Hatching Creativity: Conversations on Success, Innovation, and Growth

Comedian Frankie Caputo discusses his father's suicide at 13 and how comedy helped heal the trauma

• Hatch Compliance • Season 1 • Episode 31

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Frankie Caputo, an aspiring comedian talks about the overcoming of his fathers death by suicide and family bankruptcy. As Frankie peels back the layers of his seemingly idyllic upbringing, he exposes the stark contrast of a family grappling with secret struggles and the devastating blow of suicide. Our conversation with him sheds light on the resilience required to endure the loss of both a parent and financial security, while also facing the daunting challenges of bullying during those formative years. It's a rare glimpse of how he overcame personal tragedy. He gives an inspirational view of the tools he used to move past the most tumultuous storms.

Throughout the episode, Frankie's story evolves from somber reflections to the cathartic release found in laughter. His candid approach to discussing the loss of his father and the intricate emotions tied to expressions of sympathy illuminates the universal journey of grief and the search for solace. But it's through his stand-up comedy that Frankie has found a lifeline, transforming his pain and personal quirks into a shared experience that resonates with vulnerability and strength. Whether it's the awkward encounters that come with an eye condition or the comical pitfalls of dating, Frankie's ability to find comedy in pain exemplifies the healing power of humor and the unbreakable connection it creates with others.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Hatching Creativity. This isn't just another behavioral health podcast. This is the place where thought leaders converge to talk about real life challenges, breakthroughs and pivotal aha moments. Hey everybody, thanks for joining us on Hatching Creativity. Today I have a very special guest. He's an aspiring comedian. He's also somebody that I look up to. He's my nephew, frankie Caputo. Frankie's going to share some details of his early life, of growing up with wealth and a lot of money to their family, losing all that money and the tragic death by suicide of his father when he was 13. He's also going to walk us through his therapeutic process and how he's been able to take the pain in his life and be able to create his comedy from this pain in order to help him heal from it and potentially help others as well. So now I'm going to pass it over to Frankie. Frankie, if you'd like to tell us a little bit about what life was like for you growing up, I mean for societal standards.

Speaker 2:

My family was doing really great before my dad's death. We had a lot of money, we grew up in really big houses, we went on a lot of vacations expensive vacations too and there was most of the people in my life, most of my friends and family, would say that we're doing great. And if they took a step inside the house and watched the way that my father interacted with me and with my mother and my sister, I wish that a lot of people were able to see that part, because I think that they would disagree. I don't think that they would think that life was as good as they once thought that it was, and behind closed doors, nobody knows what's going on.

Speaker 1:

We talk about this all the time where you've got a public persona whether it's a Facebook or Instagram or whatever your public persona is and then, or how you present yourself in front of people, and then what people are like behind closed doors can be very different.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, but from the outside we had a lot of money. So a lot of people would just be like, oh, it's better to just have all the money. Who cares if your relationship with your dad sucks? But not truthfully. I would rather have just had a much better relationship with my father. But eventually I was 13 years old and he died. And very shortly after he died maybe within like a year of him dying we found out or I found out that we didn't really have any money Like they had. My family had spent all the money or it went somewhere, and I mean that's a whole another discussion. But I mean I went from living in like a three and a half million dollar mansion to like moving into a house, a really small house, and we didn't even have a car. For a year, like we had to ride our bikes around and get to the store without the car, which is a very big lifestyle change. For about 16 months since this all happened, and at 13 years old.

Speaker 1:

There's not a harder time for a kid to have to go through those kinds of things. This is a really big deal. I mean, even if you set aside the death right, you're going from a lavish, lavish lifestyle to figuring out where your food's coming from.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it was a really big change. It was a really big change. This was also around the same time that I started getting bullied for my eyes. So it was a rough time in my life. And let's just say that I had to grieve my father's death twice, because when I was 13, I was obviously I found out that he died, but my mother told me that he died because he had accidentally taken too much medication and he got a heart attack and one day he fell asleep and he just didn't wake up, and that's kind of what the picture in my head was until I was 17. And then, eventually, I started taking a bunch of other aspects and looking at the rest of my childhood and looking at how he was, and then I kind of started to question the reality of that. And then I kind of came to the conclusion that he had killed himself. And I asked my mom about it and she told me that he did kill himself and she said that she was going to tell me really soon, but she hadn't done it yet. And so so, yeah, that I had to grieve his death a second time, because when I found out that he killed himself, when I found out that he did it on purpose, as opposed to it being an accident.

