Funny Because It Hurt

A note before you read: this column discusses child abuse, domestic violence and a suicidal statement. Please take care of yourself.

At neighbourhood parties in suburban Atlanta, a United Airlines pilot would stretch out his hand to introduce his sons to other adults. The boys would flinch, because a raised hand in their house had become the usual answer to a wrong word. The comedian Druski, born Drew Desbordes, told that story to Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO, in an episode that premiered on 24 September 2026. It is the detail I cannot shake. A flinch is a lesson the body learns before the mind can argue with it.

This column is about what Druski did with that flinch, and about what the rest of us are tempted to do with his story. Clips from the episode are already circulating with the usual captions: pain made him great, trauma is your superpower, no plan B. I want to slow that down. There is a lot to admire here, and a few things that should make us uncomfortable. I would rather you argue with me than nod along.

First, the scale of the man. Forbes ranked Druski No. 7 on its 2026 Top Creators list with $20 million in earnings, measured as gross earnings between March 2025 and March 2026. His following was put at 38.5 million. The previous year, Forbes had him at about $14 million. The fifty creators on the list together earned $1.02 billion, the first time the ranking passed the billion-dollar mark. Whatever you think of sketch comedy, this is no longer a hobby economy. The boy in the flinching story now hosts award shows, sells out tours and shoots a studio film. That is the man sitting across from Bartlett. Now the boy.

The room reader

Druski describes a father who taught through force and humiliation. Ask for a Phillips screwdriver, bring back the wrong tool, get hit upside the head. His father wanted his sons to decide early whether they were headed for jail, a trade, a warehouse or the military, and Druski was eight or nine when that menu was put in front of him. He is careful to say the family was not poor. His father flew for United and his mother worked for the CDC. He draws a sharp line: the home was broken, but the family was not broke. I think that distinction is the most important idea in the whole interview, and I will come back to it.

The violence, by his account, went well past discipline. He watched his brother beaten for wetting the bed. He watched fights between his parents turn physical, including choking, and he describes standing at a locked door, with his mother outside asking him to open it and his father inside warning him not to. He was a child doing the arithmetic of whom to obey.

His response, he says, was to become the funny one. After a beating, at dinner, the next morning, he would work to lift the mood for his brother, his mother, the whole house. The habit left him able to walk into any room and sense danger, sadness or joy within moments. Bartlett saw it live: Druski stopped mid-answer to ask what Bartlett had been about to say, reading his face. Bartlett observed that comedians are often the guests who watch him.

This is not mystical, and psychologists have circled it for decades. A child in an unpredictable home learns to scan for threat because scanning works. Humour is a cheap and effective tool for that scanning, because a laugh is the fastest visible proof that the room is safe again. What Druski calls reading the room, a clinician might call hypervigilance turned into a craft. The craft is real. So is the cost, and Bartlett was right to press on it. The same radar that makes a performer brilliant keeps the nervous system switched on long after the danger has gone.

There is research that fits the picture, though it cannot prove it. A study published in the British Journal of Psychiatryrecruited 523 comedians and found they scored significantly higher than a general group on all four types of psychotic personality traits. The standouts were impulsive non-conformity and introverted anhedonia. Gordon Claridge, who led the Oxford team, stressed that these traits can be healthy equivalents of moodiness, social introversion and lateral thinking. He described comedy for some as a kind of self-medication. But note what that study did not measure: childhood. It cannot tell us whether pain produces funny people. It tells us only that funny people, as a group, are not the carefree souls we imagine.

One more thing deserves honesty. Druski first says his comedy did not necessarily come from the abuse, then says it came from a wish to heal the situation at home. That ambivalence is telling. He is not claiming his father manufactured his talent. He is saying a talent his mother filmed and nurtured found a second job in a dangerous house.

What the cane teaches

Here I must stop being a media critic and speak as someone from this side of the world. Many of us in Ghana know the story Druski tells, with different furniture. The cane, the belt, the slipper, the open hand, the lecture that ends with I am doing this because I love you. When the Ghana Statistical Service and UNICEF released the 2017/18 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, they reported that 94 per cent of children aged one to fourteen in Ghana had experienced violent discipline. Ninety-four. If you grew up in Accra, Kumasi or Tamale, statistically you were probably one of them, and so was nearly everyone you went to school with. Our Children's Act of 1998 still carries language about reasonable, justifiable correction of a child.

Now place Druski's story inside that reality and watch what a certain kind of reader does with it. I can already predict the comments: see, that is how you raise a man. Tough love built a champion's mind. He did not say that, and the data would not let him. The CDC's Adverse Childhood Experiences study found that almost two-thirds of participants reported at least one adverse childhood experience and more than one in five reported three or more. As the count rose, so did the risk of problems including depression, in a strong and graded way. A later CDC analysis estimated that preventing these experiences could reduce adult depression cases by as much as 44 per cent. Those are population numbers, and individuals vary enormously. Some people come out of terrible childhoods with unusual strength. Psychologists even have a name for it, post-traumatic growth, coined by Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun in the 1990s. But the growth belongs to the person who survived, not to the people who hurt them.

