Bill Burr and the Scars of Childhood Trauma

Coping through comedy

Full disclosure: I only discovered Bill Burr a few months ago. I’ve been on a somewhat desperate mission to find things to laugh about, and after hearing him on a podcast, I decided to check out his new special The Drop Dead Years.

Maybe it’s my age, but, boy, could I relate—even though I’m not a man facing the prospect of keeling over on a golf course. When he talked about men having two emotions: 1) fine and 2) enraged, I immediately flashed back to how I felt the majority of the time as a prosecutor. I appreciated his candor while talking about his feelings and joking about how getting married and going to therapy forced him to confront the FOUNDATION underneath the feelings.

Not easy stuff, but Burr made it funny and totally relatable. It wasn’t until the very end, when he was talking about giving his three year-old a bath and directing him to “wash his own pee-pee,” that I caught a glimpse of prior childhood trauma that may have contributed to the limits of “fine” and “enraged” resulting in the need for therapy.

He presented it in a very off-handed way, so if you were still laughing about the concept of a three year-old washing his own pee-pee, you might have missed it. SPOILER ALERT: Burr revealed that when he was a child someone had touched his pee-pee and it wasn’t in the context of giving him a bath. Because of this, he was going to make damn sure his son would be crystal clear about who was allowed to touch his pee-pee: NOBODY.

It’s a common perception about artists (and comics specifically) that they’ve created art to cope with their own pain. I’m sure it doesn’t apply to all of them, but watching Burr respond to that very question on The View, I confirmed what I’d already concluded. After dancing around the question a bit, instead of talking about therapy, he credited his use of mushrooms for helping him to recognize how “profoundly lonely” he was as a kid.

In a different interview, he said this:

“…there's also a lot of sad clowns that are accountants. I worked in warehousing, there were a lot of sad clowns out there. There's a lot of people that, if you had a rough go of it as a kid, it doesn't always translate into you going into show business or the arts. I think that there's people on Wall Street that are compensating for whatever mountain is in your head when it's usually something you can step right over. That's something that I continue to learn as an adult. A lot of my fears and anxieties are the fears and anxieties of a six-year-old boy. When I finally confront them, they're really small.”

Burr has acknowledged going to therapy at the urging of his wife. That’s interesting to me, and—whether he intends to or not—I appreciate that he’s using his platform and new special to talk about the need to get our heads straight, no matter what our day job happens to be.

As a former prosecutor specializing in child abuse cases, I only recently began to unpack what I’d been compartmentalizing for decades. It’s been a difficult but necessary process. Burr’s comedy special was a painful reminder to me that the child victims I met and advocated for, may still have significant struggles as adults.

Also, like Burr, I came to realize that those two emotions—fine and enraged—actually were mere stand-ins for many, many more, that were far more nuanced.

How about you? Have you experienced a self-limiting of your emotions? What are you doing to help yourself? Let me know in the comments, or reply to this email.

Until next month,

~ Debbie

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APRIL BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS:

If you’ve ever clicked on a book link in my newsletter, you know it directs you to Amazon. I think my reasoning for that was that you could find good descriptions and reviews if you wanted more info on a specific book.

I’ve now changed the links to direct you to bookshop.org, where each purchase benefits your local bookstore. And if you use this link, you’ll get 20% off your first purchase.

Fiction: The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

I’ve seen this book recommended often, and hesitated, noting it was in the sci-fi/fantasy genre—one I have never explored. Not even Harry Potter! I cannot get over how frequently I had to stop for a Kleenex break. Maybe it felt too close to the world in which we’re currently living?

Nonfiction: The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss

Full disclosure: I couldn’t finish this one before it was due back at the library, but what I did read was super interesting. Before returning it, I skipped ahead to the chapter about the Aryan and Communist bookstores of the 1930s and 1940s. Bookstores are an important part of our culture and history—hence my decision to link my book recommendations to bookshop.org.