Joyful Recollections Of Trauma

When something humiliating or scary happens to you, do you file it away, or do you turn it into a story that gives you back your power? In Joyful Recollections of Trauma, Paul Scheer argues that the most painful moments of your past can become rocket fuel: for humor, for connection, and for a more honest life. He contends that owning your story—especially the parts you’ve hidden in mental attics and literal plastic bins—transforms shame into authorship and isolation into community. But to do so, you must understand the survival strategies you built as a kid, the identities you improvised to stay safe, and the ways you armored up with jokes and hustle.

This book is a memoir in artifacts. Scheer is a lifelong collector: of ticket stubs, matchbooks, and VHS sleeves—and of episodes he once kept secret. His box-stacker’s eye gives the narrative a vivid specificity, from a Rocking Horse Ranch alleyway on fire to a Long Island hayloft where hiding felt like salvation. But the larger project is the opposite of hoarding. It’s curating: pulling stories out of storage, naming them, and letting them connect to other people’s lives. (Think David Sedaris’s self-revealing humor meets Trevor Noah’s survival wit, with the DIY comedy world-building of Tina Fey—only delivered with Scheer’s anxious, elastic energy.)

What the book really claims

Scheer’s core claim is simple and bracing: If you don’t tell your story, someone else (or your silence) will do it for you. That’s why he returns to episodes that once defined him by fear or embarrassment—the stepdad who choked him over Monopoly money, the Disney World meltdown that ended in a lactose-intolerance diagnosis, the SNL audition he thought he had to face alone—and reframes them with context, comedy, and clarity. He believes the move from secrecy to speech doesn’t erase the pain; it redistributes the power. Humor is not escapism here; it’s an engagement tool, like a flashlight with a cracked lens that still throws just enough light to get you moving.

How the book is built

Scheer braids two big arcs. Part 1 (his jokingly titled “Old Testament”) spans the blast radius of childhood: a mercurial stepfather named Hunter; a house that felt like a depot for animals, weapons, and chaos; and the protective behaviors—hiding, running, lying, joking—that got him through. You meet the kid who nearly burns a dude ranch to the ground to avoid horseback riding, the boy who battles a beardo home intruder with a wooden ninja sword, and the Catholic-school son who’s told Weird Al is Satanic while parishioners speak in tongues.

Part 2 (“New Testament”) charts the improvised adulthood that follows: body jobs (including strapping a CRT screen to his chest while Rollerblading AOL CDs around Manhattan), Blockbuster-floor power, a pilgrimage to the Upright Citizens Brigade where long-form improv and community rewire his comedy and his life, a sideways-love story with June Diane Raphael that becomes a marriage, and the disarming Wikipedia-deep-dive that ends with an ADHD diagnosis—plus meds that quiet the noise so he can choose, not just react. Each section reads like a great bit with stakes: it lands laughs, then lingers.

Why it matters to you

You probably have your own boxes—literal or mental—full of “we don’t talk about that” stories. Scheer’s throughline is that your past doesn’t lighten by being locked away; it lightens when you metabolize it. His methods are teachable: notice your survival patterns (hide, sprint, appease, explode); swap secrecy for specificity; build a small, trusted audience (friends, collaborators, kids) and say the hard sentence out loud. Then use humor not to minimize but to frame—like Brené Brown’s vulnerability, but with chain-store VHS returns and fake-ID mishaps as case studies.

In this guide, you’ll see how a child raised in “normalized chaos” becomes an artist who makes community his safety mechanism. You’ll learn why “humor as armor” works until it doesn’t—and how to put the armor down without losing your edge. You’ll examine faith and fanaticism, work and grift, love and partnership, parenthood and minivans, ADHD and lactose intolerance. Finally, you’ll walk away with a template for turning your own mortifying episodes into meaning—without sanding off their weirdness, because the weirdness is often the wisdom.

Key Promise

“Not acknowledging my trauma took away my triumph. I survived.” Scheer’s promise is that if you claim your survival out loud, you free your future to be built on truth, not on a cover story you crafted in fifth grade.