The lesson for the parent reaching for the belt is not that your son might become Druski. It is that your son might become his brother. Druski says his brother was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and he wonders whether the violence at home played a part. No outsider can say what caused it, because those conditions have many contributing factors. But his framing is the one every parent in Ghana should hear: trauma can send you down a good road or a negative one. Two brothers, one house, the same open hand. One found a coping tool that paid, the other did not. A philosophy of parenting that depends on which brother you get is not a philosophy. It is a gamble with a child's mind.

Forgiveness is not a receipt

The part of the episode I expect to travel furthest is also the part I find hardest to judge. Druski says he could not reach the success he wanted without forgiving everything in his past, including his father, first privately and then face to face. They now have a very good relationship. He argues that a grudge is a weight carried by the person holding it, not the person it is aimed at. He also offers context for his father: a man from the housing projects of Northeast D.C., possibly abused himself, who nonetheless taught real lessons about doing a job properly and never half-finishing the dishes.

Bartlett raised the obvious objection that many people think forgiveness means letting the offender win. Druski's answer is that forgiveness is for you.

I believe him about his own life. Some research links forgiveness to better wellbeing for the forgiver. But watch the danger in turning a personal resolution into a public rule. When a famous survivor says I forgave, so I could succeed, the unspoken corollary lands on every survivor who has not forgiven: your pain is a performance problem. That is a cruel thing to tell a woman who still wakes at night, or a man who has not spoken to his father in ten years and has good reasons. Forgiveness can be a gift to yourself. It must never be a condition of respect. Druski offers it as testimony. Our culture loves a redemption arc with a handshake at the end, and it is the one that will try to make forgiveness an obligation.

The magnet problem

The interview's most honest passage has nothing to do with money. Bartlett confessed that his parents' marriage taught him relationships looked cold, and that he ran from commitment until about twenty-seven. Druski answered that he knew exactly what that felt like. He described being affectionate until closeness arrives, and then something in him pulls back, like a magnet turned around so it repels what comes near. He says he has never seen a healthy two-person home work with his own eyes, and he wants to know why he reacts this way.

A fair point about vocabulary: the word avoidant came from the conversation's framing, and Druski described behaviour rather than claiming a diagnosis. But the behaviour matches what attachment researchers have described since John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Children who learn that closeness comes bundled with fear grow into adults who treat intimacy as an alarm. The Oxford comedian study defined introverted anhedonia as a reduced ability to feel social and physical pleasure, such as a tendency to avoid intimacy, though that is a measure of personality, not a verdict on anyone's heart.

Then Druski adds a layer I find genuinely new. Fame, he says, makes trust harder, because every admirer raises the question of whether a partner loves Drew or loves Druski, the product, and he guesses every superstar carries that doubt. Success did not heal the flinch. It gave the flinch a larger audience.

The lazy reading is that ambition is a substitute for intimacy, so hunger for greatness is just a way to avoid being loved up close. I do not think the evidence supports that, and Druski did not say it. What I will say is that he cannot be the only high achiever who works eighteen-hour days partly because the office is safer than the living room. Ask yourself honestly whether your own busyness has ever done that job.

The dorm room

By Druski's telling, the turning point was not triumph but collapse. He spent about a year and a half at a college near home, then moved to Georgia Southern hoping for the real campus experience. It did not arrive. Two boys from his county did not include him, with jokes about his shoes and his lack of a car. He stopped attending classes for the whole second semester, stayed in his room playing video games, and spent the twenty dollars his mother sent on enough food to avoid going out. He was in a depression unlike anything he had known, the class clown suddenly hiding from the world.

It was in that room, studying sports journalism, that he watched interviews with Steve Harvey and Kevin Hart. He lined up his heroes, including Will Ferrell, Chris Farley and Jim Carrey, and realised they were all comedians. He had been the funny one in every classroom, so funny he was once removed from the football team for it. The thing he was searching for was the thing he already was.

He called his mother, who cried and hung up. A friend drove four hours through the night to collect him. His grandparents predicted he would end up asking them for money. At home, he told his mother he would be on television within a year. If it did not happen, he said, he would kill himself. He later called that a little far and said he knew he would not. It was the language of someone who has put his whole self on one number.

