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all cracked up
By Cheryl Rossi-staff writer
"This reminds me of a psychotic episode... You're all staring at me and I feel really special," says Roxanne Teale, a friendly looking woman with shoulder-length salt and pepper hair.
The audience of 40 mental health patients and workers at Riverview Hospital laughs in appreciation. All eyes are on the plaid-shirted Teale holding a cordless mike at the front of the bright auditorium.
"I have to be honest. I have attempted suicide in the past," Teale says. "Obviously, I wasn't successful. But I wasn't a complete failure because I learned that I can tie a knot to save my life."
Teale, 42, is one of 11 comedians with Stand Up For Mental Health, a course that helps people with mental illness turn their problems into comedy. Led by David Granirer, a counsellor, public speaker and standup comic, Stand Up for Mental Health aims to reduce the stigma of mental illness. It gives students a platform to talk about their struggles in a way others want to listen. It also gets them thinking about their problems in a new way, boosts their self-confidence and sets them up as role models for others with mental illness.
"I love it," Teale says at the end of a three-hour class. She attends every week. "It's a creative outlet and we work as a real team and we feed off of each other. I like performing. You sort of get a little bit addicted to it, to have people actually laugh and clap at you. It does great things for your self-esteem. I find myself more confident, self-assured, and I think I find myself a tad funnier."
Teale signed up for the course after hearing about it from a former student of the program.
"It's also very rewarding in the fact that we're educating people," she says. "We're educating people and entertaining them at the same time. We're kind of like spokespeople for the mentally ill. Hopefully it will catch on and David can clone himself to teach a lot of people because it really does help."
Teale is ready to put the chaos of the last 20 years behind her. She suffered postpartum depression with her first son, postpartum psychosis with her second, a severe depression after arriving at her mother's home and finding her dead of possible heart failure, a prolonged manic episode after she and her second husband split for good and massive weight gain, a side effect of her medication.
Only in the past year has she fully embraced her mental illness.
"I almost died last year. I had a severe drug interaction and I was severely lucky, if you want to use that word, to have survived it without any huge amount of damage. It's like I was given a second chance in a way, so [doing standup] feels like it's part of it."
With Stand Up for Mental Health, her history is now material for her comedy.
"After my first son was born, I suffered from postpartum depression," she says during her set. "I went straight from an epidural to shock therapy."
Inside the basement of a Burnaby church, the students of Stand Up take turns at a microphone, practising their lines and jokes during their weekly class. Granirer hovers nearby, providing practical suggestions. Members of the class give honest critiques of new material and brainstorm alternative punchlines when original ideas fall flat. They have only been in the class three months, yet as they tell and critique jokes, they make it look easy.
Granirer, the originator of the 12-month program, has taught standup comedy at Langara College for eight years. He says his 400 former students can be found on the comedy circuit across North America. When he realized his Langara course helped students overcome longstanding depression and phobias while improving their self-esteem, he saw the potential for teaching people with mental illness.
"Telling a roomful of people who you are and having them applaud you is so huge," he says. "At AA, you go in and you tell your story and people listen in respectful silence, which is really good. But in Stand Up for Mental Health, you tell your story and people laugh and applaud and come up to you afterwards, 'Oh, that was great, hilarious,' and that's sort of a super-charged version of a support group."
Granirer teaches students how to write, structure, edit and perform three- to 10-minute comedy acts. He helps them find their inner comedy character, interact with the audience and how to recover when the jokes bomb. They must also learn to market their shows. Potential students must have stable housing, a support system of peers and professionals and be stable on any medication they take.
Granirer asks his students not to include crude jokes and swearing in their acts because they perform mostly for mental health organizations. "They're booking us because they want to hear about mental health and there are certain things that are just not appropriate in that forum," he says. "We have people joke about suicide and stalking, that's fair game, but not blow jobs or masturbation, that's just not acceptable. Plus, that's just been done. A lot of the time it's just cheap laughs."
Granirer held the first course in 2004. Its graduates recently performed at a show sponsored by the Canadian Mental Health Association in Nanaimo.
The 11 students in this year's class, seven women and four men, come from across the Lower Mainland, having learned about the course through friends and acquaintances. A few commute from as far away as Chilliwack and Gibsons to attend the course. Some work full-time, others work part-time, some volunteer and most collect disability benefits.
The course started Jan. 11 and students performed their first show March 30.
"He whipped us into shape really fast," Teale says.
They held a gala fundraiser performance for an audience of 260 in a professional theatre at Coquitlam's Evergreen Cultural Centre on April 6. The event, hosted by Vicki Gabereau, raised $10,000 for the program.
"I think people were blown away at how good they were," Granirer says. "It really seemed to touch them also, the fact that these comics were taking a subject like mental illness and making it seem funny, made it seem like you can overcome it. The comments were that it was wonderful to see the courage, the bravery, the talent and to see people with mental illness portrayed in such a strong, positive way."
