Name: Theo Von on Brody Stevens
Uploaded: 2019-02-26T00:23:46.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Theo Von on Brody Stevens' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-02-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Theo Von on Brody Stevens' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-02-26. Transcript available.

You know, everybody, I was out of town this weekend, but everybody here in the
comedy universe is thinking about Brody Stevens, who passed away.
And the news articles were everywhere.
I'm sure you saw them all over the Internet.
And, you know, Brody, you know, Brody was a one of a kind performer.
And people say that a lot, but Brody kind of, you know, he loved like knowing
where people were from and being able to relate.
To people, especially people from California.
He was he was a friendly guy.
He was big, but he wasn't.
But he was he was gentle.
He was really gentle fella.
And.
Yeah, and it's just, you know, it's heartbreaking.
It's heartbreaking.
And I've been thinking about it a little bit and.
Called a couple of people that had spoken to him last and talked to him this
week and.
You know, he'd been talking about how he was off his medication.
He was struggling or he'd gone off and was getting back on.
And that seems to be what most people are attributing his uncomfort to.
You know, his.
The depth of his uncomfort.
That it got to a point where.
Where he took his own life.
And where he took his own life by.
You know, even hanging himself.
And.
And I mean, it's just scary.
I mean, it's very sad.
You know, it's heartbreaking.
To know that this human, this, you know, this big entity.
I mean, he was six, four.
Maybe he was.
You know, he was loud and he was.
He was just.
He was so alive on stage.
You know, he used to pitch baseball at Arizona State.
He liked to play the drums.
He would drum on anything.
Sometimes during his sets, if the sets weren't going good.
He would just get drumsticks or even invisible drumsticks.
And to start playing on the chairs and the stage or whatever.
You know, he, he, you know, just like any comedian, he loved the attention.
You know, he loved the, you know, what there was some equation in the getting
attention from a stage that made him feel okay.
You know, it made him feel okay.
And, and it's just wild.
It's like you, you think like, oh, well, the medicine and my, you know, do you,
are you angry at the medicine?
But then the medicine may have been what kept him comfortable for many years.
He'd had an instance years ago where he went off his medication and, and it
didn't, he had to be 5150'd, I think.
And I'm paraphrasing here.
But, you know, he went to a, you know, he went into a, kind of a psychosis bit.
But, you know, I didn't know Brody super well.
I mean, I would see him at the store.
We would talk.
Nothing real outlandish, you know.
But he was always, you know, nothing real, nothing of a ton of depth unless we
were in a conversation together as a, you know, with other people.
Or less specifically, I was talking to him about baseball or vitamins.
He loved to talk about vitamins and, and different things he did to make
himself feel better.
You know, one thing that I noticed in looking, in thinking about him and
looking back at, at watching him perform, he always talked about positive
energy.
He'd say, positive energy.
And I always thought, I was like, man, it's so wild that that's his, his creed.
It was kind of the banner that he carried.
It was, he just, he had to tell, he had to tell us all, like, you know, we have
to, we forward, you know, onward.
He was a definition of onward.
It was constantly like, you know, lifting spirits.
That was his thing.
And, and now I'll kind of maybe, you know, I'll realize, or I wonder if maybe
he was also just really lifting his own, you know, he always talked about the
positive energy because he needed to lift his own spirits.
And, you know, you wonder, like you watch someone's act on stage and you wonder
how much of it is real and how much of it is, you know, it's like, what's for
the audience?
And what's for the, what's for the, the entertainer themselves?
And part of the thing, I think, and looking back at Brody, and this is just my
perception, I could be wrong.
And it doesn't matter if I'm wrong or right.
But that he was, you know, he was entertaining the crowd, but at the same time,
he was lifting himself up.
Like he need, you know, all the times he talked about relating to people, like
he would, he would ask somebody where they played, you know, where they went to
high school.
And they'd say, I went to high school at, you know, at Reseda Middle.
And then he'd rattle off the address of the, Reseda Middle.
I know where that is.
That's it.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Antioch Boulevard or something.
And then he would say relatable, like he had related to the person in the
audience.
And I guess now I'm just kind of dissecting, you know, some of this, the way,
and so I guess it was like, you know, he used these moments on stage to preach
the things that he needed for himself, it seemed like.
Or to not preach them, but to kind of speak them the best way he could, that he
needed, he needed to feel related to, and he needed to have positive energy
constantly to keep himself motivated and excited.
And that that's how he did it, that he facilitated that through getting on the
stage a lot.
