“People love to say, ‘Go for it!’ But not many share what happens when you do...and it doesn’t work out," Treuer writes in Chapter Four of his memoir. "The decision to write this book wasn't driven by a wild success story, but rather by failure."
The idea for the book began not as a manuscript, but as a lifeline. Following the collapse of his YouTube series Of the Comics, which he had poured years and every spare dollar into, Treuer found himself stuck in a pit of burnout and doubt. So he began writing daily pages, resulting in more than ninety days of unfiltered emotional reflection.
“I had all these notes and no idea what to do with them,” he says. “But I thought, there is a story, right? I fell into this hole, and all I had were those pages. So I started figuring out how to weave them together — the real timeline, the emotional stuff and some laughs. That’s who I am. I’m a standup, so it had to be funny.”
The result is a nonlinear narrative that Treuer calls his "most personal" work yet. Structured as a meta-conversation with himself, the book opens by telling readers not to bother reading it, a tongue-in-cheek tactic aimed at filtering for people who are truly on board.
“I hate reading a book where people are like, ‘Oh, I'm the best. This is why you should listen to me,' so I didn't want to do that," Treuer says. “I wanted to be upfront about who I am. Give people all the information, and then they can decide if they want to take the ride.”
The story charts Treuer’s winding path: from quitting corporate sales at 36 to pursue comedy, to building Treuer Laughs, a comedy production company that pivoted successfully to virtual events during the pandemic, to pouring all his revenue into producing comedy specials for Of the Comics. The project garnered over half a million YouTube subscribers but failed to turn a profit. By 42, Treuer was broke, questioning his choices, and wondering if he’d made a massive mistake.
"This concept of making that much money and then, it's hard for me not to say losing it still, because it’s very heavy," Treuer says. "Even though I'm very happy with what I did, it's still a little embarrassing. I made over a million in revenue and then it was gone. At the very least, throughout all this, I treated other people right. I would have been in a bad place if I hadn’t. No one made their entire living off of [Treuer Laughs] gigs, but it just provided a good source of income."
Despite the financial fallout from Of the Comics, Treuer doesn’t view the experience as a total loss. It gave him material and motivation to reassess what he really wants out of his career.
“I haven’t had the best focus,” he admits. “I’ve wanted to be a stand-up comedian forever, but I’ve been too scared. I had this great journey and all these struggles to get to twenty years later saying, ‘Yeah, I still just want to be a standup comedian, but now I know how to do it.’”
That clarity has become the guiding principle for what comes next. Treuer is currently revisiting material from the book and shaping it into a one-man show, a new direction he hopes will help him build a deeper relationship with audiences.
“I hit a slump with my standup maybe a month ago, and then I go, ‘Wait a minute. I’ve been writing for a year. I have something.’ So now I’m back, actually revisiting this and being like, ‘Oh, how do I make this a whole entire act?’”
His long-term plan involves taking that act on the road. “Over the next five to ten years, I want to be in a Colorado mountain town. I want to spend a year in each town and then have a show where people come on a Friday and then the following Saturday and have it be two different shows,” he says. “I recognize that that is very difficult in standup. I can’t just have a straight act, so I’ve been working on building a one-man show.”
To build the kind of audience he dreams of, Treuer knows he’ll have to travel outside the state.
“I love Denver and our comedy scene, but at most, I'm getting maybe three shows in a night. That's not enough to build the caliber of show that would draw people in," he says. "I want to pack up my car and drive around the United States for maybe a year and spend a couple of weeks in most major cities, towns, and basically anywhere that'll take me. It's easy to make generalizations about parts of the country that you don't know anything about. I want to get a better sense of the nation.”
"I am truly addicted to making people laugh," says Pat Treuer. "I'm so happy that's my addiction.”
Courtesy of Jared Chandler
In it, Treuer doesn’t offer tidy answers or platitudes. Instead, he shares the reality of what it means to risk everything for a dream, only to realize the real reward may not be success, but self-understanding. At the center of it all is a lifelong love for comedy — not just as a craft, but as a way of surviving.
“My favorite thing is laughing,” Treuer says. “I've realized that in really hard times, I will just start laughing. I sometimes have to excuse myself because it's socially inappropriate for me to be laughing at times, but that's how I handle hard times in my life or when something really is going wrong. I just started cracking up hysterically, almost like the Joaquin Phoenix Joker. I am truly addicted to making people laugh. I'm so happy that's my addiction.”
Will I Hate Myself?: A Story About Going For It is available on Amazon in Kindle, hardback, and paperback formats, as well as an audiobook read by the author on Apple, Google Play, Spotify and other platforms.