The audience gave the comics a standing ovation. "In terms of comedy, it's pretty much downhill from there," Granirer jokes.
By the end of the year, the Stand Up for Mental Health troupe will have performed 30 to 40 shows. Some of the students have already been pushing themselves to perform at comedy nights around the Lower Mainland.
Prior to the fundraiser, the costs of running the course were covered by fees paid by some of the students and by Granirer. He'd asked students to pay what they could, anywhere from nothing to $500.
"Basically, I wasn't going to turn anyone away," he says.
"It's truly a labour of love. You know, I say you've got to be nuts to take this course... you've got to be nuts to give it too. Seriously, I realized if I wait for someone to come
along and fund this, I'm still going to be waiting in five years. It just needs to happen."
Granirer also started training a Stand Up for Mental Health group in Toronto in August 2004. He trained them mostly via phone and email, and rehearsed with them when his speaking business brought him to Toronto. They performed shows with him in September, November and earlier this month. One of the members, a volunteer educator for the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario, started teaching Stand Up in Toronto last week.
Teaching Stand Up for Mental Health is much more challenging than teaching his eight-week Langara course, says Granirer.
"Here the stakes are a lot higher because people who have chronic mental illness have had a lot of knocks, they've failed a lot, so they have to succeed. That's a great challenge for me. I'm just filled with pride and joy at what they've been able to accomplish. I love being part of that process."
Spiky-haired and potty-mouthed Robbie Engelquist, 21, enjoys being in control of an audience. Waiting outside the Riverview auditorium prior to the performance watching patients file in, he is reminded of a time when his life felt anything but in control.
"I recognize that lady from when I was in here," he says. "Holy shit, I remember her, too!"
Two years ago, Engelquist spent five months in Riverview "going nuts." His mind was "totally f--ed up" from a combination of schizophrenia, previously misdiagnosed as attention-deficit disorder, and his use of cocaine, alcohol and marijuana. Engelquist says his problems with mental illness started when he was five or six years old.
"So I've been on medications for a while," he says during his set in the show. "Let me tell you, there's a lot of brutal side effects-twitching, fatigue, a large appetite and drooling, for example. The thing is, the freakin' medication makes me look way more insane than I really am!"
His parents say participating in Stand Up for Mental Health has been excellent for him.
"He has a purpose, he loves getting up and going to class, he gets excited about something now. He's blossoming, he's thriving," says his mom, Darlene. "I think he will [carry on] as long as he's getting good feedback, as long as he's getting that positive reinforcement that he is doing a good job, because for so long, he's never been able to complete anything."
Although Robbie did well in elementary school, she says high school "was just a wipe out."
Engelquist says his friends have seen him perform and they thought he was "awesome." He loves challenging himself, which perfectly meshes with Granirer's aspirations for the group.
Granirer hopes to convince a "really big name comedian" to headline their graduation show. "It's not just the celebrity factor, it's that someone like that would actually take an interest in them," he says.
"It's the story of a group of underdogs who really aren't supposed to be able to achieve much who become these super achievers. It's kind of like The Full Monty except we don't take our clothes off."
Granirer also hopes to change public attitudes toward the mentally ill.
"The great thing about this comedy course is we get to fight public stigma because we get to present people with mental illness as strong, capable, funny, personable-something that's a counter to all of the stereotypes that you see about people with mental illness as crazy, weird, pathetic people," he says.
"I've had people come up to me after a show, saying, 'You know, you could have had an expert come in and tell us all this stuff but I would have forgotten it in two hours, but I will never forget this show. I will never forget these people. I never knew that, for example, somebody with schizophrenia could have it together enough to do a standup comedy act. As a normal person I couldn't do that.' It's a really powerful way of reaching people and reaching them in such a way that they actually want to hear the message."
If anyone in the Stand Up group is going to challenge public perceptions, it's Paul Decarie.
Decarie, 47, with his quiet demeanor and flat expression, doesn't look like someone poised to crack a joke, let alone being the comic none of the others dare to follow. But he is the group's acknowledged comic master.
"None of his stuff has ever been rewritten," says classmate Eufemia Fantetti. "He's a total natural. He's the last one in the lineup always. No one wants to go after him."
Decarie has performed character roles in amateur theatre off and on over the past 30 years and did standup once before in a variety show called I Love the DTES. He's also thinking about entering the annual Best Comic in Vancouver with a Day Job contest at the Laughing Bean Coffee Co. at 2695 East Hastings St., where Granirer and his students often try new material on Friday nights. Eventually, Decarie would like to perform at an amateur night at Yuk Yuks Comedy Club or Lafflines in New Westminster.