Scheer grew up in a house where the rules changed mid-sentence and the punishments came out of nowhere. His stepfather, Hunter—quail-raiser, horse-owner, gun-lover—could be funny at breakfast and choking you over a Monopoly rent at lunch. That kind of volatility doesn’t just produce fear; it produces strategies. You learn how to read rooms, dodge blows, and preempt disaster with a quick joke or a faster exit. That conditioning explains a lot of what follows: the hiding, the sprinting, the improvising—and eventually, the art.

Normalized chaos

The book’s most searing images are domestic: a child publicly spanked with a belt at his own birthday party; a hayloft accessed by a too-short ladder, where being “stuck” becomes a chosen sanctuary (“up there in the hole, I was safe”); and a house that’s part petting zoo, part armory. Hunter’s violence often leaves no visible marks—wedgies that make eyes water, scalding-water hand-washing, chokeholds undone before a bruise forms. That very invisibility undermines intervention: a family counselor threatens to call the police “next time,” then doesn’t. Child Protective Services interviews the abuser and the abused in the same room, then declares everything fine. (Compare Tara Westover’s Educated for another portrait of institutional blind spots.)

Survival strategies you recognize

Hide. He turns a loose cardboard panel under his childhood bed into Narnia. He becomes a hide-and-seek zealot (once triggering a security-team search at a dictator’s Long Island mansion when the host’s daughter vanishes with him into a closet). Hiding becomes peace and leverage: when he’s left in the hayloft with no way down, he decides to wait out Hunter—his first victory on his own terms.

Run and lie. He nearly burns Rocking Horse Ranch while staging a one-man action movie and then insists to firefighters, “I found a fire.” His teenage “Nice bike!” showdown at 7-Eleven with three camo-clad men ends in a panicked cross-parking-lot sprint and a clumsy appeal to authority that turns into a lesson in how threats work: press charges and they’ll get your address.

Fight. A beardo pounds at the back slider demanding Hunter; eleven-year-old Paul breaks a personal rule (“Don’t reveal you’re alone”) and then fights with a wooden demo sword, smashing the man in the skull as he crawls through a laundry-room window. The cops leave; the family rehung a broken frame; the message is “If you survived, you’re fine.” But that night lodges: danger forces action, and when no one else shows up, you do.

The cost and the carry

These early moves work—until they don’t. They wire your nervous system to assume betrayal, and they harden into reflexes. You lie fast because the truth was never safe; you run because staying increased the chance of harm; you fight because the only adult who protected you was the fighter you invented. As an adult, Scheer will have to unlearn what saved him as a kid (a tension Gabor Maté highlights in The Myth of Normal: adaptive in childhood, maladaptive later).

Takeaway

If your childhood trained you to anticipate impact, of course you grew humor, speed, and stealth. Honor those skills. Then ask—like Scheer does throughout—where they still serve you and where they’re costing you closeness, honesty, or rest.

Scheer loves The Incredible Hulk, but he hated the eye-flash when man becomes monster. As a kid, he creates his own Hulk—the part of him that knees his forty-something stepfather in the groin and finally “wins” a wrestling match. That Hulk protects him—and later scares him. Comedy becomes a different kind of transformation: one that metabolizes fury and fear into shared laughter rather than collateral damage.

Armor that works—until it isolates

Humor shields you from humiliation. It also buys seconds to decide what’s safe. Scheer’s wooden-sword heroics happen after he breaks the rule never to say he’s alone; later, he builds a library of comebacks and bits to buy space between stimulus and response. Onstage at Chicago City Limits (short-form) and later at UCB (long-form), he learns to siphon the same adrenaline that once powered fights into scene choices. But he also sees the line: the night he sends a classmate to the hospital, he recognizes the spectators’ faces—they mirror the ones at his childhood party watching him get belted. He has become what he feared.

From solo defense to ensemble trust

At UCB, a teacher tells him to look every teammate in the eyes and say, “I got your back.” That tiny ritual rewires something giant. The survival rule was “You’re on your own.” The comedy rule becomes “We share the risk.” He trades the one-liner duel energy of corporate revue parodies (“Saddam, You’re Rocking the Boat”) for the trust-fall storytelling of ASSSSCAT. It’s not an accident that his personal life shifts in tandem—toward partners and friends who don’t weaponize silence (contrast the SNL teacher who trashes him through a wall with Amy Poehler’s calm, generous “It’s not that bad—have fun”).