Speaker 2:

That was a game changer for me on many levels. It filled me with a bunch of emotions that I had never felt before. I was almost embarrassed. I was embarrassed that other people knew about this before I was. I felt really bad about that, by the way, like the fact that everybody around me knew that and I didn't. I felt it was embarrassing I'm not going to lie and also I had been backing my dad up a lot because he wasn't great.

Speaker 2:

To a lot of people he wasn't the best dude, so there would be people who would talk shit about him after he died, like in front of me, like to me, and I would have to, like defend him. And, by the way, still not, still not cool when people talk shit about him in front of me, but I. But then when I found out that he killed himself, it was a little harder to defend him because it's like, well, this is what he wanted. Like he did, he got out, this is what he wanted. You know, he got us in tremendous, in a tremendous amount of debt. He spent all of our money and he didn't know how to recover from that and he killed himself. Like on paper. That's pretty much what it was.

Speaker 2:

Anything that had gone behind him not being good to him, to my family, is because that dude had had a bunch of problems that stemmed from childhood and trauma and stuff like that, and so that's just another way that I can put myself into his shoes and not be as mad at him when I could start to realize all the all the stuff that he's gone through. But it's also like we have free will and he could have been strong in some occasions and chosen to overcome some of that trauma and he could have chosen to be better, and there was a lot of scenarios in which he failed to do so and he didn't, and he chose not to be better and he chose to give in to his demons. So he also needs to be held accountable for that as well.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot to unpack there. A lot of times people are limited by their education or their beliefs in what good mental health care can do and because of those things, or because of fear, or sometimes because of shame, right we feel like we're irreparably broken. People make these decisions and they don't understand that there are options and there are places that you can go, and I like that. The 988, the suicide number, you know people can call these hotlines now and get good information and find out more about this and different things that people can maybe do to improve or to get help.

Speaker 1:

Suicide it comes from mental illness. When people are in their proper state of mind. Hopeless is not usually a place that people go. You know, just understanding that he wasn't well at that time, you know, wasn't a conscious decision of a well person to do that. That's something that I've learned over the years from dealing with the loss of John, of your dad. That has helped me to be able to not judge and to actually look for more of an empathy lens of what he must have been going through and that hopelessness that he must have been feeling. And you know, a lot of the things that we talk about on this show is about emotion and people and challenges, and there are no challenges that we can't overcome as a well person. It's really hard when somebody's not to be able to put yourself in their shoes.

Speaker 2:

I Forgiven him for everything, and I've put myself in his shoes many times and and I've cried about the feelings that he must have felt before his death, but I've also yelled at him. I've also been pissed at him for leaving us and for getting us in that situation and and for just for dipping and I've. The wide range that I've had of emotions Allocated towards his death is is there, you know, and Like, yeah, so like one day I could be pissed at him, one day I could feel really bad for him. So, but I will say that when my dad died Funny enough, like this would sound crazy for some people, but the year that my dad died, which is like 2013 to 2014 that year Was a pretty great year for me. Like, I'm not gonna lie, it was pretty. It was pretty great because when I grew up, he had, I had a tremendous amount of responsibility on me and I Felt like I was being watched like all the time, and any time I made a mistake, I would get punished for it, and I really have like no free time to do anything fun or to do anything that I enjoyed.

Speaker 2:

It was mostly just you know, works Like as in school if I got anything less than a bee, I would get punished for it for like a week. So, you know, school was a priority. When I got home, just chores, nothing really fun. So like, yeah, I lived in a big house but and I went a lot of vacations but it still wasn't the greatest thing. So when he died, like funny enough, I All the all of that responsibility was was dropped and I didn't have to really do much of. I had no responsibilities at all. Seriously, like there was really nothing that I was responsible for. It was just a year of fun for me. And, yes, I was grieving his death on a daily basis and, yes, I didn't stop thinking about him every single day for years and years and years, and I probably still think about him on a daily basis.