I want to stop here, because this is exactly the sentence an internet clip will cut out and sell as motivation. It is not motivation. A young man in a dark room, ashamed, with no friends, telling his mother that his life is conditional on a single outcome, is a young man whose family should hear alarm bells, whatever the ending. He was lucky in the way people are lucky when someone loves them and a reason to keep going turns up. Not everyone gets that. If you are the person in that room right now, please speak to someone you trust or a professional. Do not borrow his ultimatum.

The barrel of the gun

The next stretch is the one the promotional copy calls the No Plan B strategy, and it is more complicated than the slogan. Back home, Druski worked at Red Lobster, LongHorn, Outback Steakhouse and McDonald's. Notice that: before the gun, he had a Plan B, and it was a minimum-wage kitchen. Then he drifted into an Atlanta scamming circle, quick bank and card scams that he says he never felt good about. One of those situations went wrong, and he and a friend were robbed at gunpoint. He says that looking at the barrel gave him an out-of-body clarity: if he survived, he would stop flirting with comedy and commit.

He went home and wrote his goals on paper, because his mother had always told him to write things down. Number one, as he recalls it: “Don't have a plan B.” The list also included hosting a tour, hosting an awards show and starring in a major film. He was around twenty-three. He has since ticked off those items, which is why the story is irresistible.

I will say two things, and I expect to be shouted at for both.

First, a plain observation about the scams. They had victims. Druski describes them in a sentence and moves on, and the interviewer let him. I am not asking for a trial. I am noting that when a redemption story skips over the people who paid for the early chapters, we get a cleaner moral than the truth supports, and young people copy the moral without the cost.

Second, and more important, the idea that he had no Plan B is only true if you ignore his mother's house. Soon after writing his goals, his car was repossessed, and he filmed it and posted it. He slept on the floor under his little sister's blanket and turned his mother's home into a set, flipping the couch to stage a police-show interrogation and borrowing a jacket from her closet to play a news reporter in the backyard. His mother kept asking whether the followers were paying him yet, and she kept letting him stay. His grandparents lived down the street. His friend Chauncey, now his lead comedic writer, told him to post the first clip. His parents held two good jobs. Druski called his household broken, and I believe him. But a home that is broken and still has a roof, a mother and a dining room is a very different launch pad from the one most of us can offer a child.

There is a statistical name for what happens when we build philosophies out of winners. During the Second World War, the mathematician Abraham Wald advised the military to armour the parts of bombers where returning planes had no bullet holes, because the planes hit there never made it back. Survivorship bias. For every Druski there are many people who burned their boats, had no mother's dining room, and drowned. We never hear their podcast. When Druski says most people quit when the car is repossessed or things fall apart just as they start praying, he is right about the pattern among people who succeed. He cannot tell us about the pattern among people who did not.

And yet. I do not want to be unfair, because there is a real insight under the slogan. Druski says he stopped staring at the far goal and started looking for the next rung of the ladder. When college friends told him he was no Kevin Hart, he decided the people he worshipped had once started somewhere too. He also admits his youthful bravado was fake in places. A clip surfaced in which he claimed to have told Meek Mill he would one day match his level, and he confessed to Bartlett that he had actually shouted it from a distance and never shook the man's hand. A man who can laugh at his own manifestation has kept his feet on the ground. The slogan is dangerous. The man holding it seems more careful than the slogan.

The gatekeepers

The business lessons in the episode are the most portable. By Druski's account, for years his proposals to FX, Amazon and Netflix all came back as a no. He had made money from brands, and the question he put to himself was whether to buy a car, a house or jewellery, or to spend it on his own ideas. He chose to fund them himself on YouTube, spending what he describes as millions on productions such as Coulda Been Auditions, Coulda Been Love, Coulda Been House and Coulda Been Daddy. He says the companies that rejected him now want to buy what he has built, a bidding war. By his account a Netflix film is already picked up, a series with Mike Epps called Collect and Praise arrives in November on Netflix and YouTube, and he is filming alongside Emma Stone and Chris Pine in The Catch, due in May 2027.

Treat those details as his, since the interview is the only source for much of this. But the shape is believable, and it matches Forbes' reading of the moment: the creator industry has stopped trying to break into show business and has become show business. When cameras are cheap and the audience is global, the gatekeeper loses the monopoly on saying yes.

The Ghanaian filmmaker should take that seriously. If you are waiting for a distributor in Accra, a streamer in Lagos or a festival in Europe to validate you, Druski's story says your waiting is a decision. But I would add the footnote he skipped. He could invest in himself because earlier, smaller deals gave him something to invest. The Drake call, as he describes it, moved brands from sending free clothes to treating him as a serious transaction. Without a bank balance, betting on yourself is a slogan. The honest version of his lesson is: start before permission, keep your first steps cheap, and spend your first real money on the next piece of work. Not everyone can finance a series. Everyone with a phone can finish one thing this week.

