Christopher Titus is one angry dude.
Fresh off his divorce, he's brought us a new special, Love is Evol, which is set to air on Comedy Central on Saturday, February 14, that might be the bitterest, angriest thing that is marketed on the basis that it will make you laugh, ever. Bear in mind that I've read the majority of Matt Groening's Love is Hell comics, which routinely feature rabbit-like creatures sexually humiliating each other.
O yeah, and ‘evol' is love spelled backwards. Tell all your friends and look cool, because I was about five minutes into this thing before I figured that out.
The primary topic of the show is, naturally, his divorce from wife of fifteen years, which comprises nearly an hour of the 85-minute program, beginning on variations of ‘why, God, why,' and eventually getting into the specifics of the horrible conditions that he had to live with for the duration of the marriage. While he wholeheartedly admits that he is only presenting his own side of the story of this hideous breakup, if any of what he says is at all true (and knowing his family background, I'm inclined to think that it is), it presents a pretty harrowing portrait of his home life, with his ex-wife at one point saying, ‘I wish you would kill yourself like your mother and your sister.' Yeah, it was like that.
A few examples from the show:
"I lost 28 pounds since the divorce. Because that's what a soul weighs."
"The only thing that ever made me want to be a wife-beater was getting called a wife-beater."
That's pretty par for the course. It should be noted that several times during the show, he deviates from comedy altogether, and goes on rants on why people stay in abusive relationships. He never really provides an answer to that question, though he does hypothesize that everyone has a nasty relationship early on, and that you carry that with you through every relationship you have for the rest of your life, and he is incisive enough to point out that you don't get a rebate at the end of your life for time spent with horrible people. Too true.
Things do pick up towards the end a little bit, when he discusses his new relationship with a much younger woman. At this point, his humor switches gears radically from bitter, angry tales of getting stabbed to a more familiar ‘skinny white boy out of his element' sort of thing, as he describes meeting this young woman's Marine father and trying to impress him, but the show would have been far too much of a downer if he didn't give us something of a happy ending.
I can't say that I didn't laugh, because Titus has a much better stage personality than ever came off during his television show (the only place I had seen him before), and manages to pull off these incidences of horror with enough energy that it doesn't get bogged down. But with the humor being so relentlessly grim for so much of it, the cumulative effect is one more inclined to make you rethink your life no matter how happy you may happen to be rather than be elated at the rather impressive display of humor for even a short period of time.
The special airs on Comedy Central on Valentine's Day, but the DVD comes out next Tuesday, February 17. It has the show, along with a small behind-the-scenes clip of Titus and this kid playing cupid, a collection of advertisements Titus did for the show called Countdown to Valentine's Day, and a surprisingly heart-breaking collection of footage taken of audience members outside the show as they detail their own horrific break-up stories. They're not as bad as Titus's, but they seem worse when you know they're not getting paid for it.
"Christopher Titus: Love is Evol" is on sale February 17, 2009 and is rated NR. Comedy. Written and directed by Christopher Titus. Starring Christopher Titus.