His jokes revolve around his experience:
"So I live in the Downtown Eastside. There's a lot of homeless people around there. It's kind of depressing. I've been homeless myself briefly. I stayed at the Crosswalk at Hastings Street that's run by the Salvation Army. I had to sleep on a mat on the floor. But the next night I was back in a warm bed again. How did I manage that? Oh yeah, I checked into the psych ward."
He one-liners crackle: "So I went to a support group for shy people... No one showed up. I wanted to go to Paranoid's Anonymous, but no one would tell me where the meetings were."
Decarie intends to continue doing standup after the course ends. "I love getting the laughs, knowing you succeeded."
Granirer made his first foray into standup at an amateur night at Punchlines, which used to be in Gastown, in 1993.
"I got up there my first time, bombed. Five minutes of dead silence, nothing, zero," he says. "I thought I was never going to go back."
But when a two-month course called Comedy Gym-similar to the Langara course he teaches now-came to town from Austin, Texas, he enrolled.
"The next time I went up, I was prepared, I was ready, and I just knew I had to do standup comedy."
Since teaching people with mental illness, Granirer has opened up about his struggles with depression, which motivated him to start volunteering at the Vancouver Crisis Centre in 1986. Four years later, he was a counsellor and trainer there. In 1993, when he started dabbling with standup, he also started working on fostering humour in the workplace. He has been delivering presentations comprising a half-hour standup act and a half hour of education regarding the scientifically proven benefits of using humour to decrease stress, increase health and ease the problems that come with change.
It was these benefits the poised and stylish Fantetti, 36, says she was hoping for when she signed up for the course.
"It's changed my perspective on some of the things that have happened in my life because it's making jokes about things that I would normally cry about," she says. "It's been very therapeutic and very healing."
Fantetti has always talked openly about mental illness. She grew up as an only child of a mother who's been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and a father who she says deals with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. She says they still deny the nature of their problems.
"I come from an old-fashioned southern Italian family that doesn't believe in mental illness," Fantetti tells the audience at Riverview. "They prefer to think of it as demonic possession."
Fantetti wants to help people who have undiagnosed mental illness recognize their symptoms. "I'd prefer for people to think it's a health issue than for people to walk around thinking there's something wrong with them, because that's attacking your very essence," she says.
Fantetti, who still has her bad days, doesn't want others to feel the way she did for so many years.
Her routine touches on her struggles with depression, her family, her relationships with men and the various forms of therapy she's tried.
"I found out the medication they gave me for my depression was later used to treat people with bulimia, unhappy house pets and premature ejaculators," she says at the Riverview show. "Can you picture a scientist in a lab coat saying 'Eureka! I found a cure for skinny Chihuahuas that come too soon!'"
Fantetti's jokes flow swiftly and smoothly, likely a result of her previous performing experience. In 2004, she wrote and performed in a one-woman show about her experience of growing up in a family with mental illness, My Own Private Etobicoke, at the Vancouver Fringe Festival. She has performed it at the request of mental health organizations about 10 times since then. She also acted in Tony n' Tina's Wedding, playing Tina for a year. "It's my mother's dream come true," she says. "I was getting married for a year."
Her set, and the performances of the other Stand Up performers, finds a welcoming audience.
"I thought it was excellent," says Marjorie Goodman, a Riverview patient and star heckler who, perhaps unintentionally, added extra comedy to the show by commenting during the performances.
"Would you like to see them again next year?" a Riverview worker asks her.
"I'd like to get out of here," she responds, without missing a beat.
Carolyn O'Gormley, another patient, admires the performers.
"They were able to have the courage to expose their weaknesses," she says. "I didn't think it was going to be really funny. I thought people and their problems, it would end up being more tragic comedy. But I thought most of them had conquered all their tragedies because they were there, almost making a point with themselves as to why they were there."
Lilia Petrie, an art therapist at Riverview, was thrilled to see patients responding to the material. "I think when the other patients, clients, hear [aspects of mental illness] verbalized and laughed at, they can really relate to it and they laugh with it. I think they feel validated by that," she says. "I think for us as practitioners, it's really wonderful to see the clients be able to laugh at themselves, at what is the biggest for challenge for them. It seems like they have not lost hope and that is wonderful to see."
Teale, with her two sons grown and her mental illness faced directly, is starting to appreciate herself as a complete person. She is curious and excited about what life will bring next. She recently finished a drawing course and keeps busy with Stand Up for Mental Health and volunteering. The Stand Up program ends in December. But Teale would like to keep going with writing and comedy.
"I think a lot of us want to keep performing once in a while or get some other kind of project happening because a lot of us like to write. There's so much creative energy that it would be a shame just to end it."
She repeats that theme during her set in front of the Riverview patients.
"This comedy thing is a lot of fun," she says. "I'm going to use it instead of food as a replacement for sex. So I sure hope I get to perform a lot."
posted on 05/18/2005
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