He also makes a claim about relationships worth underlining for anyone who thinks talent is enough. In corporate rooms, he says, brands want to know whether you are a decent person at dinner before they trust you on television, and he credits a childhood in a multicultural county for his ease with all kinds of people. That is the soft power under the hard numbers. A room reader, in other words, is also a deal closer.

He is also at pains to say he does not do politics. Bartlett raised a viral March skit and a reported remark by Donald Trump in April about someone being sued. Druski said he had no idea whether it was about him and had no wish to be sued. I would simply note that a comedian whose sketch about conservative white women drew, by Bartlett's account, hundreds of millions of views may not be as far from politics as he says. Whether you can punch at the powerful and never down, as he insists he does, is a debate for another column.

Silence

The most unexpected advice in the episode concerns solitude. Druski says most people who claim to be confused about their purpose never put the phone down, and that when it hurts they reach for a drink, a high or a friend. What changed his life, he argues, was sitting alone, sober, with no distractions, and going through everything he had loved doing since childhood until the answer was obvious.

We should be careful with that, because the science says it is much harder than it sounds. In 2014 a University of Virginia team led by Timothy Wilson reported eleven studies in Science in which people typically did not enjoy spending six to fifteen minutes alone with nothing to do but think. In one experiment, participants first received a shock unpleasant enough that three-quarters said they would pay to avoid it again. Left alone in a room with a button, 67 per cent of the men and 25 per cent of the women shocked themselves. The authors suggested that, alone with their thoughts, people may focus on their shortcomings and get caught in ruminative cycles. Druski's silence was probably harder than he lets on, and his dorm room was a far darker place to practise it than a quiet bedroom.

At the same time, he has a point. Almost everything in our lives is built to stop us asking the one question that matters. A generation raised on infinite scroll should at least test whether it can sit alone for fifteen minutes without reaching for the shock.

The hunger that never eats

Asked whether he is fulfilled, Druski says no. He is happy but not fulfilled, and he says anyone pursuing greatness will tell you the hunger never stops. He does not take vacations and finds chaos soothing. The day after the BET Awards he was on a plane to shoot his next show, and soon after that he began filming a studio movie. He traces the habit to his parents: a mother who answered a B with a reminder he could do better, and a father who answered a division problem with a forty-minute lecture on other ways to solve it.

Here is where I put down my pen and ask you to judge. One reading says this is the discipline of an artist who knows what he wants, and the results back him. Another reading, which I think a therapist might raise gently, is that constant motion has been an anaesthetic since childhood, and that an inability to enjoy a win may be a wound rather than a virtue. He says he has begun eating better and wants to remain a heavyset legend, but a healthy one. That is good news. But when a culture celebrates a man who cannot rest, it quietly tells ordinary people that rest is failure.

What I am asking you to argue about

Here is where I land. Pain did not make Druski great. Pain gave him radar, a talent for reading rooms and an urgency that cannot be taught. People gave him runway: a mother who put a camcorder in his hands and later let him turn her living room into a studio, grandparents down the road, a friend who said post it, a famous musician who took a chance on him. Take away the runway and keep the pain, and you do not get a comedy star. You get his brother.

So I would like to put four questions to you, and I hope you will answer them loudly.

First: when a famous survivor forgives the person who hurt him, does that give the rest of us a model, or a new pressure?

Second: is no plan B wisdom, or a luxury that only people with a mother's dining room can afford?

Third: why do we keep crediting the cane, the belt and the slap when a son succeeds, and blaming the son when he does not?

Fourth, and hardest: if the hunger for greatness is partly a way of not feeling, what exactly are we cheering for?

Druski ends the interview by telling his younger self, the boy alone in that dorm room, to believe in himself more than ever and to stay consistent when he cannot see the end of the tunnel. It is good advice. I would add one line to it, for the boy and for every parent, teacher and uncle listening. The question is not whether you can transform your pain. The question is who is standing beside you while you try.

Chief Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams is an author, columnist and filmmaker, and the founder of Brownsy Silva Company.

Sources and further reading

• Steven Bartlett interview with Druski, The Diary of a CEO, premiered 24 September 2026 (transcript: The Singju Post, singjupost.com/transcript-druski-interview-on-diary-of-a-ceo-podcast)
• TheGrio, "Druski opens up about traumatic past in revealing interview," 24 September 2026
• Forbes Top Creators 2026; Tubefilter summary, 23 June 2026
• UNICEF Ghana and Ghana Statistical Service, MICS 2017/18 release, 28 November 2018
• CDC-Kaiser Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, major findings; CDC Vital Signs on ACEs, November 2019
• Ando, Claridge and Clark, "Psychotic traits in comedians," British Journal of Psychiatry, 2014 (Oxford summary at ox.ac.uk)
• Wilson et al., Science, 345 (6192), 2014 (University of Virginia summary)