Spoonful of Laughter: Dissing diabetes stigma with standup and sketch comedy

How do you solve a prob­lem that is most­ly invis­i­ble, often dead­ly, and per­pet­u­at­ed unknow­ing­ly by mil­lions of peo­ple every day? How do you make peo­ple pay atten­tion to a prob­lem that they think has noth­ing to do with them? You joke about it. Seri­ous­ly.

How do you solve a prob­lem that is most­ly invis­i­ble, often dead­ly, and per­pet­u­at­ed unknow­ing­ly by mil­lions of peo­ple every day? How do you make peo­ple pay atten­tion to a prob­lem that they think has noth­ing to do with them?

You joke about it.

Seri­ous­ly.

Jokes trav­el faster than facts. They zip around the zeit­geist like enthu­si­as­tic bun­ny rab­bits. And some­times, just some­times, folks, they’re pack­ing more than just a punch­line. As one of my favorite aca­d­e­mic stud­ies of the fun­ny reminds us, “Com­e­dy has the pow­er to make hard truths eas­ier to hear, to chal­lenge a tox­ic sta­tus quo, and to help nor­mal­ize groups and behav­iors pre­vi­ous­ly viewed as ‘oth­er.’”

dia­Tribe is a US char­i­ty ded­i­cat­ed to the sim­ple mis­sion of mak­ing the lives of peo­ple with dia­betes bet­ter. The chal­lenge they brought to Danc­ing Fox (the cre­ative agen­cy that Tom­my Craw­ford and I run) was rais­ing aware­ness of how dia­betes and peo­ple with dia­betes are suf­fer­ing from stig­ma and stig­ma­tiz­ing behav­ior to the point that it’s lit­er­al­ly killing peo­ple.

As dia­Tribe notes on their dStig­ma­tize web­site:

Research shows that stig­ma con­tributes to worse dia­betes health out­comes. Peo­ple with dia­betes have said they feel embar­rass­ment, anx­i­ety, and low self-esteem as a result of expe­ri­enc­ing stig­ma. In addi­tion, the expe­ri­ence of being blamed or shamed for their dia­betes can lead to feel­ings of iso­la­tion and a desire to hide their con­di­tion from oth­ers.

Stig­ma can also result in worse self-care and dia­betes man­age­ment. Peo­ple with dia­betes have report­ed inject­ing insulin only in restrooms or at home, mak­ing unhealthy food choic­es to avoid declin­ing what is offered, and manip­u­lat­ing glu­cose logs to avoid crit­i­cism from sig­nif­i­cant oth­ers or health care providers.

In the most delight­ful way…

The won­der­ful folks at dia­Tribe have teamed up with us on a bunch of projects, but none as fun as some­thing called A Spoon­ful of Laugh­ter (the name came out of Tommy’s some­what Mary-Pop­pins-Bag-like brain). The idea was sim­ple. Gath­er a  bunch of standup come­di­ans,  some who had dia­betes and some who did not,  mix in a few artists, some who had dia­betes and some who did not, and throw in a few activists, some who had dia­betes  and some who did not, and spend three days brain­storm­ing the comic oppor­tu­ni­ties in sit­u­a­tions where peo­ple with dia­betes  are made to feel ashamed, weird, oth­er, and gen­er­al­ly not nor­mal. Turn the best of those oppor­tu­ni­ties into sketch­es and scripts and film them. Cre­ate an aware­ness cam­paign on the back of that con­tent that snow­balls into some­thing that shifts the sta­tus quo.

We didn’t want to lec­ture peo­ple into chang­ing their stig­ma­tiz­ing behav­ior. We want­ed to “oth­er” it by out­ing its absur­di­ty in a play­ful way that peo­ple would want to share not because it was wor­thy, but because it was fun­ny.

Workshops? Never! We call them Playshops!

Run­ning any cre­ative playshop / hack-a-thon is a high-wire act. But when your col­lab­o­ra­tor has arranged a truck full of cam­era and light­ing equip­ment, an eight per­son crew, and an award-win­ning direc­tor ready to film what­ev­er scripts you come up with imme­di­ate­ly after your three days of brain­storm­ing, well, that’s a wire of a dif­fer­ent alti­tude. But wow did we have a cre­ative riot.

We had a room­ful of amaz­ing­ly fun and imag­i­na­tive peo­ple from musi­cians and improv actors to stand up artists and spe­cial­ists in com­e­dy as a dri­ver of social change. Know­ing we had three days to go from insight to idea to script felt like being shot out of a goof­ball can­non and hav­ing no idea where we were going to land. But that’s the core thrill of any form of improv: Let go, treat every­thing as a gift, and just sky­di­ve through the uncer­tain­ty.

