Comedian Titus paints in shades of light and dark

Christopher Titus never fails to see the bright side of a situation. Or is it the dark side? It gets confusing.

"None of us really know how other people see us," says the 50-year-old comedian, who is back at the South Point this weekend. When relatives recently mentioned how dark his stand-up is, Titus says he immediately protested, "I'm not dark!"

"They both just looked at me and burst out laughing."

"To me it's just how I see things," he adds. "I don't go, 'I'm gonna be dark and edgy.'"

His comic outlook flows both in source material and attitude from his parents, and the childhood chronicled in his breakout longform show, "Norman Rockwell Is Bleeding," in 2004.

His mother was mentally ill and his father was married six times, but "to his credit, when it got weird he always was really funny. My dad never let on that things were bad. I learned to be funny within stressful situations."

Even his mom "did the best she could with what she had and all the voices in her head."

"At one point when I was living with my mom, the sheriff would show up every couple of months to evict us. And it would be the same guy and I was like 'Hey Sheriff Doug.'

"A child shouldn't know the sheriff, that's all I'm saying."

So yes, a lifetime of material, light and dark.

Titus also stands apart from a traditional stand-up by veering into that hard-to-define territory of "one-man show," naming his shows and developing them from specific themes.

"Love Is Evol" tried to prove "love is possible in the worst relationship you could ever have, once you're done with it."

The last one was about the "Angry Pursuit of Happiness" because Titus is one of those people who, "once things start going well, instead of enjoying it they hunker down until the next tsunami. And I don't want to do that anymore. Because even when things are going well, I'm still living in the nightmare."

The new one is called "Born with a Defect" and shares his views on parenthood. "If you have kids and come see the show it will be like therapy to you, because it's all the stuff you think but don't say.

"And if you don't have kids, you'll just be proved correct."

Titus also says he has finally locked down financing, some of it crowdfunded, for a movie comedy he plans to shoot in February. "Special Unit" is about a team of disabled undercover detectives, but it's really about how we treat disabled people.

"I always want to say something socially relevant, as long as it's funny first," he says. "And then you realize that because you're a comic, no one really cares."

Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com and bestoflasvegas.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com.