Comedian Paul Scheer Hadn’t Realized His Childhood Was Abusive. His New Memoir Examines His Pain With Humor: ‘I’m Not Trying to Write a Therapy Session’

variety.com:

William Earl Paul Scheer is known for his joie de vivre in scores of comedy projects, from TV (“The League,” “Veep”), to podcasts (co-hosting “How Did This Get Made?” and “Unspooled”) and movies (“The Disaster Artist,” “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping”).

Yet behind his impish persona is a troubled childhood marked by bouts of physical and emotional abuse. For better or worse, Scheer was the last person to identify it as a troubled upbringing. “We’ve been doing ‘How Did This Get Made?’ for 14 years now, talking about bad movies,” he says of the podcast he co-hosts with Jason Mantzoukas and his wife June Diane Raphael. “Occasionally we’ll segue into these bigger conversations.

This is when I first started telling these stories from my life, and I would launch into a story about my grandma telling me not to open the door to strangers because there’s a butcher in town who is on the loose, killing children.

I would see this look of shock on my wife’s face and Jason asking, ‘Wait, what happened?'” Scheer’s dark childhood stories became something of a running gag on the show, with fans making supercuts and debating the darkest details on Reddit. “Honestly, I didn’t understand how bizarre it was until I was telling it on a big stage where people were reacting to it,” he says.