And it's just, you know, it's just interesting.
It's interesting how many times I sit there and watch somebody's act, and I'm
like, oh, this is an act.
But then how many times am I thinking, oh, what in here are the actual, the
tools or the exponents that this entertainer is using to actually keep
themselves okay today?
You know, to keep themselves well, mentally well.
And then I thought Brody, you know, Brody hung himself.
And that's just so, you know, it's so crazy.
It's so foreign.
It's so alien to think someone standing on top of something, you know, putting
a rope around.
There's just so many physical moments you have to go through to do that.
And, uh, now if you're a short guy, it's probably not that, you know, it's easy.
Hell, you could hang yourself off of a, um, you know, off of a handle on a shiffer
robe, probably, if you had a, but a big, tall man, you know.
And he was a 300, you know, Brody was probably 250.
He was thick.
He had those brontosaurus, you know, he was brontosaurus.
He had them big bones, you know.
I mean, you'll see, you might see his bones on the Flintstones.
He had those kind of bones.
Them thick hitters, baby.
Them, you know, he had that real, that dude was marrow plentiful.
He had a probably, he probably had about two pounds of marrow in him.
Straight marrow.
And you think about somebody going through those motions.
And I'm sorry to talk about some of this, but, you know, I think I need to
think about it.
And, uh, and then I'm not sorry to talk about it, because this is, you know,
this is what this is.
But it makes me sad.
It may, you know, the first thing you think is like, could I have done
something else?
Um, and, you know, it's, I, I, I hate to say this, but I felt, I feel like his
death maybe was unpreventable.
And I never thought about this before whenever someone that I knew, um, had
taken their life or, but Brody got a lot of, he got a, you know, he got a lot
of attention at the comedy store on performing.
Um, he had, uh, friends that he was close to that, you know, they talked about
mental health.
He talked about mental health a lot.
Like, that's another thing.
If I was switching doses or something, excuse me, you know, I take, um, you
know, I take, uh, antidepressants.
I take, you know, um, I don't know what mine is, sertraline or whatever.
I think it's Alexa.
I probably take one of those and I'm switching to something else called Vibrid.
Um, but, but he talked a lot.
You could talk to him about that, you know, and he would tell you kind of what
his experience had been if he had taken something of that.
Uh, or taken something similar or just, you know, he would always, you know, he,
he seemed like a lifeguard a little bit on the edge of the pool of mental
wellness.
And if you were in the pool, you know, he wasn't like that lifeguard that was
over there with the glasses on and the whistle just trying to fuck everybody,
you know, and skeeting out with a little sunscreen here and there, you know,
and saying they're going to get a soda.
But really they're going out to their car to get a little hit of weed and come
back in there and then they're supposed to save people when they're high on
weed.
Like people in my hometown used to, I remember going to the lifeguard one time,
dude, a friend of mine, I thought he was drowning and lifeguard was like, man,
I'm fucked up, bro.
And that was it, dude.
So I had to go and try to rescue my friend, man.
And thank God I was able to help, you know, when an old man helped.
I thought, honestly, in hindsight, pedophile, man, not even, because he kept
helping him.
Like he helped him out of the pool.
Then he helped him back into the locker room.
Then he was toweling my buddy, dude.
My buddy, what the fuck's going on out here?
But, but anyway, you know, he was like that lifeguard that was on the pool of
mental well, on the edge of the pool of mental wellness.
And he could help you.
He was there to talk to you if you needed to.
And he was a caring guy.
He had a big heart.
And I think if there's anything that I, you know, we all think personally, you
know, we relate to the world personally.
So if there's anything that I feel remorse for in my own, in my own little life,
it is that I didn't get to know the big heart that was inside of him better.
You know, that I didn't make more of an effort.
And I never knew sometimes if Brody was being serious or not.
You know, I never knew.
I never knew if he was being serious or not a lot of times.
But I bet if I'd have spent maybe a little more time getting to know him, then
I would have known more.
But I mean, that can be said for anyone.
Your life goes the way it goes and you can't know everybody.
But it definitely seemed like I haven't heard anyone say, oh, there were all
these warning signs.
There was the fact that he was changing medication or got off his medication
was getting back on his medication.
And that, you know, apparently there was a there's a pretty big dip sometimes
when that happens in your, you know, serotonin levels.
Or I don't know.
You know, I'm going out on, you know, everyday John, everyday Jackson rhetoric
here.
But or everyday Jackson diatribe, you know, I'm just talking out of my butt,
but also with some of my brain in there.
