Name: Why Chuck Palahniuk Enjoys Making People Uncomfortable
Uploaded: 2021-10-27T17:49:44.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why Chuck Palahniuk Enjoys Making People Uncomfortable' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-27. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why Chuck Palahniuk Enjoys Making People Uncomfortable' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-10-27. Transcript available.

What is it about that feeling of discomfort that brings you joy or that you
enjoy giving to people that are reading your stuff?
Is it just that you don't like the cliche sloppy endings where everything is
going to be fine and everything is great and the world is different in
literature than it is in real life?
Like, what is it about these moments, like these moments of darkness where you
do break everybody's heart?
Why do you enjoy them so much?
I enjoy them because they prove I'm not the only one.
I'm not the only one that's had these moments of complete humiliation or
complete powerlessness.
One story I've always loved is my best friend in college.
His father was this mining professor and this very super macho guy.
And my best friend Franz was like the son that just wasn't turning out right.
And in their household, they had a bunch of kids, girls and boys.
And one day, Franz's dad had all of his beer-drinking football buds over to
watch the Super Bowl.
And Franz found this old doll that had been around the house for decades.
It was called Sissy and it barely had a hair left on its little doll head.
And Franz sat there as maybe a five or six-year-old little boy.
And he very carefully untangled Sissy's hair and he backcombed it and he teased
it and he dressed it into a big bouffant.
And he even got one of his mother's brooches and he put that brooch through the
front of this beehive hairdo to hold it in place.
Very Marie Antoinette.
And he was so proud that he turned this really decrepit, ugly thing into
something passably pretty.
He had sort of redeemed it.
And then he took it to his father in front of all of his father's friends in
the Super Bowl.
And he said, Daddy, Daddy, look.
I made Sissy pretty.
And his father was so humiliated that he beat Franz right there in front of
their whole peer group.
He just beat Franz.
And the story is so painful.
But everybody's had a pain like that.
Everybody has done that thing out of innocence and expression that for whatever
reason got you slammed.
And nobody talks about it.
Nobody talks about it because it's so painful and because everyone thinks they're
the only one.
And so if I can take some of those stories and bring them to light, it creates
this opening for everyone to say,
Oh, my God, I once did this thing and my parents reacted badly to it or it
destroyed my life and I've never been the same.
And when Franz told me that story, he was almost weeping.
But he was laughing as he was telling the story.
Because he had to keep laughing in order to keep telling the story.
And that's what I'm always shooting for.
Those are the moments, like, those kind of stories are the ones that hit people
the hardest because you know that the child has no idea that what they're doing
is going to be uncomfortable for anybody.
Like, they have real pride in it.
Like, here's a parallel to the story that you told before, I guess three years
ago, when you were talking about the writing workshop that you had done where
you were talking about someone else's story about how they were jacking off in
a jacuzzi and their anus got prolapsed.
And this woman at the writing workshop felt comfortable enough because you told
that story to tell her story about being in the Girl Scouts or the brownies,
the brownies before the Girl Scouts, the heating pad story, where she had put
this vibrating heating pad on her vagina and had her friends do the same thing.
And the mom came home and she was only seven years old and she thought it was
cool, like, look, I found this thing.
And then the mom beat her with the wire that was plugged into the wall and
called her a dirty whore and she never orgasmed again.
And she said, in summation, that if I could tell the story that I had just told
that was so, so self-debasing and so humiliating, but also make it funny, then
that gave her proof that she could make her own story funny.
And that maybe she could someday go back to her mother and say, remember that
heating pad and that maybe ultimately she could have an orgasm because until
you can kind of reveal these things and resolve them, they run the rest of your
life and you're never going to get beyond them.
Yeah, especially when you don't see it coming, when you're just a child and
then you do something that you think is totally fine and all of a sudden you're
getting the fuck beaten out of you and you don't understand why.
All you did is make a doll pretty.
Like, what happened?
Well, and it occurs in so many different ways.
Several years ago, I got a job house sitting a farm that was famous for being
haunted.
It had all these paranormal studies.
So as soon as the owners were gone, I invited a bunch of psychics out to do a
seance.
And I wanted to know.
And my father had been murdered about five years before that.
And one of these psychic women that I'd never met before said, there is a man
standing with you.
He's wearing a white T-shirt.
And he's holding something wooden.
And he is really, really sorry he did what he did.
But he was a very, very young man at the time.
He was only 23 or 24.
He's holding something wooden and he's about to dismember you?
Does that make any sense whatsoever?
And I just kind of nodded my head and I said, I have no idea what you're
talking about.
But when I was maybe three or four years old, my mother had taken my siblings
into town and I was, you know, in our rural farm.
And I put a fender washer around one of my fingers and I couldn't get it off.
And so I waited until a finger was swollen up and turning sort of purple black.
And I went to my father and I said, can you help me with this washer thing?
And my father had said, I can help you, but I want you to learn a lesson that
you have to, there are consequences to everything you do.
And I will help you with a washer if you accept responsibility for your actions
for the rest of your life.
And he took me and we had to wash the axe that we kill chickens with.
We had this hatchet.
And he took me and we sharpened the hatchet and we washed it really thoroughly
so there were no germs on it.
And then he had me kneel down by the chopping block and put my hand on the
chopping block.
And at the time, there was no drama.
It was just complete clarity.
My father was helping me to resolve the situation.
And at the last moment, he missed my hand with the axe.
The axe went into the chopping block and then we went inside and used dish soap
to take the washer off.
And I knew that story would just make my mother insane.
So I never told anybody my entire life that story.
Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.