes to avoid bestowing upon his daughter and son while trying to keep Rachel out of his latter-day turmoil. He starts by taking us into the dark streets of the San Fernando Valley at the age of 4, accompanying his mother as she goes for drinks at a nearby bar, hoping to meet Titus’ next “Uncle.” It doesn’t stop there; he follows it up with more stories about parental neglect, hostage-like custody transfers, and legal kidnapping.
You read that right: legal kidnapping.

Propping himself in front of a lively set (designed by Chris Foose) featuring locales he touches upon through this feature-length solo performance, Titus doesn’t hesitate to sink us into the discomfort of what’s made him the live wire he is today. That he’s lived through everything he talks about and still has the resilience to help us laugh about it and bring us together in a shared catharsis is admirable. Some of these stories sound nigh impossible and improbable, but there’s a saying: “God helps three kinds of people: fools, children, and drunkards.” Carrying Monsters proves this adage, with Titus doling out some harrowing examples of the bookending two while being caught in the middle. One of his tour posters reads: “Our monsters were given to us by the people that said they loved us.” And as he tells us early on of these monsters, “You guys’re gonna meet every single one of mine.”

Titus’ sense of timing has never been sharper. He knows just how long to let us hang on each moment before surgically striking with a zinger or an even more hard-hitting truth to deepen our emotional ties to the material. Take note of his careful, meticulously planned uses of profanity; he doesn’t throw these words around left, right, and center, instead waiting for a perfect passage in which to include what Captain Spock calls “colorful metaphors” for a bigger impact. In one certain instance, he prepares a string of f-bombs to punctuate a foolish attempt at making himself seem harder than he is, but even that is not without consequence.

This tenth production is once again strewn with the debris of emotional, economic, and family implosions. A lot of the stories spring from how his parents are established in Norman Rockwell is Bleeding, Voice in My Head, and Love is Evol, which Titus gently reminds us of before diving headfirst into the disastrous makeup of these tales he couldn’t tell in those specials, owing to the fact that some of the subjects of these stories were alive. But the path has been cleared, and Titus lets it rip, giving us shocks and laughs – at times, they’re one and the same – in his inimitable fashion. There’s something about the way he draws you into his world and these stories, and he changes his tactics every time to keep us on our toes. He could start a tale by getting us all on common ground through a relatable hook and setting it well before slow-rolling us 180° away toward a more sinister track with an unorthodox end. Or he could switch subjects with a single word and wait a nanosecond for us to process that word and cough out shocked laughter.

Regardless, Christopher Titus has the ability to get us all on the same page, but not by cajoling or being condescending; instead, he takes a leaf out of George Carlin’s book and asks us to come with him into the weird, damaged world of humanity and the reasons we make the decisions we do, whether his choices lead to triumph or disaster. With Titus, there’s definitely more of the latter than the former, but he has the magical ability to turn disaster into triumph, relishing the fact that he’s alive to pass the jokes onto us. Carrying Monsters is another tremendous special full of heart, eye-widening surprises, and the kind of family mishaps that help lawyers afford their mansions. Titus himself says, “Some tragedies don’t have a punchline,” but his strength and wit lift Carrying Monsters past the sadness and into a space that’s hilarious and – dare I say – inspirational.