But that he went off on those that he went off and he got back on and there was
a dip in there.
And then and then that's, you know, whenever he found some, you know, maybe a
level of discomfort hit him and and his brain wasn't at a level where it could
handle it or something.
You know, I don't know.
We'll never really know.
We'll never really know.
So, you know, and it's crazy to think if it's unpreventable.
I mean, it would have been preventable if he didn't switch his medications,
maybe.
But there wasn't it didn't seem like anything anybody could have said that day
or did that day.
You can't spend every night with someone that you don't, you know, you know, we
can't.
You know, people can only really do what they're doing and do the best that
they are doing in a specific instance.
And, you know, in the hanging part is what also gets me, you know, with Robin
Williams hung himself.
It's such a.
And I don't mean this in a like a base way, but I mean this in a it's such a
performer thing.
You know, it's such a like a display.
You know, it's like it's like a last.
It's like your last bit.
It's like, oh, I need to show you that I'm not doing well and I couldn't show
anyone how bad I'm feeling or how uncomfortable I feel except with this last
display of art.
Because it's such a presentation, you know.
It's such a specific thing.
It's like I need to stop my head.
Like I need to, I need to like litigate my head from my body.
That's not called ligature.
Oh, ligature.
Yeah, I need to stop.
I need to stop this head from infecting the rest of me.
And this is the only way I know how to do it is to literally or not literally,
but, you know, I don't know, just to cut it off at the pass.
I need to tighten right here so that my brain doesn't keep bothering the rest
of me.
And I didn't mean to get on, you know, it's just sad, man.
It's very sad.
And people say suicide is selfish and, yeah, I think, I think suicide is a
selfish thing.
I mean, yeah, it's you.
It's your life.
It's your relation with the world.
But I just don't know how this would have been preventable.
You know, unless his medication, you know, maybe he didn't or if he wasn't.
I'm not sure if a doctor recommended that he switch with his medication and get
off and get back on or I don't know.
And it's sad, though.
It's sad to think that there was this, this being that's just not here now.
But I do hope that he's somewhere where he is at a lot more at peace.
And I'm sure that he is.
It's heartbreaking.
You know, one of the saddest things I feel like or one thing that I feel like
is sad.
And I don't know if this is judgmental in some way, but Brody did a great job
of, you know, the comedy store has like, there's a lot of comics that, a lot of
the same comics work there.
You know, it's just like a lot of comics that are doing well right now.
And those change over time.
And, you know, Brody always had like kind of the later night spots.
So he always was kind of like the king of this sort of later night group of
comedians in a way.
That were sort of, that are great comedians, but just aren't in the top like
four or five spots.
And I'm kind of, I'm out there sort of in the middle of those groups, which I'm
grateful to be in.
And that's their judgment of me.
And that's, I don't, I'm happy to be at the comedy store.
I am, it's the only place in LA that I really feel comfortable.
And, uh, and Brody was kind of right, yeah, like into these sort of late night
spots where he kind of held down.
He was kind of like the king of this little late night kind of crew.
And, uh, you know, and I just know they're all going to miss their, you know,
their fearless leader that had all this experience.
You know, but, uh, rest in peace, bud.
You know, we love you.
And I'm sorry that we didn't tell you that more.

Theo Von on Brody Stevens

You know, everybody, I was out of town this weekend, but everybody here in the
comedy universe is thinking about Brody Stevens, who passed away.
And the news articles were everywhere.
I'm sure you saw them all over the Internet.
And, you know, Brody, you know, Brody was a one of a kind performer.
And people say that a lot, but Brody kind of, you know, he loved like knowing
where people were from and being able to relate.
To people, especially people from California.
He was he was a friendly guy.
He was big, but he wasn't.
But he was he was gentle.
He was really gentle fella.
And.
Yeah, and it's just, you know, it's heartbreaking.
It's heartbreaking.
And I've been thinking about it a little bit and.
Called a couple of people that had spoken to him last and talked to him this
week and.
You know, he'd been talking about how he was off his medication.
He was struggling or he'd gone off and was getting back on.
And that seems to be what most people are attributing his uncomfort to.
You know, his.
The depth of his uncomfort.
That it got to a point where.
Where he took his own life.
And where he took his own life by.
You know, even hanging himself.
And.
And I mean, it's just scary.
I mean, it's very sad.
You know, it's heartbreaking.
To know that this human, this, you know, this big entity.
I mean, he was six, four.
Maybe he was.
You know, he was loud and he was.
