- The paramedic wanted to tell me the worst news
in the least amount of words possible.
What's happening?
You just had a seizure!
Now what's gonna happen?
You're gonna have another!
(audience laughing)
(intense electronic music)
Welcome to This Is Not Happening Presents: One Crazy Night
So this is what we do.
Our bunch of comedians
tell stories about a similar subject.
So this is just One Crazy Night.
Give it up for Mr. T.J. Miller, everybody!
(audience clapping)
What a crazy night!
You guys ever been on a bender?
It's like more than three to four days of drinking
from morning to evening.
You ever done a three-week bender?
That's an interesting comedown.
You have to be careful, you know
you obviously have withdrawal.
I had a particularly difficult night of sweating
and waking up and you hallucinate a little bit.
And one of the hallucinations I had was that the guy,
my buddy, who was letting me stay at his place,
I woke up and he had also been getting off a bender,
and he was like in the corner, sort of naked.
Sort of, he was like naked.
(audience laughing)
And he was just going like this,
like, you ever seen someone not quite dance?
(audience laughing)
Like it's just inches from dancing, you know?
I mean, he was so close to being dancing.
And the next morning, I came downstairs
and I was like, buddy, what were you doing
at 7 a.m. in my room, kinda naked,
well, naked
but just sort of dancing in the corner?
That's weird, it's uncomfortable to me.
I don't want to go on benders with a person
that that will happen.
And he said, "What are you talking about?
"My cousin had a 7 a.m. flight, I was at the airport."
And I had never had a moment switch from me being like,
weirdo to oh shit.
(audience laughing)
'Cause then I was really the weirdo.
(audience laughing)
It went from him being so strange that he was
sort of dancing naked in my room
to me being the guy that when I hallucinate,
it's of my friend.
(audience laughing)
Sort of dancing naked in the room.
We didn't hang out for a while after that.
But that's not the craziest night I've ever had.
The craziest night, I almost died in 2010,
not from any of these fun things
that everyone's talking about.
I had an arteriovenous malformation,
which is a congenital brain disorder
where there's a hemorrhaging in a part of your brain
that has malformed since you were born.
They later had to remove about a golf-ball-size
chunk of my brain from the frontal lobe.
Flash forward just about six months,
I was doing a film I'm sure you've seen,
Yogi Bear 3D.
(audience laughing)
Of which I was the star,
and my behavior had become erratic.
I mean really erratic.
I got very excited about entanglement puzzles,
I was studying them and taking them apart
and putting them back together.
I was speaking in narrative
where I would sort of talk about the narrative path
of the conversation before I engaged in it,
and then I would hit those signposts in the conversation
and usually end with a compliment.
(audience laughing)
It works.
Later, I would ask my friends,
did you notice anything weird about how I was acting?
And they were like,
oh yeah, we thought you were on, like, hard drugs.
(audience laughing)
That really shows you how good of friends you have.
They think you're on meth and they're just like,
don't mention it, it'll work itself out.
(audience laughing)
So, you know, my behavior being erratic,
I came back to the States, finished the film,
which grossed $100 million domestic
and not bad for the first
talking bear hybrid cartoon live-action 3D.
(audience laughing)
Oh yeah, there's gum on here.
So I was at lunch with my terrible managers
at a Beverly Hills lunch spot,
I'm sure it was vegetarian,
and I was pitching a movie, this is all true,
about Chatroulette.
Are you guys familiar with Chatroulette?
That social experiment that turned into dicks immediately.
I was pitching a terrible horror film about Chatroulette,
where you get on,
and you sort of start talking to a girl,
and they're talking for a while,
and they're just getting to that point
where they might start telling you about
where they are in the world.
they find out they're in the same state
in the United States.
And then right when he's about to find out which city,
sort of a scary man walks by in the background.
And the guy's like, There's a guy in your room.
Who's that?
And she's like, ha, yeah right, whatever
don't try to freak me out, it's late.
And then the same stranger walks by and goes like that.
Pretty good movie, right?
(audience laughing)
Too bad it never got made
because of this crazy night I'm about to tell you about.
(audience laughing)
So, again, the dark stranger walks by,
not dark in ethnicity, he's just doesn't,
he's not well lit.
So he walks by.
I'm talking to my managers, and I'm like,
and then, you know, he comes directly behind her
and he makes this really scary face.
(audience laughing)
And I fell on the ground, and my managers were like,
he has such commitment to such a terrible idea.
(audience laughing)
Then they realized I had stopped breathing
so they called the ambulance, and I woke up.
"Boo!" goes one girl.
(audience laughing)
I like your attitude towards death, ma'am.
(audience laughing)
What, you had to go to the hospital?
Booo!
Keep it healthy!
Multivitamins!
So I woke up in the ambulance,
and there's a paramedic, and he goes,
you just had a seizure!
