Paul Scheer is primarily known for making people laugh, having spent more than two decades as a podcaster and comic actor on shows such as 30 Rock, Veep, The League, and the police procedural satire NTSF: SD: SUV. But in his new memoir, Joyful Recollections of Trauma, Scheer delves into the not-so-funny forces that shaped his sense of humor and outlook on life. In this excerpt, from a chapter entitled “Hulk,” Scheer recounts a series of childhood clashes with his mother’s boyfriend, and how he learned to resist the angry impulses that consumed some of the adults raising him.
As a kid, I loved watching The Incredible Hulk, the cheesy live-action ’80s show in which the Hulk was played by two different people. David Banner—yes, they changed his name from Bruce to David—was played by Bill Bixby, a normal, nice guy. The Hulk was played by weightlifting champion Lou Ferrigno, covered in green paint and wearing a bad black wig. I loved the show except for the moments when David Banner would turn into the Hulk. The camera would zoom in on his eyes, and I watched in absolute terror as his pupils would shrink and then expand, changing into fiery cat’s eyes. His anger was coming to a full boil, and you could see it all in those eyes. This transformation was one of the most horrific images my five-year-old brain had ever absorbed. I was watching someone literally explode from within. The first time I saw it, I ran out of the room crying. The image haunted me at night. My mom tried to get me over my fear by painting me green like the Hulk, but it wasn’t the Hulk I was afraid of. I loved the Hulk. I was afraid of the split second when he turned—when man became monster.
I don’t remember when the abuse started with Hunter. When I look back on that time, I just recall a chorus of raised voices, hurled insults, broken tchotchkes, and aggressive behavior. As I mentioned earlier, all the chaos and abuse were so normalized that only in the retelling do I realize just how abnormal they were. Those moments where I was so scared and thought I might die hit harder now because at the time I was just thrilled to survive. I felt victorious for outsmarting Hunter and narrowly avoiding a worse beating, like the time I outran a pitchfork he threw at my back. I didn’t think about what would’ve happened if I’d run just a bit more slowly and he’d actually gotten me. Instead, those moments, though dark, feel triumphant to this day. They are the mental medals I won in the war I fought in my own house.
Most of the attacks happened without anyone else around, but sometimes other people were subjected to scenes of him punishing me. During a second-grade birthday party where I was “misbehaving,” Hunter took a chair, placed it in the middle of the room, and spanked me in front of all of my friends. It wasn’t with his hands; it was with a belt. As I lay across his legs, I saw sympathetic and confused looks on my friends’ faces, and I tried so hard not to cry, to be relaxed as if this were an everyday occurrence. Truthfully, it was. The only difference was the presence of spectators. When he was done, I mustered all the energy I could to get back into the party, still shaking a bit but trying to convince everyone I was “fine,” when I clearly wasn’t.
As I got older, I realized more and more just how alone Mom and I were during that time. It wasn’t that we wanted to stay; it was that we didn’t have any help to get out. Over the years, we asked so many people to intervene. They were either scared to interfere or, as one relative put it, “we didn’t want to intrude on your family business.”
We tried to convince Hunter to go to family counseling for a long time, and when we finally succeeded, the therapist asked me to detail every violent physical interaction I’d had with him. Hunter wasn’t allowed to interrupt; he just had to listen. As I told her every story of abuse I could remember, from washing my hands with scalding water until my fingers lost sensation to him routinely slapping my face and giving me wedgies that made my eyes tear, the therapist’s shock was apparent. She eventually had to cut me off because the list was so long and she had more than enough to prove her point. She challenged Hunter: “Let’s make an agreement: if you ever lay a hand on your stepson or wife again, I’m going to call the police.” I believed her. Finally, we had someone who would hold him accountable.
He did hit me again. We all went back to the counselor. I told her exactly what had happened, and she took a long breath and said, “Okay, Hunter, this is your last chance. If it happens one more time, I’ll call the police.” She let him off the hook! She treated him like she had caught a kid stealing an Oreo from the pantry. I had never felt more helpless. I knew she was never going to call the police, and I knew we were never going to family counseling again, because Hunter had gotten lucky, and he wasn’t going to double down on his good luck. We left that office and never returned, and the therapist never followed up with us.
I once made an anonymous call to Child Protective Services that brought a police officer and counselor to our house. They interviewed Mom and Hunter together in the same room. It was like interviewing a kidnapper and kidnappee together: you aren’t going to get the true story. My mom was too scared to say anything. Plus the counselor never spoke to me. Suffice it to say, CPS didn’t find anything wrong—once again reinforcing the idea that if you live through it and have no scars, you’re fine and why complain. I often thought, Maybe one time he will break my arm or leg, then I can finally get some real help. But he never did. That was the trickiest thing about his violence: it didn’t leave any physically permanent marks.
But the most shocking thing was how neutral the rest of our family was toward all of the violence. My very Italian great-grandmother, who lived with us for a short time in her nineties, quickly became privy to what was happening at our house. I told her that Hunter hit me and my mom, and she said, “It’s not abuse if nothing is broken.” She’d lived through multiple wars and immigrated through Ellis Island—I often heard stories where she broke wooden spoons over her own children’s heads when they misbehaved—so her empathy meter was probably a touch off. Once Hunter and I got into a physical fight where he threw a plant at my head, all while my great-grandmother sat there watching TV, unmoved. Her only interjection was, “Boys! Boys! Keep it down! People’s Court is on.”
Unlike my great-grandmother, my grandma (my mom’s mom) was my closest ally. I spent a lot of my youth with her while my parents worked. She was one of the only people I could fully confide in. She didn’t like Hunter from the beginning; she’d joke and make fun of him to me privately and always made it a point to take him down a peg or two to his face in front of me. She was the only adult I ever saw do that. When she was over, we’d stand together. She always had my back—until she didn’t. After a particularly bad Christmas dinner, a verbal fight started between my grandma and Hunter, and it slowly erupted until every adult was screaming. Finally, my grandma got up and announced to us, “It’s either him or me!” If Hunter kept treating her grandson and daughter this way, she wouldn’t come back ever again. The logic here is hard to parse: the punishment for his abuse was eliminating interactions with his mother-in-law . . . whom he didn’t like? It made no sense and still doesn’t, even though she stands by her decision to this day: “I had to do what I had to do”—which was nothing. She gathered up her coat and left, my grandfather trailing behind. We didn’t see her again for what seemed like years.
My dad’s response to Hunter was the toughest to come to terms with. Dad was very present in my life. The Herculean efforts he made to juggle work and fulfill his duties as a parent continue to astound me. He was my rock; though my parents were divorced and he lived and worked over an hour away, he never missed any of my big events. Not only did I spend every weekend with him, but he also came to our house after school twice a week just to be with me.
Hunter was jealous of my dad’s relationship with me simply because my dad was my dad, and Hunter couldn’t compete. In his warped brain, Dad was his greatest rival, and Hunter needed to take him down. He saw the joy I had in my eyes when Dad was around, a joy Hunter couldn’t take away or duplicate. So in typical fashion if he couldn’t earn it, he forced it—whether it was making me call him Dad, insisting on me giving him kisses, or talking shit about my dad and sharing things that my mom told him privately about her and my dad’s relationship. It didn’t work. I loved my dad and nothing was going to change that.