He was just.
He was so alive on stage.
You know, he used to pitch baseball at Arizona State.
He liked to play the drums.
He would drum on anything.
Sometimes during his sets, if the sets weren't going good.
He would just get drumsticks or even invisible drumsticks.
And to start playing on the chairs and the stage or whatever.
You know, he, he, you know, just like any comedian, he loved the attention.
You know, he loved the, you know, what there was some equation in the getting
attention from a stage that made him feel okay.
You know, it made him feel okay.
And, and it's just wild.
It's like you, you think like, oh, well, the medicine and my, you know, do you,
are you angry at the medicine?
But then the medicine may have been what kept him comfortable for many years.
He'd had an instance years ago where he went off his medication and, and it
didn't, he had to be 5150'd, I think.
And I'm paraphrasing here.
But, you know, he went to a, you know, he went into a, kind of a psychosis bit.
But, you know, I didn't know Brody super well.
I mean, I would see him at the store.
We would talk.
Nothing real outlandish, you know.
But he was always, you know, nothing real, nothing of a ton of depth unless we
were in a conversation together as a, you know, with other people.
Or less specifically, I was talking to him about baseball or vitamins.
He loved to talk about vitamins and, and different things he did to make
himself feel better.
You know, one thing that I noticed in looking, in thinking about him and
looking back at, at watching him perform, he always talked about positive
energy.
He'd say, positive energy.
And I always thought, I was like, man, it's so wild that that's his, his creed.
It was kind of the banner that he carried.
It was, he just, he had to tell, he had to tell us all, like, you know, we have
to, we forward, you know, onward.
He was a definition of onward.
It was constantly like, you know, lifting spirits.
That was his thing.
And, and now I'll kind of maybe, you know, I'll realize, or I wonder if maybe
he was also just really lifting his own, you know, he always talked about the
positive energy because he needed to lift his own spirits.
And, you know, you wonder, like you watch someone's act on stage and you wonder
how much of it is real and how much of it is, you know, it's like, what's for
the audience?
And what's for the, what's for the, the entertainer themselves?
And part of the thing, I think, and looking back at Brody, and this is just my
perception, I could be wrong.
And it doesn't matter if I'm wrong or right.
But that he was, you know, he was entertaining the crowd, but at the same time,
he was lifting himself up.
Like he need, you know, all the times he talked about relating to people, like
he would, he would ask somebody where they played, you know, where they went to
high school.
And they'd say, I went to high school at, you know, at Reseda Middle.
And then he'd rattle off the address of the, Reseda Middle.
I know where that is.
That's it.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Antioch Boulevard or something.
And then he would say relatable, like he had related to the person in the
audience.
And I guess now I'm just kind of dissecting, you know, some of this, the way,
and so I guess it was like, you know, he used these moments on stage to preach
the things that he needed for himself, it seemed like.
Or to not preach them, but to kind of speak them the best way he could, that he
needed, he needed to feel related to, and he needed to have positive energy
constantly to keep himself motivated and excited.
And that that's how he did it, that he facilitated that through getting on the
stage a lot.
And it's just, you know, it's just interesting.
It's interesting how many times I sit there and watch somebody's act, and I'm
like, oh, this is an act.
But then how many times am I thinking, oh, what in here are the actual, the
tools or the exponents that this entertainer is using to actually keep
themselves okay today?
You know, to keep themselves well, mentally well.
And then I thought Brody, you know, Brody hung himself.
And that's just so, you know, it's so crazy.
It's so foreign.
It's so alien to think someone standing on top of something, you know, putting
a rope around.
There's just so many physical moments you have to go through to do that.
And, uh, now if you're a short guy, it's probably not that, you know, it's easy.
Hell, you could hang yourself off of a, um, you know, off of a handle on a shiffer
robe, probably, if you had a, but a big, tall man, you know.
And he was a 300, you know, Brody was probably 250.
He was thick.
He had those brontosaurus, you know, he was brontosaurus.
He had them big bones, you know.
I mean, you'll see, you might see his bones on the Flintstones.
He had those kind of bones.
Them thick hitters, baby.
Them, you know, he had that real, that dude was marrow plentiful.
He had a probably, he probably had about two pounds of marrow in him.
Straight marrow.
And you think about somebody going through those motions.
And I'm sorry to talk about some of this, but, you know, I think I need to
think about it.
And, uh, and then I'm not sorry to talk about it, because this is, you know,
this is what this is.
But it makes me sad.
It may, you know, the first thing you think is like, could I have done
something else?