I was like, huh?
He goes, "You're about to have another seizure!"
I was like, "Ah!" and I passed back out.
(audience laughing)
What a bizarre...
The paramedic wanted to tell me the worst news
in the least amount of words possible.
(audience laughing)
You know what I mean.
What's happening?
You just had a seizure!
Now what's going to happen?
You're going to have another!
(audience laughing)
He's out guys, it's fine!
He knew what happened and than what was going to happen.
We can let this one go.
(audience laughing)
The next time I woke up, I woke up and I was
in the ninth floor of Cedars-Sinai
in what I would later find out to be the ICU,
in the neurology ward.
Nobody can talk up there,
I was the only person able to talk.
That's heavy duty brain problems
if you're in the ICU, ninth floor.
So I woke up, and I was looking around,
and this nurse comes in, and she goes,
"Um, your doctor cannot be here,
"but a proxy will be here in just a bit."
She walked out.
(audience laughing)
There's that moment where you don't have any information
and that's all you've been given,
and the first thought I had was like,
where's that paramedic guy?
(audience laughing)
He'd know what the fuck is going on.
(audience laughing)
He'd come in and be like,
doctor's gone, proxy coming.
We'll explain proxy later!
(audience laughing)
So I'm sort of waiting
and sitting in what little knowledge I have,
and this is all true.
Then a robot wheeled in.
(audience laughing)
We all think of robots as so exciting
and helpful in our everyday life,
but when you're not expecting to see a robot
it's not like, hey, a robot!
You're like, oh no.
A robot.
But it sort of wheeled in; it was on these Segway wheels,
and it was a sort of a,
it had a column,
a metal column,
and then a flat-screen little television
with a camera on top and a microphone at the bottom,
and it was sort of like Skyping to another place,
and there was a man's face on it.
And it wheeled like this,
and wheeled over,
and just looked at me.
And he's like, "I'm sorry I can't be here right now,
"but I've sent a proxy in my place."
And I couldn't help it.
I just went, are we in the future?
(audience laughing)
And his reaction was so great,
because he must have gotten a lot of that, I guess,
because he was like, ha ha, okay.
Anyway, I'll be there on Thursday.
(audience laughing)
He just laughed and said, "I'll be there on Thursday"
to a man who was clearly terrified.
But I woke up the next morning and they said,
look, you just had an AVM hemorrhage.
AVMs are usually found in autopsy.
Which means you're usually dead when they find them,
or you're in an almost worst situation than being dead,
which is being in an autopsy alive and you're like,
stop, wait!
So he said, "Usually these are found in autopsy
"but you're lucky,
"your brain started bleeding probably six months ago.
"Did you notice any erratic behavior?"
And I said, "Yes."
And he said, "Well it was in the frontal lobe,
"which is responsible for the personality,
"so if there was excess bleeding there,
"you'd feel more activity.
"Did you have any grandeur, delusional personality stuff?"
And I was like, yeah, you know it, man.
(audience laughing)
And he said, "Well, we're going to have to go in
"and we're going to embolize that area.
"And luckily it's close enough to your skull
"that we'll cut into it and then we'll take out
"a small piece of your frontal lobe.
"It was already malformed to begin with,
"so we don't think that it'll affect your thinking
"or your personality, but we're not sure.
"There's a 10% fatality rate for the surgery.
"You don't have to get it,
"but you'll probably die in your mid 30's."
And I was like, okay.
Just give me the options one more time.
Just kidding, I'll have the surgery.
(audience laughing)
But you know I had to ask, I said,
"Well, I am a comedian,
"I kind of make living off of being sort of amusing
"and entertaining, and being able to look at things
"in kind of a quirky, fun way."
For instance, my own death, or something like that.
(audience laughing)
"So if you remove this part of my brain,
"will that affect my ability to do that work?"
And he was like, uh, I don't know.
But if you don't get it,
you're probably going to die, so.
(audience laughing)
And I said, "Yeah, but I'm still asking."
He said, look, friend
which is worse dying
or not being as funny on stage
when you tell your little stories?
(audience laughing)
And I was like, have you ever been on stage
and not had it go well?
(audience laughing)
He was like, no.
I mean, I've a lot of lectures to medical societies.
And I was like, do you ever start out with
a joke or anything.
And he said, "No, sometimes I'll close with a joke."
And I was like, has any of those ever not gone well?
He's like, sometimes I feel like
they're starting on a path where it's gonna go well
and then I get really confident,
and then it kind of goes on longer than it should
and then the payoff isn't necessarily worth
what I thought it would be worth.
And I was like, isn't that awful?
And he was like, yeah.
(sighing)
(audience laughing)
Thanks, guys, I'm T.J. Miller.
(audience applause)
(intense electronic music)
Hi, everybody.
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