Humor as bridge, not bypass

Scheer doesn’t sentimentalize jokes. They can cut, deflect, or connect. The difference is motive and audience. Telling the Disney “death by dairy” story—vomiting over a Birnbaum guide, a skycap wheeling him away by mistake, Nipsey Russell reciting a poem—doesn’t deny the distress. It frames it so you’re in the room with him, laughing and learning. (Viktor Frankl argued that meaning is the last human freedom; here humor is the doorway to meaning.) Comedy isn’t avoidance; it’s a permission slip for truth.

Practice

Use humor to move toward, not away from, the hard thing. Ask: Is this joke buying time to get honest—or building a wall I’ll have to tear down later?

Scheer’s garage holds Sterilite bins of his life—ticket stubs, matchbooks, a Martin Lawrence playbill, notes from classes, even Mardi Gras beads acquired the night he watched a real-life Channing Tatum dance-off. The boxes protect stories, but they also trap them. This book is him opening the bins. The move from storing to telling is the central craft lesson: curation beats collection only when you add context and claim your point of view.

Why stories stayed boxed

Three reasons kept him quiet: fear (If I tell it, I’ll relive it), loyalty (My mom and I survived together; I won’t betray her), and momentum (I’m a working comedian; anecdotes without the underbelly are safer). What changes? Parenting, therapy, and a growing sense that secrecy preserves shame. He reframes even his parents with nuance: he’s angry his dad didn’t intervene more with Hunter—and also grateful his dad never missed a school moment and loved UCB’s messiest shows. He forgives without erasing harm. (Brené Brown would call this “boundaryed compassion.”)

Claiming your narrative power

The actual escape from Hunter is cinematic: a fake hunting trip to Montana, movers loading boxes, Hunter arriving mid-heist, and a tug-of-war over two guns through a car window until Paul lets go of the stocks so they can drive away. The metaphor is on the nose because it’s true: stop gripping the weapon that keeps you locked in place. Later, when Scheer hears a mentor mocking his SNL audition through a wall, he literally moves out of hiding and chooses his people at the bar. In both scenes, he resists the old rule (“Protect the abuser’s comfort”) and keeps his promise to himself (“Tell the truth, even if you’re shaking”).

A usable template for you

• Label the bin. Name the pattern behind your story: appeasing, hiding, explosive, funny-too-fast.
• Add the context you lacked. As a kid, “If you survived, you’re fine” was the rule. As an adult, dignity needs more than survival.
• Choose your witnesses. Start with people who say “I got your back,” then widen the circle.
• Keep the weirdness. Don’t sand down the facts (e.g., a skycap “kidnaps” you by wheelchair); specificity makes truth credible.

Bottom Line

Collecting preserves; storytelling liberates. Open one box. Label, share, and notice what power comes back.

If you grew up with religion that shouted more than it soothed, you’ll recognize Scheer’s whiplash. He moves from Roman Catholic donuts-and-mass efficiency to a born-again church where people speak in tongues, fists shoot “God energy,” and Weird Al is banned for singing “Nature Trail to Hell.” He seeks a miracle cure for his out-toeing foot; a pastor shakes him and screams “YOU ARE HEALED!”—only nothing changes. The kid feels unworthy. The adult reframes: maybe God isn’t in the spectacle; maybe He’s in the people who stay.

How spiritual harm happens

Scheer parses the mismatch between sermonized mercy and practiced cruelty. In the Living Christ Church, ecstasy stands in for intimacy; public performance substitutes for private safety. If God and Hunter are both angry males whose rules shift, who can you trust? The system’s failure is not abstract: it outlaws Weird Al, but it never stops Hunter’s hands. (This echoes Hannah Gadsby’s argument in Nanette that jokes without accountability can normalize harm.)

Reclaiming ritual on your terms

As an adult, he experiments: he visits different faiths, tallies pros and cons, doesn’t land. When his son Gus is born, he and June decline a formal baptism; her father offers to baptize Gus in their backyard. They say yes. The result feels like the thing religion promises at its best: a gathered circle that agrees to help raise a child. It’s community, safety, and care—without the threat that kept him small. In other words, a sacrament remade to serve the child, not the institution.

Talking with kids without gaslighting

Scheer notes how his family’s pattern was “If you survived, you’re fine.” In parenting, he does the opposite. When his son asks about the Uvalde shooting, he resists the urge to soothe away the fear. He listens, centers the child’s experience, and says, “It’s okay to be scared, but I’ll always be here for you.” That small sentence repairs something ancient: he stays in the feeling instead of outlawing it.