Speaker 1:

But like that one year, like it was a pretty nice year for me it's important to Circle back to what happened, because what I'm hearing you say is that it turned out to be okay. And very often people will come over to people with under death, you know a circumstance of death, and say I'm sorry, I'm terribly sorry for your loss. It's almost like an automatic response that people say, and I really encourage people to go away from that. To get away from that, Because what happens is if you say to somebody I'm sorry for your loss, I'm so sorry you've had to deal with it.

Speaker 1:

Maybe and in your circumstance this would have been appropriate Maybe it wasn't the worst thing in the world that somebody is lost or gone. And if you say to somebody I'm sorry for your loss or take that kind of sympathetic approach and somebody did not have that kind of relationship where they feel sad or the overwhelming sadness that somebody else may feel, you can introduce shame into that as well where somebody feels like what's wrong with me that I don't feel more sad or I'm more upset about this. Is there something wrong with me? And I think it's really important that we check in with people about how they feel, as opposed to assuming that they feel a certain way, and that goes with any aspect of life, but that's an interesting point.

Speaker 2:

That's an interesting point that I've never really heard anybody say before. But I do have a couple of things that I want to respond to that with. The first one would be that at the time that he died, it truly was like the worst thing that's ever happened to me and it did suck really bad, like I don't want to say that when he died I was happy, because I wasn't, but there was a massive mixture of feelings Because obviously I had just lost my dad. I lost my father figure.

Speaker 2:

You might ask yourself, like how did I cry every single day but then say that it was the best year of my life? And I don't really know. And I guess that that's when the aspect of saying I'm sorry for your loss can bring some shame, because I think that I did experience some of that, because there were people all around me saying I'm sorry for your loss, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. And a lot of the times when they said that my internal response would be I don't feel as bad as you make it out to seem, or my feelings on him fluctuated all the time, like one time of the day I wouldn't feel too bad, but then another time I'll be crying because I can't contain how bad I feel. So it fluctuated so much, but in terms of saying like I'm sorry for your loss, I'm not sure what a better alternative would be.

Speaker 1:

It's like a pat response. Right, it's a canned response that doesn't really take any thought. And it's the same thing as when something tragic happens and you have people sending thoughts and prayers. It's just, it's a non-solution-based, non-valuable comment. You may be better off saying look, I don't know what to say. And that's one of the things that I love about Renee, my wife, is that Renee has no problem saying the things that everybody thinks, but doesn't know what to say. For example, in a situation like yours, I can guarantee you Renee's would have been wow, that must have been really tough. This must be really tough time for you. I don't know what to say, and what they're doing is they're she's acknowledging that you're potentially suffering with something from her perspective, but I just don't know what to say. And what happens is, when people don't know what to say, they say things that could potentially hurt somebody, just to get something in there. Does that make sense?

Speaker 2:

Yes, that makes sense. But also I don't know. Like, I think, if you don't have the tightest relationship with somebody and if you're not going to go all up into their feelings and really try to find out how they're feeling, I still think that, like I'm sorry for your loss is a pretty solid response, just because, especially when I was in when this happened, when I was in middle school, a lot of my friends or acquaintances in class have never dealt with death. They've never really seen it in their own family and if they did, it was with like a grandparent or something, and they've also never had a buddy whose dad just died. So, like a lot of them wouldn't know how to respond to that either.

Speaker 2:

And I think when I was 13 and this happened and people came up to me and said I'm sorry for your loss, I didn't really know how to respond very well either. Like there's no, there's no training book on how to respond to some of these questions. But if you were to ask me a better alternative, like a different thing, for them to say, I don't know if I had a different one, because then them coming up to me and saying, like I don't know what to say, I don't know. I think I don't know how I would respond to that either.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, they're both ways of trying to connect you know, and the thing is is nobody really knows what to say at the end of the day, other than a couple of you know. Pat answers, nobody really knows what to say. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what your healing process was like and how you turned that into a positive in your life.

