Good morning, John. I'm here in Buffalo, New York getting ready to do some stand-up comedy which I scheduled previously and now I'm like, "This doesn't feel like a very fun time to be funny, but we'll do it anyway."

I feel like I ended up writing a 70-minute long stand-up show about cancer for a couple of reasons. First, while I was getting chemotherapy, I thought I was gonna wanna watch, like, long form things that would really capture and hold my attention, which would be great if they had captured and held my attention but I was so physically uncomfortable and my brain was so foggy. But I couldn't, like, enjoy things. Like, I had no attention span. Basically only two forms of content worked for me: Sitcoms, with like a really large number of laughs per minute where you're not supposed to, like, care about anything that happens. Like, Seinfeld was perfect. And stand-up was great. Like, you can start it and stop it. You're always captivated. It is always distracting. It--I watched so much stand-up comedy during chemo.

I end up going pretty deep, like, I'd bring up that I'm doing comedy and people like, "Who's your favorite comedian?" and I'd say a name and they'd be like, "I haven't heard of them. What about this person?" I'm like, "Yeah, I get it. You have Netflix." I don't wanna be like that, of course, it's just a thing that happened, you know? I became a little snobby about comedy.

So that's the first thing, like, I just watched a lot of stand-up. The second thing is that, like, I broke. I, like, got some new issues. I think that, for the most part, to be a successful comedian, you have to be two things. First, you have to be very very very funny. