Episode 9 - The One With Dana Gould's Fictional Father

Everybody Knows But Me - Holly Brown, Next Chapter Podcasts, Companion Arts

Holly Brown explores generational trauma through personal storytelling and listener submissions, highlighting how humor and honesty can heal. She discusses her journey of confronting family secrets, including discovering

Key takeaways

• Comedy as a tool for processing trauma

Transcript preview

Next Chapter Podcasts. Podcasts. Hello, my little Trauma Club, my everybody's. I'm kicking things off with a very special announcement. Are you sitting down? Everybody knows but me is having its first ever live stand-up show on Thursday, July 16th in Los Angeles. It's at the upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Hollywood. tickets are available now. And if you've been listening to the podcast, then you know UCB holds a very special place in my heart to do our first ever live show. The show is called The Fucked Up Family Hour, and it's a night of stand-up comedy about generational trauma, family secrets, and the people we love who really fucking screwed us up. Along with some incredible comedians, I'll be headlighting with even more insane family stories that unfortunately are in fact fact. all true. For tickets, head to UCB comedy.com or my Instagram at Holly Brown comedy. That's Thursday July 16th at the upright citizens brigade theater in Hollywood. And if you're coming, let me know. I would love to say hi. When I started making this podcast, I felt incredibly alone. Not because I didn't have support. You've heard how close I am with Casey and Carson and my husband Brad has been by my side. through every second of this. But when you spend your life on stage, you become very aware of the assumptions people make about you. And that applies to off stage too. People think they know you because they know the version of you who can joke about O. C. D. or talk about family trauma. Because you must have already processed it enough to turn it into a bit. They don't see the years before that. When you were living through experiences, that seem impossible to explain, while wondering whether anyone would even believe you if you tried. After my mom died, I realized something I hadn't really let myself fully admit I wanted. I was never gonna get the conversation I'd secretly hoped for. The one where my parents looked at me and said, we know. We understand what happened to you. We understand what we put you through. I'd long chosen to love both of my parents so deeply, despite everything. But there was still a part of me that wanted someone to tell me I wasn't crazy for reacting the way I did. And that's a lonely place to be. I wanted someone to look at the honorary black sheep of the family. The kid who got arrested for shoplifting school clothes, illegally entered Canada, aka ran away to Canada. Uh-oh, another detail of the Canada story. I wanted them to see the girl who didn't drink, didn't do drugs, but did have intense outward struggles with her mental health. And then have them say, yeah, that makes sense. It wasn't your fault. We know you were trying your best. So, I made this. everything. I filled in the gaps. I gained two whole brothers. I started brand new relationships with people I'd wondered about my entire life. Friends started calling me saying, girl, we need to talk. Family members started sharing stories they never told me before. Now at this point I bet some of you are thinking, okay, yeah, yeah. Can you get back to the cliff you left us hanging off. off of last time where you said you only had one last thing to do? Also, by the way, no sitcom scene at the top of the show? What in God's name is going on here? To that I say, you're absolutely right. We're barreling towards the end of the line here full steam ahead. But the thing is, what you may not realize is that this podcast isn't going to end with my story. Oh, yeah, another big reveal. We've got big plans for season two, including a Patreon that'll give you a chance to help support us making this dang show. More on that later, though. Because the thing that's been the quickest shortcut to feeling less alone, that has stopped me from now and then breaking the fourth wall, Ferris-Buler style. Life moves pretty fast. And I wish it would move faster, am I right? Is the unexpected door you open when you're totally honest about the weird weirdly. of your life. Well I thought about that. I said what if when I was a what if when I was in high school I suddenly find out oh I have other siblings by my dad. I don't even know what that would have done. It was a shock. Yeah so not an usual circumstance actually surprisingly common now that I'm sharing the story with me. You hear a lot of those kinds of stories more than you expect. Turns out the quickest way to stop screaming into the abyss is to meet people already standing in it, waving right back at you. So before we get to the rest of my story, before we find out how my family reacted after hearing all of this, by the way, I genuinely don't know yet, I'm writing this before we've had that conversation. But before we hear what the brothers I just met thought about me making this podcast, and before I figure out what the HE double hockey comes next. Oh, what language? My ears are burning. I wanted to share a few of the stories that made me realize maybe my life wasn't written for some bizarre TV show absolutely no one else had ever seen. Maybe there are just a lot more people in this cast than I ever imagined. And that's why you might have noticed that over the course of the last eight episodes, I've kept asking you guys to send you guys to send you guys to send you guys to send you me your stories. And boy, have there ever been some really astounding ones that have hit our inbox. Take listener Carrie, who reminded me that stories of secret families can go back generation after generation. And yet, hearing them will always manage to stop me in my tracks. See, Carrie's grandmother, Dahlia, was married to her grandfather, Dick. And yet, hearing them will always manage to stop me in my tracks. See, Carrie's grandmother, Dahlia, was married to her grandfather, Dick. Unfortunately, his name was also a personality trait. Dahlia and Dick had one daughter, Carrie's mom. Now, Dick and Dahlia also had another couple they were incredibly close with, and and her husband, who, just to make this story as confusing as humanly possible, was also named Dick. Two Dix! Great start! Dahlia down a flight of stairs in an attempt to kill her. Classic 1960s marriage