Principle

Trade spectacle for steadfastness. Any belief worth keeping should increase safety, agency, and honesty at home.

Scheer’s “school” is a montage: a shy first acting class in a Long Island living room run by Lillian Caron (who looked like “Marlon Brando impersonating Shelley Winters”); a midtown porn palace called Show World where the lesson is that curiosity outruns courage; and Blockbuster, where he learns power, theater, and a little larceny.

Learning by doing (and faking)

At twelve, he does his own monologues in gibberish and steals focus as a silent juggler in someone else’s breakup scene—Lillian’s metaphor for comedy: be interesting without words. In high school, he lies his way into an adult improv class by claiming to be in college, then lies his way out of a Central Park joint circle (“I have a baptism”). It’s not admirable, but it is educational: he practices entering rooms where he feels too young and learning fast.

Blockbuster University

At the chain’s flagship, he falls under the spell of shrink-wrap and laminated authority. He hacks the system (“hold” new releases for friends; pre-sell Disney’s Aladdin using vault FOMO), he tests parasocial boundaries (staging a fake Jami Gertz signing with a Phoebe Cates poster), and he glimpses real Hollywood in the wild (discovering Natalie Portman’s birth name—Hershlag—on a rental account). He also runs the biggest heist of the era: stealing empty VHS cover boxes to make his home collection look legit. The punch line arrives on cue: then DVDs came out. (An elegant little parable about permanence.)

Body jobs and the office where nothing happened

Between gigs, he becomes a Rollerblading human billboard dragging a TV on his chest, and a downtown accounts-payable employee who’s paid to have a chair—no desk, no computer, no tasks. He turns being fired into a severance negotiation masterclass (“I’ve been asking for something to do for two years… six months”). He leaves with five months’ pay and a story. The throughline is scrappy dignity: if the system is absurd, narrate it, and find the exit.

Field Note

Your résumé is a pastiche of audacity, luck, and duct tape. That’s not a flaw; it’s your style guide. Use it.

Scheer leaves one improv home (Chicago City Limits) for another (UCB) because the latter’s vibe matches his nervous system: punk lights, beer-in-hand bravado, ensemble loyalty, and an appetite for failing together. Del Close, improv legend, only needs one sentence to push him over the edge: “Tell those people at Chicago City Limits to stop performing that horseshit short-form improv.” The stakes aren’t just artistic; they’re communal. He chooses the people who will say yes to his weird. That choice shapes everything after: the shows he makes, the marriage he builds, the way he absorbs rejection and keeps moving.

Why ensemble matters

The Real Real World is a Saturday-night hit because the cast shares oxygen. He even accepts being “on the bench” as an onstage director whose job is to set up others’ shots—his hardest role and his most formative. Respecto Montalban bombs gloriously with a Blue Man Group sketch when the projector fails and they run back out, inexplicably bloody. But “we bombed together” becomes a happy kind of scar.

Auditioning for your dream—together

When Lorne Michaels asks for a best-of-UCB night, Scheer is the only one who gets an SNL audition. He hides it, thinking he should go alone, then spends five hours isolated in a dressing room with a live-feed of competitors and a hallway chat with a pre-megafame Kevin Hart. Amy Poehler steps out from her audition and tells him it’s not that bad. He goes in, crushes or doesn’t (you never know), and emerges into a corridor where a teacher is mocking him through a wall. He hides—literally—then stops, decides not to shrink, and rejoins his friends. It’s a micro-ritual of self-respect: choose the room that wants you. (Compare with Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential on the role of supportive peers.)

Fame, awkwardness, and boundaries

A joy of the book is how often he meets idols and combusts: Alan Alda humiliates him; Bill Cosby whispers “Go!” like a hex; Samuel L. Jackson slams “Fuck no!” before he opens his mouth; he confuses Robert Downey Jr. at Comic-Con while his wife, who’s actually worked with RDJ, slowly backs away. The growth isn’t in the wins; it’s in his strategic exits. He learns the wisdom of leaving the party after an awkward moment (so the story ends where you want it to). That’s boundary work with a comedian’s timing.