Diabetes is a superpower

For the artists and activists and come­di­ans in the room who didn’t have dia­betes, the playshop uncov­ered some eye-open­ing stuff. To any­one like me who is #BadAt­Math, peo­ple with dia­betes seem like freak­ing super­com­put­ers. They have to make an esti­mat­ed 180 extra deci­sions a day about what they eat, when to exer­cise, when to adjust their blood sug­ar up or down, whether they can do this or that. Insulin lev­els are impact­ed by every­thing from the weath­er to mood to hor­mones to exer­cise to how much sleep you get. Peo­ple with dia­betes have to look at a menu and not just decide what they want, but cal­cu­late the carbs and calo­ries and sug­ar con­tent, com­pare it again­st their tar­gets, and have an answer for Rachel the clue­less wait­ress in sec­onds. Many can’t leave the house with­out some array of mon­i­tor­ing gear, insulin, hypo­der­mics, their emer­gen­cy can­dy, emer­gen­cy juice, emer­gen­cy snacks. And when they go low and have to adjust with a sug­ary treat, it’s often the peo­ple clos­est to them, who know they have dia­betes, who ask the dread­ed “Should you be eat­ing that?” ques­tion. We heard hilar­i­ous sto­ries of what it’s like to date as a dia­bet­ic, hor­ror sto­ries of hav­ing to face pre­sump­tions of drug addi­tion for inject­ing insulin in pub­lic, heart-wrench­ing sto­ries of being blamed for their con­di­tion and shamed by their own health care prac­ti­tion­ers.

#SpoonfulofLaughter Video Shoot, January 2024, San Francisco#SpoonfulofLaughter Video Shoot, January 2024, San Francisco

#SpoonfulofLaughter Video Shoot, January 2024, San Francisco

#SpoonfulofLaughter Video Shoot, January 2024, San Francisco
#Spoon­fulofLaugh­ter Video Shoot, Jan­u­ary 2024, San Fran­cis­co

The Sugars” is a sap that flows in my family tree

I had some skin in this game. Dia­betes runs in my fam­i­ly. My mom had Latent Autoim­mune Dia­betes, a form of type 1 which afflicts adults when their pan­creas grad­u­al­ly stops pro­duc­ing insulin. She’d known she was at risk since she was a child. She once told me a sto­ry about her favorite aunt Mar­i­on, who lost her twin sis­ter to the dis­ease at 21, a year before insulin was dis­cov­ered. Mar­i­on once showed my mom how much birth­day cake the doc­tor would allow her to eat — the tini­est of slices in my mom’s tiny hand.

Mar­i­on was a mav­er­ick for a wom­an born at the tail end of the 1800s: she nev­er mar­ried, and worked all her life as a book­keep­er. When she retired, she became a research assis­tant to Elliott Joslin, a pio­neer of dia­betes research who found­ed the Josling Dia­betes Cen­ter. It’s still oper­at­ing today, more than a hun­dred years lat­er, in Boston. The core of his research was ledgers of diet and exer­cise cor­re­lat­ed to symp­toms — book­keep­er ter­ri­to­ry, which Mar­i­on was a wiz at. She couldn’t save her twin sis­ter, but she ded­i­cat­ed her final years to find­ing a cure for the dis­ease which killed her.

Mar­i­on Effie Deck­er, 1899–1976

My mom began tak­ing insulin in her 30s, and hypo­der­mics were a con­stant pres­ence in our house­hold. Test­ing her­self back then required a fin­ger prick to draw blood, and her emer­gen­cy can­dy stash was (unjust­ly, we thought) off lim­its to me and my sib­lings. Her blood sug­ar lev­els sent her on roller coast­er mood swings. We learned to spot the signs, but also quick­ly learned it could be risky to ask her if she need­ed to take a test or have some can­dy. Nobody wants to be defined by a dis­ease, and a com­mon cause of stig­ma is loved ones try­ing to help man­age their con­di­tion, or blam­ing the dis­ease for cer­tain behav­iors or dis­agree­ments.

Still, there’s a del­i­cate dance.

