The Funny Therapist

A therapist, a client, and a comedian walk into a bar. This might sound like the start of a hilarious joke, but for therapist David Granirer, it’s just another Saturday night. Granirer isn’t any ordinary clinician. As the founder of Stand Up for Mental Health, as well as a skilled comedian, he’s spent the last two decades helping aspiring stand-up comics—many in therapy—not only hone their craft, but alchemize their personal stories about mental health into performances that are empowering, destigmatizing, and often hilarious!

Since creating the program, Granirer has partnered with a range of mental health organizations that connect him with these comics-to-be, singlehandedly training over 700 stand-up comedians and coordinating over 500 shows in more than 50 cities across the United States, Canada, and Australia. Beyond clubs or theaters, they’ve taken their acts to workplaces, boardrooms, college campuses, and even military sites.

When I managed to pin Granirer down for an interview, he was on his way to do a gig for 900 crisis line workers at crisis con, an annual conference in Arizona. Over the next 45 minutes (Granirer promised not to bill me) we talked about his comedy origins, what training comedians and helping clients have in common, and how comedy belongs in the therapy room.

***

Chris Lyford: Blending comedy with mental health is such an interesting concept. Where did this all begin?

David Granirer: Technically, it began when I was a teenager. I’d been a guitar player, and when I developed problems in my wrists and could no longer play, I plunged into a horrific, awful depression that, combined with bipolar disorder, culminated in me attempting suicide. After getting help, I thought, I’ve got to do something constructive with my life, so I started volunteering at the crisis line where my dad and brother had volunteered after my suicide attempt. It turned out I was really good at it, and eventually they hired me as a trainer, and I continued to work there for 10 years.

Before the suicide attempt, I was known as a bit of a class clown. But my depression had caused me to lose my confidence and humor. It was only once I started getting treatment that I tried getting it back. I was in my early 30s, getting trained as a counselor, and my training center was right around the corner from a comedy club called Punchline. So after I’d finish class, I’d walk over and watch amateur hour at the comedy club. After a couple visits, I decided to try it out for myself.

CL: What was that like?

Granirer: To be honest, the first time I did stand-up, I was horrible! I did five minutes, and I completely bombed. There was dead silence afterward. It felt like the longest couple minutes of my life. I thought, I’m never going back! But then I decided to take a comedy course, and the next time I got onstage, I was prepared. I knew what I was doing. The club was packed with my friends and supporters, and it was an amazing experience. That’s when I knew I had to stick with it.

Soon, I began talking about my mental health issues in my routine. But back then, there wasn’t a lot of precedent for talking about mental health in this way, and stand-up became a process of trial and error, where I had to ask myself, Do I feel safe doing this?

I found that not only did I feel safe joking about my mental health onstage, but people would come up to me after shows and say things like, “Oh, I can totally relate to that!” or “I’ve been suicidal” or, “I feel depressed.” I was getting a lot of great feedback, and having some really wonderful conversations.

CL: That’s amazing. So how did Stand Up for Mental Health come about?

Granirer: After a couple years of doing stand-up, I was asked to teach a stand-up comedy course at one of my local community colleges. The course had nothing to do with mental health, but students would often tell me how transformative it was for them for get up and stage and talk about themselves and their problems. It was powerful for them and for the audience. So I had a good feeling that a program like Stand Up for mental Health would be transformative for people.

In 2004, I started putting out some feelers and found a handful of people who were interested in joining. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure how our first show would go, but we got a standing ovation. And so many of the comics told me how incredible they felt about succeeding in something like that. They say that public speaking is the hardest thing in the world. But stand-up comedy is a whole other ballgame. You have to get laughs every 10 or 15 seconds, and they were doing it! They’d all been told things like, “You can’t do this,” or “Be really careful about that,” and they knocked it out of the park.

CL: How do you go about training the comics? What’s that like?

Granirer: The program is a six- or 12-week virtual class, but I also do individual coaching. At the end of the training, I fly in to do a live show with the comics, usually at a theater or club. Of course, participants have to self-select, because it would be incredibly damaging if this was part of some kind of mandated treatment program. You can’t just tell someone, ”Okay, now we’re doing stand-up comedy.” So I teach people who want to do comedy all the nuts and bolts of stand-up: the formulas, tips, and techniques. My guarantee is that I’ll do whatever it takes to help them succeed. If they need time to practice outside of class, no matter how much, I’ll spend that time with them.