Speaker 2:

There was a lot of me thinking about him. Like I said, I thought about him every single day For most of my thoughts. If it wasn't like it's secure to be about my eyes, like this was my life for many years, it was insecurity about my eyes, thinking about my dad's death and playing Madden, those were the three things. So that was me. Now I joke about it and I write about it. You know I journal almost on a daily basis and he comes up in my journals once in a while. So I'll write about him and I would like to say that I'm fully over his death. But I can make myself cry about it really quickly if I wanted to. And I think that there's pent up emotions inside of me that I could reach if I really wanted to. But frankly, most of the time I don't want to reach those feelings and I'd rather stay away from them. But once in a while I choose to get into them and really go into it.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that I was really impressed about with you was your ability to speak openly about the death, about what it was like for you, about the trauma before and after. One of the things I love about you is your resilience. You completed your education, then you decided that you wanted to take this and speak about it, and we talked a little bit about your podcast that talked about your eye condition and how that was beneficial for you. Now, over the past couple of years, you've been getting into stand-up comedy. You've been able to take these traumatic events through some learning and getting through them and building some resilience, and now you've been able to make comedy out of these situations that a lot of people would be afraid to talk about. Can you talk a little bit about the process from going from trauma to healing and how you helped do some of your healing to the sharing of your experiences through your comedy?

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, first off, I think that it's the coolest thing ever to be able to talk about trauma and turn it into laughter for other people. Just turn it into something funny. I think that it's the coolest thing ever. I think you're doing something with that energy and you're transferring it into a negative energy, into a positive one, and I think that if everybody did that, the world would be a better place. And obviously everybody likes the feeling of laughter.

Speaker 2:

If I could take something that brought me a lot of pain and then get over that pain by making people laugh with it or laugh about it, I think that's beautiful. It's not like I'm going on stage and telling jokes that hurt me, but I'm sacrificing my self for the laugh. No, these are things Me talking about. It is therapeutic for me. Me telling it on stage is a good thing for me, so that's also why I do it. It goes back to why I started the Dancing Eyes podcast, which we spoke about in the last episode. Just simply talking about some things can really make you feel better about it. So for me, talking about my father's death and standup has been a good source of material for me and also a good way to heal.

Speaker 1:

I'd like to show everybody a quick clip of some of your comedy and this way they can see how you've been able to take some of these challenges in your world and move them forward as a superpower for yourself.

Speaker 3:

I'd say my least favorite thing about my eye condition is that it's literally the first thing that a cop is trained to look for when deciding if someone's intoxicated. That's not a joke, it's just unfortunate. I always looked like I'm high, but I didn't know. I always felt like I was high until one time I was in math class. In the middle of math class, someone came up to me, lifted me in my eyes and said Pfft, I've been there before, buddy. And I was like dude, you are my math teacher, bro, teach me a dish.

Speaker 3:

I don't have a girlfriend, but I can get one whenever I want, because Google has been giving me a lot of advertisements for AI girlfriends, which pretty much means that the Google algorithm has seen my search history and said there's no way this guy fucks. I mean, you looked up John Cena's theme song 12 times last night but you dick's not going anywhere and it's got a point. It's not wrong. Google knows what they're working with. I just wonder, if you download one of these AI girlfriends, if this girlfriend is your bot, if this bot is your girlfriend automatically, or if you still have to ask it out on a date Because they advertise these bots and say that they're just like a real woman.

Speaker 3:

And if it's just like a real woman and I still have to ask it out, that's not a good thing for me. If I had to ask a bot out on a date, I'd be texting back and forth with it for like two weeks just trying to build the courage to do that shit. By the time I finally ask it if it wants to be my girlfriend, it'll probably send me a text back saying Frankie, you're like a brother to me. I wouldn't even be mad, I would just be like Dan. If this app is good. It's just realistic as fuck.

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