stuff. And if it sounds brutal to say it like that, don't worry. Carrie had just as much of a sense of humor in sharing all of these details as I have with mine. Anyway, Dahlia survived, divorced him, and because this was the era where apparently everyone had their priorities in order, she was effectively kicked out of the Catholic Church for getting the vote. Meanwhile, her daughter, listener Carrie's mom, was beaten by nuns because she was the child of divorced parents. Jesus Christ! No, seriously, I thought JC was supposed to be all about love. Now that's religion. So after the divorce, Grandpa Dick stayed single. Or, so everyone thought. Years later, the other family friend, that Dick died single. And his wife Anne became a widow. And then, completely out of nowhere, Anne married Grandpa Dick. A Dick swap! Except it turned out this wasn't some late in life romance. They'd actually been having an affair for decades. An affair that produced two daughters. Mary's mom eventually discovered that two women she'd always known as family friends were actually her sisters. And the secret finally came out during, you guessed it, a death-fed confession. Hmm, another secret family classic. Grandpa Dick was dying in the hospital when he took one of those daughter's hands and told her he was glad she'd had a another man to raise her. Yousa. Carrie, I get it. After that, for our listener, Carrie, decades of decisions made perfect sense. Why Anne married Grandpa Dick after her husband died, why everybody behaved the way they did. Why there always seemed to be something just slightly off. Because once you know the secret, you start seeing the entire story, differently. Thank you, Carrie, you hilarious badass for submitting that truly unhinged family story. Lest we forget, people have been dealing with these kinds of shenanigans long before mine. Carrie ended her email by saying something that immediately felt relatable as hell. She told me she uses her aforementioned sense of humor to deflect. Now, that is a trauma club kid if I've ever met one. It also made me wonder why so many of us do that. Why some people seem almost wired to take the worst thing that's ever happened to them and somehow turn it into the funniest story you've ever heard. So I sat down for a quick chat with someone who's made a career out of balancing those two very things. Prolific stand-up comedian, writer, actor, and casual little flexier, former executive producer of The Simpsons, where he worked. on more than 100 episodes, Dana Gould. He's also the creator of IFC's cult hit Stan Against Evil, a show inspired in part by his own father. Oh, and because Hollywood is hilariously small, Stan Against Evil also features an appearance by Valerie Tossie, the actress who plays my mom in the sitcom retellings of my life that are usually at the start of every episode. We talked about what it means to turn. pain into comedy, whether we realize we're doing it at the time, and why some of the funniest people you've ever met also happen to be carrying around some of the heaviest stories. From Next Chapter Podcasts and Companion Arts, this is everybody knows but me, episode 9, the one with Dana Gould's fictional father. I kind of wanted to start with, because one of the things I'm doing is using sitcoms to create the world I always wanted. And I watched that growing up to lose myself in them desperately and be like, God damn, I wish my only problems that my parents found a cigarette in my room. Not, you know, and then I would just eat it and be like, it's gone. And so one of the things that's like, I've been living in the sitcom world so much that I wanted to ask you, is there a sitcom world that if you could choose to live in, that you would want to live in most? Well, I would, I would, I would, I would, I would to say the one that I did live in was the odd couple. That was my childhood of being a really weird OCD. Do you have OCD? Well, no, I don't have it. It's not been diagnosed, but I grew up in a house full of chaos. Everybody was drunk. Everybody was drunk. Everybody. Everybody. And I didn't drink. I was old like I'm talking about, it was 9, 10, 11. I never did. But. Uh, so I needed to create order. constantly cleaning up because it was nobody was yeah and I was just trying to have some kind of order and so I always related to the odd couple of just feel is constantly walking around picking up cleaning up after Oscar in terms of the world that I would live in I would have to say the world of standing against evil is sort of the world that I wanted to live in because I this one I made so I was like yeah I live in that one you had a unique opportunity to make the world which is what I'm trying to do now and I love how I love how and I'm Yours is obviously blends those genres. Yeah, you can't escape that. That's what I'm learning every day that I work is that you wherever you go there you are and that that means creatively to What I'm starting the idea that I'm working on now started off Nothing to do with me and and I was like oh it's me. When did it become you? Did you know what was happening or did was it a moment that you said? No, as you as you get into it in the onion peels There it is. Damn, I mean, I relate to that so much when even when you think you're processing something, I feel like there's just, I'm writing an entire podcast to process something. Right. Fully knowing that I'll think I close this. It will help you. And it will help. Like, they always help. Yeah, you know, I did a one man show in the early 90s called Insomnia about when I first kind of crashed out. And it absolutely helped. It closed a huge how I'm so curious about this one man show I'm not gonna lie I was talking to Candice about it our mutual friend and because I actually I on the podcast I detail that I committed tried to commit suicide sure and then something that the podcast listeners don't know but they find out now is your girl tried again she was like I didn't get it right so I tried again and part of that was a lack of sleep induced I went months without sleeping and I felt like I was going insane. Oh, you were. And I say that from experience. Yeah, yeah, so it just like instantly I wanted to learn more about this and what at what point because I remember being in the mental hospital. And as I'm like seeing, you know, there was like a there's certain things that I think are so funny that some people might not being in the mental hospital. There was like a schizophrenic gambling addict which I thought was hilarious. Uh-huh. And he was still losing.