Healing with Humor: Transformative Stories from The Laughing Cure by Dr. Brian King

Hey there, lifter uppers. I'm Deb Krier, the co-host of Cancer and Comedy, where our mission is to heal cancer-impacted people through hope and humor, something we like to call turning the grim into a grin. Today on Cancer and Comedy, we're going to be sharing stories from people who have used humor to help them cope with cancer and other adversities. We are sharing these stories from a great book written by Dr. Brian King. It's called The Laughing Cure: Emotional and Physical Healing — A Comedian Reveals Why Laughter Really Is the Best Medicine. So here is the host of Cancer and Comedy, Dr. Brad Miller.

Hey, hey, thank you, Deb. I'm really excited about today's podcast. I like to share stories. I like to hear stories, especially when they kind of put a smile on your face and help, like we say, turn the grim of cancer and bad things like that into the grin of having a hopeful outlook on life. That's exactly what we're looking to do here in the Cancer and Comedy community — helping people face cancer and adversities with hope and humor. We just hope people will get connected to our community simply by going to cancerandcomedy.com/follow. So, Deb, I always like to share a couple of dad jokes. Are you ready?

I'm ready.

Here are a couple of dad jokes for you. Then I've got a slight dad joke story before we jump into our content. Okay, here's a good dad joke for you. How are false teeth like stars?

I have no idea.

They come out at night. One more. What's worse than finding a worm in your apple?

Finding half a worm?

Nailed it. You nailed it. And that's part of the story I wanted to share with you. One of the things I love, sometimes I like to, when I go in public with my three adult children, I kind of sort of embarrass them once in a while by being the dad. But anyway, I was at our state fair here in Indiana, Indianapolis, a big deal with the State Fair, and I wore a shirt that said, “Dad jokes are how I roll, E, Y, E, i roll.” And so, I just wore that around, and my son and daughter, we just knew that was Dad doing his thing, but I just knew that the type of thing might get some attention from some people. And so people called me out on that, “Hey, here, tell us a joke.” So that happened two or three times where I was so we said, “Hey, I love your shirt.” And so I would give these people a little dad joke. I had these cards, and I used these cards with dad jokes on them, and I gave them the joke, and then I told them a little joke, and then I said, “Make sure you share that joke with somebody else.” Embarrassed my kids a little bit, but they had fun with it. You know, that's kind of how, indeed, how I roll sometimes. But here's the point: it gave people a little bit of a brief moment of humor in their life, and that's what I think we like to do here.

So the world is too serious.

The world is too serious.

Yes, well, after our conversation, and we're going to have a good time with it today. You definitely want to stick around, because we do have another Dr. Brad's Bad Joke of the Day. And then, of course, our very important Faith It or Break It segment. Well, as mentioned, we would love for you to be part of our Cancer and Comedy community, where together we crush cancer with a message of how to cope with hope and humor. Please follow Cancer and Comedy at cancerandcomedy.com/follow. Well, you know, as I said, we're going to be telling stories from people who personally experienced emotional and physical healing through humor and laughter. We're going to be talking about the book by Dr. Brian King. So Brad, you know, tell us why stories are really an important part of healing with hope and humor.

