Christopher Titus - Early Life

Early Life

Titus was born in Castro Valley, California to Ken and Juanita C. (née Holmes) Titus. His parents divorced when he was a young child, and he was raised largely by his father, Ken, a judgmental, chain-smoking, hard drinker who was married six times and divorced five times. His mother suffered from manic-depressive schizophrenia and spent time in and out of mental hospitals. At the age of four, he was taken away from his father and given to his grandparents on his mother's side. His father went to kidnap him back and inadvertently told a man about his plans who turned out to be a local district attorney. Rather than arrest him, the attorney gave him legal tactics he could use to get his son back which he used and eventually regained custody of Christopher. When Christopher was 12, he ran away from his father to live with his mother, during which he lived in her garage, but he shortly moved back with his father.

According to Titus in Norman Rockwell is Bleeding, Juanita was acquitted of murder in 1986 after killing her second husband who beat her up when he came home to find that she wasn't done cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Eight years later, Juanita committed suicide after marrying another abusive man and being sent to court-ordered therapy for hurling a Duraflame log through the window of a Missouri sheriff's office. This resulted in Titus having a nervous breakdown on his flight a week after her funeral. His father, Ken Titus, died in 2001 of cardiac arrest. Chris Titus dedicated his entire Norman Rockwell is Bleeding special and an episode of his show Titus ("The Pendulum," where Christopher is in a coma following a racecar crash and Ken narrated the episode, "Christopher's Neutral Space") to his late father. Titus would claim that although his father "never missed a beer in his life, or a joint, or a party, or a chance to get laid," he also "never missed a day of work, or a house payment, or a car payment. I never went hungry although he did a couple times so I wouldn't".

Christopher Titus had problems with alcohol and drugs during adolescence until one day, while intoxicated, he fell into a bonfire at a beach party. In the morning, his friends took him to the hospital, where the doctor told him he would have died if he had inhaled the deadly hot smoke inside of the bonfire. He has called this moment his "epiphany" and began to turn his life around and get into comedy.