Comedian uses stand-up to help others overcome trauma

Brut America

Stand-up comedy saved him from an abusive childhood — now Tom Thakkar makes comedy hoping to bring laughter anyone else who may need light in the dark.

Transcript

00:00The first time I saw stand-up was with my stepdad, which is weird because he was such an angry guy.

00:10I don't like guns, but I don't want them to like go to people's houses and take

00:14their guns away from them because then it'd be harder for my stepdad to kill himself.

00:19He threw an ice pick at my sister. He like held me up to a wall with a knife,

00:24stuff like that, where you didn't know what was going to set him off,

00:28but something was ready to set him off and it felt out of your control.

00:41I grew up in a house with my mom and from the age of about two and up a stepdad who was

00:49like an alcoholic bipolar guy. My mom worked night shifts, so a lot of times we got left

00:55at home alone with him and a lot of times it played itself out in him standing in the yard

01:01with a gun to his head and it was my job to essentially talk him off the ledge. And I would

01:06because I was afraid that if I said something wrong the gun would be facing the other way.

01:20I think that he brought home a tape from Blockbuster and it just became a thing where

01:23we all gathered around to watch a guy talk and it blew my mind. Seeing everybody in my

01:29house, not even in the room this guy is in, in my house watching a screen of a guy

01:35and being locked in and hanging on every word the guy says and dying laughing at everything.

01:42Just this one guy in our living room on the TV made my life safe for the night. I remember

01:49thinking like if I'm laughing I'm okay. Nothing can hurt me while I'm laughing.

02:01If you ask what do I do to try to help people with this, I try to make stuff that I feel like

02:07is for kids like me. I try to make content that they can feel a little less alone. I hate when

02:16you do a joke and about some horrible thing in your life and people go oh and it's like that's

02:23not what you want at all. So if you can plow through that and get to the point where people

02:28are laughing with you about some kind of trauma that you had that is when you start to feel good.

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