Adam DeVine Got into Comedy Because He Was Hit by a 32-Ton Cement Truck

If most of us got hit by a 32-ton cement truck, the only calling we’d discover would be a lucrative career in personal injury lawsuits. That’s why we couldn’t have created Workaholics.

When Adam DeVine was 11 years old living in suburban Omaha, Nebraska, he went on a simple trip to the corner store to buy candy (or to steal pages from porno mags, depending on who’s asking). While crossing the street on his bike, DeVine was hit by a passing cement truck and dragged almost 500 feet by his estimation, breaking nearly every bone in both legs and causing him to spend two weeks in a medically induced coma and years in recovery. It was during that recuperation period when DeVine took stock of his young life and decided to focus on his passion — a life in comedy. “It really gave me a driving force,” DeVine told Entertainment Weekly. “I’m glad that it happened to me.”

“A lot of comics say that something traumatic happened in their lives, that sort of pushes them in this direction,” Devine explained of his tragic origin story. “Some of their dads burned them with cigarettes and stuff. My dad just pushed me in a wheelchair, you know? It could be much worse. I just had a cement truck.”

It took two years of rehab and 26 total surgeries for a young DeVine to return to normalcy, but the Workaholics co-creator and star spent that time honing his comedy chops by prank calling local radio stations and working on his celebrity impressions. Once he was old enough, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue stand-up comedy where he met Blake Anderson, Anders Holm and Kyle Newacheck, with whom he would later collaborate on the acclaimed Comedy Central series about the world’s drunkest, highest and tightest-butthole telemarketers.

Today, DeVine stars on HBO’s megachurch comedy series The Righteous Gemstones and the Pitch Perfect show Bumper in Berlin. He also continues to use his success to support Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, a not-for-profit that raises funds for children’s hospitals across the country. All because a cement truck hit him when he was a kid and gave him nothing to do in his hospital bed besides work on his Robert De Niro impression.