Name: JD Vance Gets Real About His Tough Childhood and Addiction
Uploaded: 2024-10-23T22:11:14.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'JD Vance Gets Real About His Tough Childhood and Addiction' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-10-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'JD Vance Gets Real About His Tough Childhood and Addiction' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-10-23. Transcript available.

JD Vance Gets Real About His Tough Childhood and Addiction

I saw where you had your mom was out and you congratulated her on she almost
has 10 years
of sobriety you said that's right yeah she's uh in january january of 2025 she
will be 10 years
clean and sober and that's really funny because you know she's standing next to
you there uh that's
mike johnson the speaker of the house oh yeah and like and like my family's not
very political
so they bring her up to this booth and like two chairs over is donald trump of
course she knows
who that is but she shakes mike johnson's hand and uh he's like you know lovely
to meet you and she
says lovely to meet you too who are you do you work in politics it's like mom
that's the speaker of the
house okay she's like well i'll take a uh i'll take a mcdouble yeah that's
right um what um diet coke
with with extra ice what was uh yeah i know your mom's your mom struggled with
alcoholism right
um addiction mostly yeah mostly non-alcohol drugs i never saw her you know
drink that much but i mean
you know pills opioids heroin um what's it been like to watch her get sober
what's that been like
it's amazing man it's it's amazing i know you're you're what are you you're you're
recovery yeah a lot
of my family's in it too so i think yeah i can i can relate a lot to your story
to be honest with you
yeah but i mean i mean look i mean there was a time like i always you know
always wanted to grow
up and have a family and i remember when i was a teenager thinking to myself
there's no way mom's
going to be around to meet like if i have kids there's no way my mom's ever
going to meet them
and um you know she's now like she's now a great grandmother to to the three
grandkids but
i don't know man it's it's just if if you've known anybody in this circumstance
it sounds like
you know very well what it's like is there's like this there's two feelings
that you have or at least
always two feelings i had when mom was going through it is like on the one hand
yeah she's so smart she's
so funny and you're just like kind of rooting for her because you just wanted
to get better then on the
other hand you're just pissed off it's like you know because you don't quite
understand it i think
if you're not in recovery yourself it's hard to fully understand and um you
know so that you'd be
frustrated with her one moment and then just desperate for her to get better
the next moment
you're constantly bouncing back and forth but man it's it's amazing it really
is i mean she you know
she was at the wedding we were at last night and uh just having a good time and
being her like funny
quirky self she has a good sense of humor she's a very good sense of humor um i
mean you know like
the bride and groomed this really cool tradition where they had like at each
table wine bottle with a
number on it and then like at the table one they'd open the bottle of wine
their first anniversary
and table two the second anniversary and so forth and they had people write
stuff in sharpies on the
wine bottle i'd never seen that i thought it was a pretty cool uh little thing
um and my mom i forget
what table she was in but you know like 10 years down the road and she just she
writes something on on
her bottle like like hey i love you hopefully i'm still alive when you're
drinking this
she's just got like it again she's like a kind of a morbid quirky sense of
humor
um but yeah man it's it's it's really amazing because i i get i i just never i
never thought
she'd be alive when i was 40 years old yeah and she is and she's got a good
relationship with her
family and her grandparents or her grandkids and that's just a very cool thing
yeah yeah it's a
blessing man that's awesome it is a blessing it was really cool to see that um
did you ever go to
meetings with her did she go to you have been before yeah i've been to a lot of
na meetings
um when you were growing up did you ever go or no yeah i went when i was a kid
um i went i went
when i was a teenager i mean i've been to a lot actually just in the past few
years because she
you know that she's like you know she feels like she's really on the other side
of it yeah she does
a lot with her local na i think she's the treasurer the secretary of her local
na chapter
and um i don't do you ever go to meetings or anything oh yeah i went to one
okay i went to one
i was at one last night at eight okay i mean there there's a there's actually a
really special
community around it which i really like and it almost kind of reminds me of
church right 100
where you you know you say you say these prayers and and you talk about what's
going on
and there's like this sense of fellowship and community that i think is is
really is really
awesome and you know it's it's it's like one of these things where you see just
human nature and
all of its good sides and its bad sides right because sometimes you have people
who come in
and they're getting their 24-hour medallion yeah right which is like this is
the first real period
of sobriety i've had in a very long time then sometimes you have people you
know celebrating 15 20
25 years and uh it's it's just amazing to see but what was it like growing up
like with an
alcoholic mother like and no judgment against your mother this is just to look
at it right
yeah yeah sure i appreciate that yeah what um what is that like like is it hard
to make a connection
with your mom like what are some of the side effects of that uh on a child yeah
i mean i definitely
think there's a um you get very careful about who you allow yourself to get
close to right that's
that's one big part of it you're never quite sure whether you can trust the
particular situation
that you're in right so am i still going to be living in this house three
months from
