Skip to content
Brick Wall Comedy
Brick Wall Comedy
Promotional art for The Angry Pursuit of Happiness
Cover image credit:

Source

The Angry Pursuit of Happiness

Christopher Titus

Comedy Central · 2015 · 1 h 45 min

A combative comic pitches aggressive solutions for the human race.

Christopher Titus expands his focus from deep family dysfunction to the survival of the human race. Rather than just recounting his personal damage, he pitches a combative blueprint for humanity’s overarching problems. His premise relies on a strange kind of aggressive optimism. He argues that humans are a uniquely resilient species simply because we constantly invent things to keep ourselves going, a survival instinct that dogs completely lack.

Filmed at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara and aired on Comedy Central in 2015, the hour captures a veteran comic deep into his stride. Titus was churning out his sixth long-form act while simultaneously hosting the History Channel game show Pawnography. He moves from broad societal fixes, like explaining why the government cannot take your guns because you already hold them, to proposing a lawless holiday to thin out the population. He eventually returns to the intensely personal, detailing his late father’s erectile dysfunction and delivering his own preemptive eulogy.

The set list

4 bits

  1. Solving all of the world's problems

    Titus presents an unbelievable, radical comedic solution to fix everything wrong in the world.

  2. The 'Me-logy'

    Titus delivers his own eulogy from the stage.

  3. Here's How Life Goes

    An unflinching comedic insight into the unavoidable trajectories of life.

  4. His father's erectile dysfunction

    Tackles an uncomfortable family topic as part of his signature dark, personal exploration of his father.

How it plays

Tone
Dark, edgy, cathartic, and personal.
On stage
Described as a 'hard funny' firebrand, tackling intensely dark, dysfunctional, and personal material with passionate, unfiltered storytelling.
Pace
A wild ride with relentless momentum across an extended theatrical set.
About
global problems and societal solutions, mortality and eulogies, family dysfunction, how life goes

What the critics said

Promoted and received as his best performance to date, demonstrating why he is regarded as one of the best and most prolific working comedians.

Summed up from reviews, articles and listings. Sources: onstage411.com, christophertitus.com, combustionfilms.vhx.tv, themoviedb.org, broadwayworld.com, letterboxd.com, wtsp.com, sacramentopress.com.

Backstory

Drawing heavily from personal and familial trauma—including an alcoholic father and a schizophrenic mother—using comedy to sublimate destructive impulses under the philosophy that 'we need comedy to get rid of our desire to kill.'

Details

Released
Runtime
1 h 45 min
Where
Comedy Central
Topics
Before
Norman Rockwell Is Bleeding (2004)
After
Born with a Defect (2016)

More from Christopher Titus

If you liked this