Well, I just told a story a second ago about going to the state fair and sharing a couple of jokes and just putting a smile on people's faces, and that's a good thing. I have been reading this book by a doctor who is also a psychologist and a stand-up comedian named Brian King. And his book is called The Laughing Cure, and it's all about, you know, basically, humorous therapy. He has these seminars and other things he does. He teaches this to thousands of people, and there are lots of great things in this book. We'll talk about it, and I hope to get Dr. King on our podcast at some point. But one of the things I got out of this was that several stories were told. He had his breakdown of how humor works psychologically and things like this, but then he would give examples of people who were impacted by humor and how it helped them a lot, and some testimonies. One thing I know from being around people is that people love stories, and they remember stories. When we hear someone else's story, it helps us kind of tell our own story. And you and I have been privileged here on the Cancer and Comedy podcast to tell our stories, your story, and my story quite a bit. We've heard lots of other great stories. And really, what a podcast is about is telling great stories. But I wanted to give you just a flavor of a couple of these stories that Brian King shares in his book. We'd like to give a lot of credit to that, and then there’s more for us to talk about it a little bit. So I'll just share one of them. There's a comedian whose story he shares in his book, and her name is Katrina Brown. She was born with a rare birth defect that meant she spent, as she says, the majority of her life as an outcast. She was born with part of her skull missing, which meant she had to wear a helmet as a child to protect her skull. There were some physical aspects of the way she looked regarding this. She said, “I make jokes about the metal plate in my head, and it morphs into whatever imperfection an audience member has in their own life. While being born without the majority of my skull might shock some people to hear, I tell them that finding the humor in it eases their minds about their own issues.” She talks about how at age five, a stranger once smacked the helmet off her head at a mall and yelled at her mom for putting an ugly thing on a child's head, not knowing that this was not some deficit or punishment or something. When this woman smacked the helmet off her head, it could have caused major brain damage. It could have killed her. Katrina says it was serious stuff, but because not many other kids wore helmets, she said she milked that for what it was worth, like candy at Easter from her grandparents, things like that. So she talks about how she now, as a comedian, likes to mess with airport metal detectors and security guards because the metal in her head sets off the detectors all the time. She talks about how even in the worst of times, being able to laugh is freeing. She says you can take this unfortunate event and decide that you have control over it, and you're going to make it what you want it to be and how it affects your life. She talks about how when she gets booked in Florida to do events, it's so hot down there that even the heat heats up the plate in her head, causing big headaches, which she has to sleep off for several hours. But she uses the phrase, “You take what is broken, you decorate it until it's beautiful.” She says after her shows, almost invariably, people with either some sort of disability or some oddity about their life, either themselves or someone in their family, thank her for taking something personal and finding the humor in it. That makes it all worth it. So that's why we share it with you. Reflect on that a little bit and see what you think, how she's taken this pretty difficult circumstance and turned it around and taken control of her life, because the opportunity would always be there to let life happen to you and be ridiculed or crushed by people saying bad things about you. Many comedians and people have taken whatever bad things happen in their life and turned it around to diffuse the anger, hurt, and fear by doing something humorous. I just love that aspect of not letting the circumstances control you but taking control of it. One aspect of that is to lighten the load with a little bit of humor. Well, hey, give me your reflections about this little story that we got.

You know, I think it definitely is about getting control back, and we do. You can do that through anger, or you can do it through humor. I think humor is so much better. Of course, it is kind of a dark humor, right? It’s not I Love Lucy type of stuff. I mean, when you're talking about a big plate in your head, that can go south pretty fast.

That's tough stuff. Yeah.

But what I love is, you know, we've seen comedians who, no matter what they're talking about, when they poke fun at someone else, sometimes it doesn't go well, right? But when they're poking fun at themselves, it's very different. I think that is what she's talking about, is the fact that, yeah, she's able to say that. Now, if somebody else said, “Hey, look at that, you look funny,” even if they were trying to be funny about it, that's hurtful. But when she says it herself, then, you know, she also diffuses the situation. I think that's one of the things that comedy does: it lightens that mood. It's as you mentioned, she knows that she looks different, so then you deal with it and go on, as opposed to that elephant in the room of not wanting to say, “Hmm, she looks a little different.”

And everybody's got something, you know. If somebody says I got a big nose, that's different than me saying I got a big nose. Hey, you know, or something like that. I've even heard, you probably heard, you know, there are people who are—I just spent a lot of time watching the Olympics the last couple of weeks—and you see these incredible, super athletes. But some of them had some human interest stories about how they had to overcome something in their life, and even people who could be, you know, whatever, super athletes or supermodels or whatever, but they were somehow ridiculed at some point in life, and they were able to turn that around, and then in their careers succeed. Obviously, Katrina was able to be a successful stand-up comedian. We'll put links to her website in our show notes. But it's a good story, and I commend it to you. So what story do you have here?