Creative Law

Pick the ensemble that expands you. Auditions are moments; community is a practice. Build the latter and you’ll survive the former.

Scheer and June Diane Raphael don’t so much fall in love as keep finding each other in New York at the right speed. After a year of almost-dates (including a vodka-luge cancellation that forces him to see Sideways alone at 11:45 p.m.), they finally align. He blurts, “Do you like me? Because I like you.” She says, “Yeah.” The path from there to marriage and kids is full of Scheer’s signature chaos, only now the chaos is shared—and that makes all the difference.

Proposal, imperfect and perfect

He research-sprints the ring (from fancy boutiques to dead-people diamonds) until he “knows” June’s. He plans a post-dinner beach proposal with a sweatshirt-concealed ring box and a case to avoid valeting the car. On the sand, he launches into a heartfelt speech; June, startled, asks, “What the fuck are you talking about?!”—then realizes it’s real, cries, and says yes just as a twelve-year-old heckler yells, “Get a room!” It’s clumsy, human, and theirs. The lesson: perfect is not a thing; present is.

How they crisis

At a bar, a scarfed hipster calls June a slur. Scheer’s old Hulk stirs; his comeback is nonsense (“I bet you’d want to put my dick in between my front teeth!”). The man rears back to punch—and June smacks him hard across the face. They sprint out, parents and partners, triumphant and laughing. Their real superpower is tag-teaming; whoever has a better move makes it. (This is the couple version of “I got your back.”)

Parenting with honesty and humor

Becoming Dad combines awe and grief (mourning the old life) with practical Tetris: how do you get to a park playdate when the gas light pops on and you forgot the wipes? You rip up a Clippers T-shirt to invent wipes and you make the five-minute social window. Scheer refuses the family script “If you survived, you’re fine,” opting instead to name the hard thing. That’s how you shrink intergenerational echoes. And yes, he evangelizes minivans—the funniest, most persuasive brief you’ll read on sliding doors, built-in vacuums, and the sex appeal of three-zone climate control. (Consider it the dad-comedy cousin to Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft.)

Relationship Rule

Don’t audition alone when you can audition together. In love and parenting, narrate your stumbles, share the joke, and choose the team over the bit.

Two medical plot twists reshape Scheer’s life: lactose intolerance discovered by nearly “dying at Disney,” and ADHD diagnosed via a Twitter troll on Father’s Day. Both stories are played for laughs, then grounded in precision: a doctor’s finger finally rules out appendicitis before connecting milk to meltdowns; a psychiatrist’s tiny pill dials down the mental static so he can finish what he starts. The throughline is humility: help isn’t defeat; it’s a form of authorship.

The Disney diagnosis

Eleven-year-old Scheer lands in Orlando, eats a Mickey bar, and spirals into a night of projectile vomit that defeats housekeeping. He’s wheelchair-kidnapped by a rogue skycap, serenaded by Nipsey Russell on a plane, and finger-tested by his pediatrician who quickly sees the pattern: cereal-milk breakfasts, ice-cream desserts—milk is the villain. Dairy leaves; Lactaid arrives; identity shifts. He becomes the weary veteran kid at birthday parties who pops a Lactaid and intones, “Almost did.”

The ADHD reveal

A Clippers Twitter feud ends with a stranger diagnosing him: “You’re hyperfixating. You have ADHD.” He scrolls ADHD Twitter and finds his biography in bullet points: leg jiggling, late-by-early arrivals, too many notebooks, cleaning the apartment before writing vows. June’s response (“Of course you do”) narrows the denial window. He sees a psychiatrist, resists meds (ego fears), tries them, then stops, then starts again. The blinders metaphor says it well: with the pill, he can focus on one lane; without it, every lane honks.

How to translate this to your life

• Track the pattern, not the one-off. “If you survived, you’re fine” hides chronic friction (constant overwhelm, ritual lateness). Patterns point to causes.
• Treat help as a tool, not a verdict. A pill, a boundary, a minivan—they don’t change who you are; they help you be who you are on purpose. (See Ned Hallowell’s Driven to Distraction for ADHD context.)
• Narrate the shift. Tell your people what changed and why; it normalizes adaptation and invites accountability.

Reframe

Diagnosis isn’t destiny; it’s a map. Once you have a map, you can choose your route—with fewer puddles and more jokes.