Um, and, you know, it's, I, I, I hate to say this, but I felt, I feel like his
death maybe was unpreventable.
And I never thought about this before whenever someone that I knew, um, had
taken their life or, but Brody got a lot of, he got a, you know, he got a lot
of attention at the comedy store on performing.
Um, he had, uh, friends that he was close to that, you know, they talked about
mental health.
He talked about mental health a lot.
Like, that's another thing.
If I was switching doses or something, excuse me, you know, I take, um, you
know, I take, uh, antidepressants.
I take, you know, um, I don't know what mine is, sertraline or whatever.
I think it's Alexa.
I probably take one of those and I'm switching to something else called Vibrid.
Um, but, but he talked a lot.
You could talk to him about that, you know, and he would tell you kind of what
his experience had been if he had taken something of that.
Uh, or taken something similar or just, you know, he would always, you know, he,
he seemed like a lifeguard a little bit on the edge of the pool of mental
wellness.
And if you were in the pool, you know, he wasn't like that lifeguard that was
over there with the glasses on and the whistle just trying to fuck everybody,
you know, and skeeting out with a little sunscreen here and there, you know,
and saying they're going to get a soda.
But really they're going out to their car to get a little hit of weed and come
back in there and then they're supposed to save people when they're high on
weed.
Like people in my hometown used to, I remember going to the lifeguard one time,
dude, a friend of mine, I thought he was drowning and lifeguard was like, man,
I'm fucked up, bro.
And that was it, dude.
So I had to go and try to rescue my friend, man.
And thank God I was able to help, you know, when an old man helped.
I thought, honestly, in hindsight, pedophile, man, not even, because he kept
helping him.
Like he helped him out of the pool.
Then he helped him back into the locker room.
Then he was toweling my buddy, dude.
My buddy, what the fuck's going on out here?
But, but anyway, you know, he was like that lifeguard that was on the pool of
mental well, on the edge of the pool of mental wellness.
And he could help you.
He was there to talk to you if you needed to.
And he was a caring guy.
He had a big heart.
And I think if there's anything that I, you know, we all think personally, you
know, we relate to the world personally.
So if there's anything that I feel remorse for in my own, in my own little life,
it is that I didn't get to know the big heart that was inside of him better.
You know, that I didn't make more of an effort.
And I never knew sometimes if Brody was being serious or not.
You know, I never knew.
I never knew if he was being serious or not a lot of times.
But I bet if I'd have spent maybe a little more time getting to know him, then
I would have known more.
But I mean, that can be said for anyone.
Your life goes the way it goes and you can't know everybody.
But it definitely seemed like I haven't heard anyone say, oh, there were all
these warning signs.
There was the fact that he was changing medication or got off his medication
was getting back on his medication.
And that, you know, apparently there was a there's a pretty big dip sometimes
when that happens in your, you know, serotonin levels.
Or I don't know.
You know, I'm going out on, you know, everyday John, everyday Jackson rhetoric
here.
But or everyday Jackson diatribe, you know, I'm just talking out of my butt,
but also with some of my brain in there.
But that he went off on those that he went off and he got back on and there was
a dip in there.
And then and then that's, you know, whenever he found some, you know, maybe a
level of discomfort hit him and and his brain wasn't at a level where it could
handle it or something.
You know, I don't know.
We'll never really know.
We'll never really know.
So, you know, and it's crazy to think if it's unpreventable.
I mean, it would have been preventable if he didn't switch his medications,
maybe.
But there wasn't it didn't seem like anything anybody could have said that day
or did that day.
You can't spend every night with someone that you don't, you know, you know, we
can't.
You know, people can only really do what they're doing and do the best that
they are doing in a specific instance.
And, you know, in the hanging part is what also gets me, you know, with Robin
Williams hung himself.
It's such a.
And I don't mean this in a like a base way, but I mean this in a it's such a
performer thing.
You know, it's such a like a display.
You know, it's like it's like a last.
It's like your last bit.
It's like, oh, I need to show you that I'm not doing well and I couldn't show
anyone how bad I'm feeling or how uncomfortable I feel except with this last
display of art.
Because it's such a presentation, you know.
It's such a specific thing.
It's like I need to stop my head.
Like I need to, I need to like litigate my head from my body.
That's not called ligature.
Oh, ligature.
Yeah, I need to stop.
I need to stop this head from infecting the rest of me.
And this is the only way I know how to do it is to literally or not literally,
but, you know, I don't know, just to cut it off a