Christopher Titus lived through a difficult childhood. His mother was a paranoid schizophrenic who was in an out of mental institutions. His father drank too much, and he was tough, bordering on abusive. He married five more times, leaving a legacy of distrust and dysfunction.
And Titus has taken that life and turned it into -- a sitcom."Titus," which premieres Monday at 7:30 p.m. on Fox/Ch. 13, mines personal trauma for laughs. Or, at least, attempted laughs.
It's rude, crude and often vulgar (this is Fox, after all) -- and it's sometimes downright painful to watch. Christopher stars as the owner of a car-customizing shop who deals with the constant presence of an overbearing, loutish father (Stacy Keach). He's trying to work out a relationship with his girlfriend, Erin (Cynthia Watros), and keep an eye on his younger brother, Dave (Zack Ward).
Not that Titus wallows in self-pity.
"To write the show, you had to have gone past it and seen the positive aspects of whatever your life was," he said. "You're never going to see us go to a really sappy place of, 'Look what happened to me.' It's great to laugh about it because then it blows it away. It turns it into a joke instead of what life was."
If only the jokes were funnier. That attitude of "Titus" is summed up early in that premiere episode.
"The Los Angeles Times states 63 percent of American families are now considered dysfunctional," Titus says. "That means we're the majority. We're normal. It's the people that had the mom, dad, brother, sister, little white picket fence -- those people are the freaks."
Indeed, Christopher's friend, Tommy (David Shatraw) -- the only character who grew up in a normal household -- is hopelessly inept.
Titus makes this sort of pronouncement in one of the show's many narrative sequences. Titus is videotaped (in black and white) on a nondescript set that looks like a police interrogation room offering commentary directly to the audience. It's an ugly device for often ugly observations.
And the episodes, we're assured, are based on real-life incidents.
"The show is my real life," Titus said. "We're working on an episode right now about one of (my father's) heart attacks that he blamed on me. That really happened."
And there are various sexual storylines that he also assures us come right out of his life. Like when he and his wife, Erin, ran around behind each other's backs and ended up getting engaged.
"Erin and I cheating on each other, finding out the same week, actually happened," Titus said, sounding perversely proud. (And his real-life wife was nearby, whooping her agreement.) "When my mother came back -- it's really a story where she tried to kill my aunt, not my father. But, see, it's funny."
Well, he certainly thinks so. But jokes about his crazy mother are more painful than humorous.
"Anything is funny if the set-up is right," Titus insisted. "And it's my mom, so the deniability is there. . . .
"She was schizophrenic. She was brilliant. She had a 185 IQ. She was a concert pianist for awhile. She was a beauty queen. So she was amazing. And the other part was -- she was crazy."
Not that his father seems all that stable, either. He's constantly belittling and tormenting his sons, both as adults and (in flashbacks) as children. The least of his psychological abuse was letting his son know he didn't really even want to have custody of him.
As a 3-year-old, Titus was in court "a lot." And he remembers the family court judge asking him who he wanted to live with.
"I remember (thinking), 'Isn't there someone more qualified than me to do this?' " Titus said.
"Mom was what she was. Dad got me, to his chagrin. He just wanted me on the weekends. He said, 'You know, I went to court fighting for you just to get my visitation on the weekends. When I go there, the court said -- well, you can have full custody of the kid.' And Dad was 21 going, 'Wait, wait, wait, wait.' "
All of which is in the scripts.
"We just wanted to put his life on camera," said executive producer Jack Kenny. "Whenever we get stuck for a story point, we say, 'What would your dad do? Just project here.' And you got a story."
Titus himself turns to his wife, who works in the production office.
"There's times when we'll be stuck and I'll run in to her office and go, 'Hon, do you remember that time when I did that stupid thing but I forgot the stupid thing?' And she'll tell me what I did and I'll run back to the writers and we'll fix it."
Titus assures us that his father did the best he could. There's an incident in the pilot in which Dad allows young Titus to stick a screwdriver in a wall socket -- something that really happened.
"Dad never went, 'I'm going to cause my kids pain.' He went, 'I'm going to teach my children.' "
And he's forgiven his father all of his failings.
"Dad was raised the way he was raised. That's how he knew how to raise a kid," he said. "He was a 21-year-old father who got given a 3-year-old kid and he did the best he could. . . . (He) always paid the rent. I had to go to school. I had a job when I was 14. He was just on me all the time.
"And look at me now. I mean, I don't know how I can rip him too hard -- I'm here talking about my TV show coming out." Titus said that members of his family have "an amazing sense of humor."
"If you notice, the show's got a lot of love, especially about Dad," he said. "And we may show what Dad did and stuff that may look heinous to other people, but it's always the normal people, the freaks who are (in) the minority are the ones that seem to have a problem with it."
Christopher Titus has a strange sort of appeal -- you want to like this guy, you admire him for making something of a tough life.
But you get the feeling that he's still working out his problems, only this time it's in a sitcom rather than the years he's spent talking about them as a stand-up comedian.
"You talk about your pain every night. That's what you go to therapy for," he said. "I got to go to a room full of 300 people every night for 16 years around this country and talk about it. And what happens is you blow it out because you see the funny side of it. You see the power in it as opposed to the pain in it."
Now he's dragging it into the living rooms of viewers across the country. And it's not a pretty -- or a particularly funny -- sight.