I don’t call the students in my course, clients or patients. I call them comics. That’s huge for people who’ve been in the system for a long time. They no longer have to think of themselves a perpetual client. Now, all of a sudden, they’re a comic, and I treat them just like I would any other comic.

I once had a student who told me about a manic episode he’d had five years earlier, where he took off all his clothes at a Walmart and ran around naked. As a counselor, I’m trained to say, “Whoa, that sounds really problematic. Let’s talk about your feelings.” But as a comic, I’m like, “Whoa, that’s hilarious! I can’t wait to see that in your act!” And suddenly, there’s a cognitive shift. All of that horrible stuff you’ve been through just becomes great material. Now, you can talk about all that stuff you’ve been hiding—and it changes the way it sits in your soul.

CL: In a way, it sounds like something you might do in therapy. You’re reframing.

Granirer: There’s something very therapeutic about it. In therapy, you get to tell your stories to another person and be witnessed. In this program, you get to tell your stories to a room full of people, and afterward they’ll applaud you and come up to you and say, “Wow, that was great!” And you begin to think, Huh, I’m not such a bad persona after all! People can really relate to me!

It’s also worth noting that these comics are great role models, and this kind of comedy is really empowering for our audience. It gives people courage and empowers them to talk about their own mental health.

CL: I’m itching to hear some of their jokes! What are some favorites you’ve heard over the years?

Granirer: One of our recent comics had this great joke. He said, “I’ve been in and out of psych wards all my life, and my dad told me, ‘In order to do great things, you have to be committed!’”

I also have some of my own that I really like. One of my favorites is this: I’ve found this great new drug for overcoming depression. It’s called winning the lottery! But seriously, I think the government should get a group of depressed people together and give them each a million dollars and see what it does for their mood. In the interest of science, I’m offering to go first. But with my luck, I’ll wind up in the placebo group!

I have another: So many people are afraid to use the word suicide. I once had a friend say to me, “But David, if I use that word, It’ll give you ideas!” And I said “Listen, man. I’ve used the words mow the lawn with my son every day for the last eight years, and it never gave him any ideas.”

One more: Sometimes my wife and I like to role-play to spice things up. One night she said, “David, who do you want me to be?” I told her, “A client who doesn’t speak!” And she said, “Nice try. I’ll be a client who doesn’t pay. But really, who do you want me to be?” So I told her, “I want you to be my psychiatrist. Ohhh, cancel my session! Up my Zoloft! I’ve been a baaaad boy, tell me I’m noncompliant!”

Lyford: I love it! What’s the audience reaction like?

Granirer: When people come to see us, they know what they’re getting. Many of our audience members have mental health issues and addictions—and they’ll often bring their families and friends, or their therapists, or their psychiatrists.

And since our audience knows what we do and wants to hear what we have to say, the reaction is incredibly positive. We get a ton of laughs. I think the best compliment I ever heard from an audience member was, “Hey, that guy with schizophrenia was hilarious!” I love that. How often do you hear schizophrenia and hilarious in the same sentence?

These kinds of reactions are an incredible confidence-booster for the comics, too. Getting applause and laughs and people coming up afterward to say how great they were—it really lessens the internal stigma they’ve had about their conditions.

Lyford: I’d imagine doing this has been transformative for you too, professionally and personally.

Granirer: I love the process of making people into stars. I love watching someone come into the class and start off really scared, thinking they’re going to fail, and then a couple weeks later getting onstage and killing it. So in a sense, I guess it’s like being a therapist! You see your clients go on to all sorts of amazing things. It’s been incredibly rewarding to watch them grow.

More personally, doing this has given me a real sense of freedom. When I started out, I had a lot of internalized stigma, too. I used to feel really embarrassed about my suicide attempt, and now I talk about it in my act.

Lyford: I’m sure a lot of clinicians will be curious about bringing humor into their therapy sessions. Can it be done?

Granirer: Definitely! It needs to be done respectfully, of course. It’s less about telling jokes and more about helping the client use their sense of humor, helping them find the comedic moments in their own life. Sometimes a client will say something like, “There’s a part of me that’s really negative,” and I’ll ask, “If that part of you was a cartoon character, what would that cartoon character look like?” At that point it starts to become absurd, and I think absurdity is the key to a lot of great humor.

***

For more information about Granirer’s work and Stand Up for Mental Health, visit standupformentalhealth.com.