‘Titus’ Plays Family Dysfunction for Laughs

Fox--parent of “Married . . . With Children,” “The Simpsons” and “Malcolm in the Middle”--continues its comic assault on families with a new series it says is drawn from the life of comedian Christopher Titus. Poor boy.

He plays himself in “Titus.” Its hub character is a custom hot-rod builder whose family environment is a demolition derby. Therein lies the anomaly.

It’s one thing to laugh at a show that is funny, as this one often is, and dismiss it as fictional warped humor. Literature is filled with such dark farce. It’s quite another, though, to find yourself yukking it up over something that, if true, would have approached criminal behavior on the part of a parent.

That parent here is Titus’ nasty father, Ken (Stacy Keach), the five-times-married, beer-guzzling, mean-spirited antichrist of dads who we see give an infant Titus a brew, read and ridicule his oldest son’s private diary and throw his youngest son, Dave, into the drink to force him to learn how to swim. When Dave sinks, he tosses Titus in after him.

In addition, we learn that Titus’ mother is an institutionalized manic-depressive, and that when Titus was young, both his parents involved him in their philandering.

Some of this spills out in monologues that Titus delivers to the camera, and is quite a raw howl.

Unless it really happened.

“Titus” makes “Married . . . With Children”--the most anti-family of Fox’s earlier shows--look like “Touched by an Angel.” And most of it is about Titus as an adult. In tonight’s opener, his girlfriend, Erin (Cynthia Watros), is victimized by sexual harassment, which gives him an opportunity to crack: “Every suit about sexual harassment, my dad gets a royalty check.”

Things turn grim next week, meanwhile, when Dave (Zach Ward) calls Titus home from work and announces that their dad must be dead because he’s been in bed with the door shut for four days.

Titus: “And?”

Dave: “Without getting a beer.”

As a pair, Titus and Dave are Beavis and Butt-head revisited. Consequently, it’s as hard to imagine someone as bright as Erin falling for Titus as it is him recalling his dysfunctional father and upbringing with a sense of humor.

If it all really happened.

* “Titus” can be seen Mondays at 8:30 p.m. on Fox. The network has rated it TV-PG-DLS (may be unsuitable for young children with special advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language and sex).