So another one of the stories in the book features Sandy Selby. She is a comedian and a writer, and she had to go through a stem cell transplant. As part of that process, she had to have a port put into her chest so they could do the procedure. When she woke up after the procedure, she couldn't breathe, right? But nobody really took her too seriously, so they just gave her Ativan to calm her down. Well, she said she still couldn't breathe, right? So they gave her more Ativan, then she didn't care, right?

She's like, Yeah, yeah.

And so, because she had calmed down, they sent her home. She said she went to bed and still could not breathe, but discovered she could kind of prop herself up. So what was she going to do? Well, she started watching comedy shows on TV. She had them on tape, and so she was watching them, and she laughed so hard that it helped draw the air back into her lungs. Finally, her husband came to see what the heck was going on, who was very alarmed, because her lips were blue, and there was clearly something serious going on. So he toddles her back to the hospital very quickly, and they discovered that they had punctured her lung as part of that process. But she firmly believes that if she had not been watching the comedy programs and laughing so much, she might not have survived. Wow.

Well, what do you make of that? What do you think?

You know, there are several things in there. The first is the fact that they didn't quite pay attention to her. That is a little bit concerning, right? But she also knew, “Okay, I have to take charge of this myself,” and so she said, “Okay, I'm gonna watch comedy and I'm gonna laugh.” She could have felt pitiful for herself. She could have been sad, mad, all of those things, and instead, she chose to laugh.

Yeah, I think it goes to the choice here. We kind of choose our mood. Bad things are going to happen to us. When we talk about cancer and other things we discuss here, that's a bad thing, no doubt about it, but we choose how we react to it and how we deal with it. Sometimes that can also lead to other ramifications. Most times are good. In this case, it was very good in that she literally, you know, literally, had a physical manifestation of the humor of the laughter to put air in her lungs, to get her on her way back to the hospital to deal with the broken ribs and the collapsed lung and everything. I just think it says, what I get out of this story here is, you choose how you're going to react to things, no matter how bad stuff gets.

Yep, most definitely. So tell us about another story.

Well, yeah, one of the other things that King shares in his book is by another, by another kid by the name of John Hager, who works out of Reno, Nevada, and he talks about his life growing up in his family and things like that, and how he talks about in his family growing up, it was not always the most friendly environment in the family. So everybody comes from different family environments. They talk about how his mother and father knew they were kind of, you know, they were kind of the butt of each other's jokes and they were kind of the, you know, there's a style of humor that's kind of put-down humor, that kind of thing, you know. And there's some people it works, some people it had to work, but that's kind of what it was. You know, there's different, those inside jokes, types of things, and people would, you know, cut you. It's the kind of thing where, you know, I can cut down my brother or my kids, in a way, but if someone else does.

Oh, then the wagons get circled or..

and also, there's kind of inside jokes. John talks about how outsiders did not always get their inside humor, the kind of inside-the-family humor that they had. He talked about how his mom was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and the doctor said she would only have, like, two to four months to live. Of course, that was the shock that we talk about here, right? But he said to his mom, “I’m really shocked by this. I had no idea that you even had a brain,” and this gave way to his mom saying, “Calling my kids little bastards,” but she was having her dig at them. Of course, they were. She was really kind of digging at her own self, but it sent them into laughing and easing the pain a little bit. But as the situation progressed, the mom was living in a healthcare facility or at a senior living center, and she went through the various therapeutic tests and things that showed her disease was progressing in such a way that she could be a danger to herself and perhaps to others. So she had to meet before a panel of therapists and doctors, basically about her living situation. We have talked about this kind of thing once in a while, and people’s circumstances about it, but she was adamant that she wanted to finish her days in her apartment. She really didn’t want to move on. So she told them this was part of the conversation, that she really wanted to stay here, but John said, and part of this give and take that they had, he said, “I told her, I would love for that to happen, to stay here, but we did not have enough money to get her full-time care that she would need to stay there in the apartment. In fact, I said, if you don't die in two months, we’re just gonna have to put you out in the streets. We can't afford to keep you here.” Oh, spend our budget. “Yeah. Well, just can't afford to keep you. We’ll have to be living in the streets.” And this panel of doctors and other administrators kind of looked with their mouths open, kind of shocked. And then the mom shot over and said, “You are a little bastard, aren't you?” And then the family started laughing back and forth and cackling and bursting out laughing. That's when the panel of people got it. It was just, you know, they were just having some fun with the situation, even though it really meant an end of life, right? It was a very serious situation. So I just reflect on that a little bit about, you know, yes, there's serious stuff, and sometimes we have inside jokes, and other people don't get it, but it's so important in the family. It doesn’t always happen this way, but in the family, if we can have a level of understanding that comes with just a bit of humor in our circumstances, I think that's a good thing. It eases things. It helps relax things. Breaks the tension. Obviously, there was some tension here, and you know, there are finances involved, and there are administrative decisions being made and that kind of thing. So that was my take on it. What do you think about this story?

