What’s Wrong with Me?

As I sat across from Dr. Drew Pinsky, the renowned addiction specialist and broadcaster, I beamed. I always get a little extra boost of excitement when I know I’ll be sharing what I consider to be my prized possessions: a collection of absurd video clips from the web. On my long-running podcast, Your Mom’s House, we specialize in finding and sharing the most outrageous clips the internet has to offer. The more inappropriate, disgusting, and disturbing, the better. Our guests sit in a chair facing a monitor, and the podcast shifts between interview, conversation, and showcasing our clips. The goal is always to get the guest to laugh or cry watching what we show them. Most of the time we have comedians on, so having someone as educated, articulate, and frankly put together as Dr. Drew was a new world for us. I could only fantasize about what he would say. He always had fantastic insight whenever I had seen him react on other shows. But those other shows weren’t going to show him what we had. We had videos that made people shut off their phones. Would he laugh, scream, walk out? The anticipation and exhilaration were killing me.

I never imagined I would have a podcast. In 2009, my friend Joe Rogan began doing one out of his house. He would invite friends over and we would sit on a couch in his office and chat. I thought he was kind of crazy for doing it, but this is the same guy who talked about his sensory deprivation tank, so I thought, This is just another weird thing he’s into. He kept telling me to do one, and I kept shrugging it off. In 2010 on a random weeknight my phone rang, and it was Joe.

“Dude, I saw your wife at the Improv. She’s hilarious.”

“Yeah, she is.”

“You have to do a podcast together.”

And so in late 2010 we began what would become one of the biggest comedy podcasts. When we started, we would go over to Brian Redban’s (Joe’s producer at the time) apartment in Burbank to record the first forty episodes. We had no idea what to do, so we just… talked. We would have the same conversations we were having at home, only now they were on mic. Soon we discovered that people were actually listening and the show began to expand. We went from simple conversations to interviewing comics, then building segments and ultimately, my favorite, playing clips. Clips have become a staple of the podcast along with almost always maintaining a juvenile tone while we’re doing the show. We are anything but adults when doing our podcast and, truthfully, I love it. We both relish the time together every week where we get to act like fifth graders.

Our audience has become our associate producers, sending in the most horrifying and silly content that the internet can provide. Once you tell a large audience that you like this sort of thing—you’d better hold on to your seat, because they are going to go beyond what you’ve seen or imagined. The email account is so active that I had to remove it from my phone. It averages more than 2,500 messages a week from listeners wanting to share their stories, songs, and the clips that I crave.

With Drew we had earmarked our favorites of the past six months: a man asking for a tattooed woman to beat him, a woman bathing in her own menstrual blood, a man encouraging people with ED to try meth because it helped him. You get the picture. As I ran through the clips with Drew, he kept shaking his head. “What do you like about this?”

I thought for a moment. “I like studying human behavior.” I sat back with a smug smile on my face. Drew can’t judge me now. My interest is purely academic and a fellow scholar will respect that. But Drew didn’t accept it. He shot back, “You don’t like studying human behavior, Tom.”

I don’t? I panicked. Was this doctor about to reveal my brain is actually poisoned? Does he know precisely what is wrong with me? How does he know?

“You like abnormal human behavior.” My head dropped and I turned red. He was right, and he noticed the change in me. “You feel shame. Why?”

I did feel shame. I’d been exposed. What is wrong with me? Why does watching these clips fill me with happiness? Why do I laugh when I watch other people watch those clips for the first time? It’s hard to describe, but when I press play I know something is about to happen. It’s like a chef who knows he’s going to feed someone Japanese A5 wagyu beef for the first time. There’s really only two ways it can go, and both have “holy shit” in them. I want guests to either laugh or be vocally, physically uncomfortable.

I’ve always had a visceral reaction to strange behavior. People who don’t know how to behave in a public setting are fascinating to me. I don’t think I’m alone in that. When someone starts yelling and cursing in a restaurant or store, we all turn our heads and watch the chaos unfold. I’ve also always laughed uncontrollably when someone tells me a story of personal injury. I know it sounds awful, and I’ve presumed it’s my way of dealing with something uncomfortable that I never knew how to process. When I was a little kid I would squirm at any gory details and eventually I would just laugh.