There were times she went so low or so high she wasn’t real­ly able to prop­er­ly process what need­ed to be done, and she need­ed help. After my father passed, that hap­pened when she fell into a dia­bet­ic coma alone at home on Sep­tem­ber 1, 1998, right after I’d called to tell her my first son had been born. I had heard a slight slur in her words, a tell­tale sign of a sug­ar low, and to my dying day I will regret not say­ing some­thing, and not call­ing some­one near­by to look in on her. As it turned out, my moth­er-in-law stopped by to cel­e­brate the baby news, and found her on the kitchen floor. She woke up from her coma in hos­pi­tal, her life saved, but she’d nev­er see again.

Not a very fun­ny sto­ry, right? It’s always a strug­gle, when deal­ing with a seri­ous top­ic like dia­betes, to find the places where laugh­ter can be a spot­light, a mir­ror, and an invi­ta­tion. There are risks in mak­ing light of any­thing, but espe­cial­ly a life-threat­en­ing dis­ease which impacts mil­lions of peo­ple every day with the risk of blind­ness or los­ing a limb.

Insights from Caty Borum Chat­too & Lau­ren Feld­man in A Come­di­an and an Activist Walk into a Bar, illus­trat­ed cap­ture by Car­rie Heart­wood of Heart­wood visu­als

Nothing as serious as a joke

But if there was one thing I learned in my years of run­ning Greenpeace’s online activism pro­gram­me, it was that humor is dig­i­tal rock­et fuel, and when you can load the nosecone with an insight or a mes­sage or a new way of look­ing at the world, it can det­o­nate in a pow­er­ful glit­ter bomb that can shift, how­ev­er slight­ly, how­ev­er slow­ly, the def­i­n­i­tion of what’s right, what’s nor­mal, and what’s pos­si­ble.

Think of what Will and Grace did in the US for the per­cep­tion of gay lifestyles, or how Steven Col­bert, Saman­tha Bee, Jim­my Kim­mel, and Han­nah Gads­by rein­force polit­i­cal and social val­ues with laughs. Check out A Come­di­an and An Activist Walk into a Bar, a bril­liant overview of the inter­face between com­e­dy and social change. It described com­e­dy as “a rabid­ly shared and avid­ly con­sumed form of cul­tur­al nar­ra­tive” which made our foxy sto­ry­telling whiskers twitch with plea­sure. Because at Danc­ing Fox we know that the secret of social change is to shift the nar­ra­tives that make one thing nor­mal and anoth­er weird. Wom­en being unable to vote used to be nor­mal, because the dom­i­nant nar­ra­tive was that wom­en were infe­ri­or to men. But once you shift that nar­ra­tive, it’s no longer nor­mal for wom­en to be unable to vote, or own prop­er­ty, or have a bank account: it’s just plain weird.

This project was about refram­ing peo­ple with dia­betes. Rather than tar­gets of pity or shame, we could present them as peo­ple who com­mit dai­ly death-defy­ing acts deserv­ing of admi­ra­tion, awe, and respect. We could pull back the cur­tains on what piss­es them off about what “Normies” do by show­ing it through their eyes.  We could dis­arm with gig­gles and per­suade with punch­li­nes. We could turn come­di­ans into secret agents of social change. Not just as joke-tellers, but as truth-tellers.

After three days of brain­storm­ing, we had a ton of ideas which we win­nowed down to five skits. Some we script­ed tight­ly, oth­ers were just frames we let our come­di­ans play in. We filmed it all in a quirky San Fran­cis­co hotel and a near­by bar, and edit­ed the results into a set of short videos.

November is diabetes awareness month — join the movement

We con­sid­er the­se pilots, proof-of-con­cept shorts that we hope will be fol­lowed by more com­mu­ni­ty con­tent, more playshop mad­ness, and some pointy con­ver­sa­tions around how soci­ety treats peo­ple with dia­betes, and how we can all help make life just a lit­tle eas­ier for the super­heroes who deal with this dis­ease every day.

Videos will roll out over the next five weeks fea­tur­ing come­di­ans Sam Mor­risonKelsey Bas­comKesha CarterJustin East­zer, and Ash­ley Monique. The films were direct­ed and pro­duced by Ben Jehoshua and Image Line Pro­duc­tions. And the cre­ative cook­ing was done by a rag tag col­lec­tive of artists, come­di­ans, experts and activists that includ­ed San­ti­ago Paulos, Jim Car­roll, Kat Sav­age, Eileen Opatut, Marnee Ben­son, Selin Varol, Sara Leal, Beth Stra­chan, Irene Canu­ti, Car­rie Van Horn, Matthew Garza, and Clare Ken­ny.

You can do your part by laugh­ing, lik­ing, shar­ing, com­ment­ing, and join­ing the mail­ing list for ear­ly access to videos as they’re released and more ways you can help stick it to stig­ma.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.