You know, I agree. It's one of those things where, you know, I think we all have inside jokes with our families, right? Frequently, the people who overhear them are aghast. But it's just kind of how we get along. We have those with our friends and things also. Again, it's a way to break that tension. But it's always so funny when there are other people listening, like the doctors who are saying, "What? What do you mean she has to die within two months?" It's almost half the fun of it, right? Seeing their reactions. Sometimes, I think that's why we do this. We joke and carry on to just kind of throw them off, sure.

Sure. Well, I think that's another piece of this. It's important. It's about kind of diffusing the power of death. You know, death, there's a thing in the Bible I use once in a while: "Death, where is your sting? Death, where is your victory?" But those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength, right? So that just means that when we hear a diagnosis like, "You only have two to four months to live," it's depressing and defeating, but then you choose how to react to it. This family was trying to diffuse that gloom and doom, the power of death, and interject life. You can live your life to the very end. I got a feeling that's what John's mother did.

Most definitely, yep, yep. There's another story in the book featuring Gloria Ryan. She is now a cancer researcher. I thought that was very interesting. But when she was a teenager, she was diagnosed with a very severe form of cancer, one that most times can be either fatal or has a lot of long-term issues with it. She was in the hospital for her treatment, and this teenage girl delighted in finding ways to entertain herself. If there was a cute physical therapist, she would drop things just to make them pick them up. More importantly, she would have comedy playing in her room. She mentioned Monty Python, and people would come in to watch. She thought that was great fun. She also had people rub her little bald head for good luck. I loved that because she’s bald, people see she's bald, so okay, why not have them rub the head? She reflected later on the fact that she never really developed that superpower she had during chemotherapy, but I think it's, again, about trying to control the situation as best we can, which is frequently done by having laughter.

I love this story because she mentions something important to touch on for a minute, and that's the word "power." So many times, whether it's cancer or something else in life, we think our power, our strength, our physical strength, is taken away, or something identifies us, like our hair. You lose your hair. Oh, it's especially for women, of course. Yet, she was able to say, "Okay, this is now my superpower." Now that she's a cancer researcher, I have to assume this was part of her life journey, that this experience led her to do what she does now. You see that happen a lot, right? She kind of longs a little bit for the power that brings. I just say, claim your power. Claim it. Part of what we're talking about here, and what I love about you and what we do here about our lifter uppers, is to claim the power of your story. Claim the power of your story that you can live your life to the very end, no matter what. You can have great vitality in life, even if you have cancer or something else. You choose how you live, and I just believe, and I know you do too, that there's something therapeutic about living a life of hope and humor. That's our lesson. That's our message here, overall, to our listeners, our lifter uppers. Certainly, I would share that we want to hear from them too. We would love to hear from you on our voice message line. You can go to cancerandcomedy.com/voicemessage and tell us your story. Make us laugh. We would share that as well. I love to hear your stories, and I love it when we can tell stories that lift people up. That's why we're here, right?

Most definitely. Well, speaking of that, do you have another bad joke of the day?