I knew that I was laughing a little too hard when I was working a construction job one summer in Florida and listened to a man tell a story about when he was injured. I was eighteen, and this was some brutal grunt work remodeling apartments with no AC. My friend Steve and I worked under a guy in his forties named Alan. Alan looked like he’d had somewhat of a rough life, rougher than ours for sure. He was thin, tan, and polite, but he had that Florida man vibe. He’d probably drifted all over the state and maybe even the entire southeast. Every morning we would arrive on-site and he would take us through the tasks of the day: painting, laying tile, hauling two-by-fours, etc. On one particularly hot day Alan removed his shirt and I saw something I had never seen before: a foreign object was protruding from inside his abdominal area. It was clearly something mechanical in nature, and it was under his skin!

“What the fuck is that, dude?”

“Oh, that’s a morphine drip pouch.”

“Huh?”

Alan went on to explain that the device I saw sticking out from his midsection was a port of morphine. It had a line from the port to his neck, where it would release a timed dosage. I had never seen or heard of anything like that, and in over twenty years to this day, I’ve only heard one person mention a similar device. When I asked Alan why he needed a morphine drip in his neck, I was unprepared for his straightforward answer.

“A bathtub fell on my neck from a third-floor window.”

To say that I laughed would not be truthful. I went into an uncontrollable fit of laughter that was so powerful it rode on the verge of a seizure. My abs ached, and tears poured down my face. I tried to hide it at first, but it was so overwhelming that there wasn’t a point in trying to pretend it wasn’t happening. When I finally recovered, I sat up and looked at Alan. He had almost the same deadpan expression on his face but with a hint of a smirk. “That’s… funny to you?”

I tried to explain then what I’m more capable of explaining now. It was the perfect storm of hilarity for me. It was the whole package: Alan’s plain-faced expression, the unheard-of sewn-in opioid pouch, and the completely outrageous explanation that a bathtub fell on his neck from three stories up. It’s exactly what is so great about a perfectly executed joke: the information of the joke coupled with the timing. Alan got me that day. Thankfully, he wasn’t offended. He actually grew to enjoy my laughter at his pain, and he would show up some days and walk up to me. “I got one I think you’ll like. I ever tell you about the time I broke both collarbones falling off a ladder?” I would collapse over listening to every horrible detail.

Fast-forward twenty years, and I still find something so funny about injuries. I have to make a clear distinction—I don’t want to see them. I don’t like open wounds or gore of any kind, but an injury story or video of one without gruesome footage will make me laugh. I swear that I don’t fully understand why it makes me laugh, but it does.

One of our all-time most popular clips from YMH is captured from inside a car in Taiwan. The driver pulls into a mechanic’s shop and the audio suggests that his car is manual and he is definitely anything but an expert at driving it. He is revving the engine hard and struggling to gracefully bring it into the garage. Another man is standing there, wearing dark coveralls and reading whatever is on his clipboard. He doesn’t bother to look up until… the car hits him. The clipboard goes flying and the man lets out an almost inhuman yell: “Baaaaaaaa!!” He then yells commands in Mandarin, which we have since learned are the word “stuck.” The driver doesn’t move the car for more than a beat, so it makes sense that the mechanic is telling him that he’s stuck. Finally, the car inches forward and the mechanic falls to the ground, moaning. The driver casually walks back, looks down at him with no expression on his face, and then… just walks away. I’ll interrupt my justification for laughing to inform you that the man who was hit by the car made a full recovery—not even a broken bone. It was widely reported in Taiwan, so if you’re holding on for, “Yeah, but what happened to that man?” Well, he’s fine.

Back to the video. I would take the witness stand to defend my stance that this video is nothing short of hilarious; I’ve shown it to at least a dozen guests on our show, and I can happily report that a few agree. Some laugh just as hard as I did, and some look like their soul escaped when viewing it. I’m certain that it’s funny. No doubt about it. But seriously, is something wrong with me?