now if i have somebody if i give somebody my address because this is back in
the 90s right
people still wrote letters postcards things like that at least a lot more than
they do today if i
give somebody my address are they going to send me a letter and i'm not going
to live in this place
anymore because we you know we moved around a fair amount right but i i think i
i think that you
know the the thing that it i took away from it is i very even as a young kid i
sort of very neatly
divided the world into like three categories of people right there were the
helpless people the
victims the people who needed to be helped there were the bad guys who were preying
on the victims
and then there were the strong people who sort of stood up uh for for everybody
else and stood up to
the bad guys that's like you know that's overly simplistic um but definitely
you know i i saw my mom
growing up very much as this person who was who was kind of a victim and was
being preyed on by by bad
people right and then the person who was sort of looking up for us and standing
up for me especially
was my grandmother and uh i think that that that attitude of you know some
people are just not as
strong as we wish them to be and bad people are going to prey on them but it's
kind of up to you
know try to make yourself the person who can look out for people who can
protect people and that's
always what i wanted to be that's one thing i think i took from it were you
able to be that for
your mom did you feel like you know not always certainly i mean when i was a
lot of responsibility
for a kid when i was a teenager man i was definitely very very selfish i think
i got pretty resentful
just the situation it's like oh other people have more money than i do other
people have more stability
than i do you know other people you know they've got nice cars we don't have
that so there's there's
definitely like there's definitely like a resentment that comes from it i think
but um you know i left
high school enlisted in the marine corps uh spent four years in the marine
corps and i think that what
you know that really did for me was just like gave me a cool perspective and i
probably went into the
marine corps i was pretty whiny pretty resentful kid was pissed off at my mom
was pissed off at all
these other people because i didn't have the things that i thought i should
have and then eventually
yeah there's me when i was much much skinnier much better looking oh yeah the
marines dude that
was the original ozempic that's right that's right that's right that's brozempic
that is good that is
good marines the original ozempic i'm gonna steal that one um but but man yeah
i i think that
the way that i noticed it i mean not to get you know too personal but like when
i so i met my wife
in law school and it was like you know i dated girls in the past but for her it
was like oh my god
this is i'm in love with this girl right like i'd known her for a week and i
was like i want to
marry this girl yeah and um there was definitely just an element of like it
took a long time for
me to get to a place where i was like oh i can actually trust this person i
actually rely on
this person because that's not really the experience that i had growing up is
the people you trusted on
trusted the people you relied on they would just kind of disappear yeah
sometimes through no fault of
their own but sometimes they would just disappear and so you know i don't know
if you say i have
attachment issues and that's that's something that definitely i think comes
from growing up in a pretty
tough pretty chaotic environment but you know the other thing the flip side of
it is and again this is
this is what i talk about the marine corps is you have for four years in the
marine corps you know
like like one of the best marines maybe the best marine that i served with is
this kid who grew up
he was a puerto rican guy from the bronx was a drug dealer wore jewelry or not
do you wear jewelry
um i mean not with uniform right because that's yeah maybe he did but by the
time he you know by the
time i met him as a marine he did but but he was like he had had a much harder
life than i had
and there was no bullshit there was no complaining no whining he was just doing
his job and he was a
good dude and you meet a lot of people like that and you start to realize like
in some ways you know
not having everything handed to you is actually a blessing right and and and
growing up in a tough
circumstance and being able to understand that not everybody's always had it
easy i used to be
annoyed by that kind of complaining about it now i sort of see it as like a
good thing yeah right
because i think i have a different perspective than than a lot of people i
spend my life around
where you know they're they they were born to a rich family they went to a
private school then
they you know everything was kind of laid out for him oh it's kind of good to
not have everything
laid out for you because you have to work for it a little bit more yeah that
was going to be my next
my my follow-up question that was just like yeah what are the what are the
positives like and also
so we don't get stuck in like you know um just in like a debbie downer spiral
kind of you know
because it's okay to talk about stuff but sometimes you know it's like things
can get kind of like
where you're just looking at the negative things but there's usually something
positive and everything
exactly right and um yeah that's what i was thinking what were some of the
positives of
um of having a childhood like that and of being um yeah and i guess it would be
some self-reliance
i think i think it's definitely some self-reliance um awareness probably which
is probably a curse
when you're young because it feels like you have to be kind of scared of stuff
but or but when you get
older being having awareness can be pretty helpful sometimes yeah i've got my
head on a swivel
right i'm always looking around corners i'm always yeah kind of worried that
things that
aren't exactly what they seem but i think that's made me a little less
comfortable which is a good
thing especially in the in the political life oh yeah now you're yeah it's good
to have your head
on a swivel hey now everybody's an alcoholic yeah everybody has ever