If you’re reading this you probably made it through 2020. Unless you’re reading this hundreds of years from now. Nobody alive at this time can recall a year like 2020. There was a global pandemic, horrific humanitarian and economic consequences unlike any that we could imagine. I was so lucky that I got into podcasting ten years earlier and had built a fan base that wanted to consume what we were making. Everything was growing in that business, and it allowed us to thrive in the most depressing of years. I had made it almost through the entire year, not only unscathed but prospering. Could this historically bad year go any better for me? It was December 1, 2020. Literally the first day of the last month of that terrible year. My good friend Bert Kreischer and I were going to film some content for the livestreaming New Year’s Eve podcast that we had planned. Bert and I do a weekly podcast called 2 Bears, 1 Cave that has grown into one of the world’s biggest comedy shows. We had done livestreaming podcasts before and really enjoyed putting them together. We had competed on the previous one by playing tennis. I trained for months after not having played for years. I got my forehand to a pretty good place and I was playing three days a week in anticipation of kicking my friend’s ass. I knew he wasn’t training as much as me. The only thing up in the air was, How good was his game back in the day? We had established that we both played tennis as teens, but you really never know the extent to which somebody was good twenty-five years ago. If there’s one thing I can say about Bert, it’s that he has a tendency for gross exaggerations. I was pretty confident that this was another one of his tall tales. He beat the shit out of me. 6–2, 6–1. It was demoralizing. My coach, Mike, whom I had worked with for months preparing for the match, was equally astounded. He pulled me aside and told me that Bert had a “legit Division I college serve.” He also pointed out that he’d never seen such a discrepancy between someone’s serve and the rest of their game. But it didn’t matter. Bert’s serve was so advanced I didn’t have a chance.

I knew that on the next challenge I had to show him up. I needed to pick a sport or challenge where I felt extremely confident that I could return the favor to my friend. I chose basketball.

I actually played a lot of basketball earlier in my life. Pickup games, organized basketball, club basketball, and I always had a hoop in every house growing up. In college I would go to the gym and get in on games with some pretty good players. After moving to Los Angeles it was one of the first social activities I took part in. I would go to the Hollywood YMCA and get in on games there. Funny thing about saying the “Hollywood YMCA” is that people outside of Los Angeles think you mean the “showbiz YMCA” as if there are red carpets, Botox treatments in the lobby, and actors parading around in costumes. Angelenos know the truth. “Hollywood” means dirty, grimy, scrappy. Hollywood is easily one of the nastiest, most neglected parts of the city. It’s filthy, and the pickup games are pretty good. I knew Bert didn’t have the same basketball background as me. I chose this competition just to annihilate him.

That day we went to a private gym and were joined by YouTube sensation and exceptionally talented basketball player Tristan Jass. He was a week shy of his twenty-first birthday. Tristan has built an enormous following by posting videos of himself playing basketball against bigger, faster opponents and not only holding his own, but often humiliating them. He also has an incredible ability to make trick shots that seem physically impossible.

First, we played Tristan 2 v 1, meaning Tristan had to play against the two of us. It’s completely unfair to play two on one in basketball, since the team with two players can pass to each other, and the other team can only guard one at a time. On top of that we agreed that each basket that Bert and I scored would count as two points, while Tristan’s baskets would count as one.

He beat us.

Totally Bert’s fault for missing a wide-open layup. In case it isn’t clear, Bert is fat and very bad at basketball.

After the game it was time for our preplanned dunk contest. It was a simple plan. Lower the hoop to seven feet, five inches, both of us attempt to dunk, and then incrementally raise the rim. Whoever can dunk on the highest height wins. We go back and forth until we get to nine feet. This was honestly kind of the goal for my old ass. I was saying that I was certain I could do it, but I had a little doubt. So did some of the staff in my office. They placed bets.

Bert went first. He came up just short and was certain he was done.

“I can’t. Can’t do it.”

This was my big chance. I wanted to win this, then play Bert one on one and redeem myself for losing at tennis. I lined up and boom—dunked on nine feet. Forty-one years old and over 240 pounds. Truthfully, I was happy. I won the competition, and even my buddy Bert noted that it was “seriously impressive.”

I felt good and was ready to move on, but then I heard it. Someone said, “I think you can go higher.” I stopped. I really felt like nine feet was close to my limit. I had a bit of room, so maybe what, two, three inches more? Now the pressure felt like it was on. They raised the hoop to nine foot three. Roy, the man who worked at the gym and coached basketball, pulled me aside. He told me to dig deep on this attempt. I felt an adrenaline surge. My heart started to race. I started at the three-point line and began the stutter step to get my footing right. I got closer and pushed off my left leg. Almost immediately I heard and felt an explosion in my leg. It was quick and powerful. Like a gunshot. I didn’t know what happened.

Did a car just hit me?

I didn’t know if I was one or twenty-five inches off the ground. I knew I was falling back. My left arm instinctively went behind my back, and as I hit the court I felt the full impact on that arm. I knew immediately—it was broken.

I lay on my right side writhing in pain, moaning. I tried to pull my left arm close to my chest, but it was spun around and facing the wrong way behind me. Bert got close and twisted my arm back into place. I knew I was super fucked, and I just blurted out, “Call 911.”

It wasn’t long before it hit me. We were rolling multiple cameras.

“I’m going to be one of the videos I usually play.”

image

A young baller who would be known for his basketball skills one day.

And boy, was I ever. We have multiple angles of my patellar tendon rupturing, humerus breaking, and me groaning in pain. It’s pain porn. To be clear, and I think this is an important distinction, my video is not the kind of video that I would have laughed hysterically at. I say that and people assume, “Oh, because you’re the one getting hurt, so now it’s not so funny?” No, not at all. My criteria for what I involuntarily laugh at in these videos is pretty well documented. Sports injuries do not do it for me. They never have. I remember seeing Tim Krumrie’s leg break in Super Bowl XXIII—nauseating. Willis McGahee in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl—gross. Dak Prescott in 2020—Jesus. They’re all awful. That is not to say that one shouldn’t laugh at my injury. Many have, and I fully accept it. I’m just pointing out that I’m not being a hypocrite. But back to my video—oh, boy, did people love it. I knew it would get some views, but, Jesus Christ, it took over my life in every way.

Physically I was completely incapable of doing the most menial task for almost a month. The double whammy of arm and leg being severely injured meant that even after surgery I would need to be tended to by professionals to do everything: eat, drink, sit, stand, and, of course, wipe. I don’t think there’s a more undignified line that can come from your mouth than, “I’m done pooping. Can you wipe me?” To be fair I met the most amazing nurses, who only made me feel dignified and respected, but still. At forty-one you don’t imagine you’ll actually need someone to wipe your shitty ass. One male nurse actually didn’t want to, but let’s forgive him. I wouldn’t want to wipe my ass either if I saw me. I clearly remember the moment I went back to wiping myself. I had shit, called out that I was done, and a shift change had occurred between nurses. The older nurse left while I was still pushing, and the cute nurse took over. When she walked up to me as I sat on the toilet I looked up and thought, Naw, I can’t let her.

The video of my injury is now unavoidable if you search my name on any platform. The footage was set to debut as a pay-per-view event on my YMHstudios.com site. It wasn’t the only thing planned for the big New Year show, but clearly it was the main attraction. We knew people would want to see it and expected a solid turnout, but it far surpassed our expectations. My fans knew how I got hurt, but this gave them a chance to see it. So many people bought tickets that we crashed the streaming site, but it was after the show that the real show began.

First people posted the clip of my injury; then the memes, deep fakes, Photoshops, and even toy figurines took over. Yes, yours truly has a limited edition run of handmade mini figures of me, just what I dreamed of as a child, only these have me in the fetal position, grimacing and with a broken, twisted arm.

The videos were posted and reposted thousands of times. I was the top gif search, trending on social media, and talked about by sports shows. At times it was overwhelming. I literally couldn’t get away from the footage or reactions to it. When the dust finally settled, I had to ask myself, had this experience changed me? There’s no way I could sit here and tell you that it had not. It has changed me in so many ways: physically, mentally, and emotionally. It was a truly traumatic event. Those stay with you. Yes, you’re able to continue living your life, but the scar, or in this case the scars, they’ll always be there. They’ll serve as quiet reminders of what happened that day and how it was, hopefully, the beginning of a new you. So it begs the question: Do I still laugh when I see a video of someone getting hurt?

Absolutely.

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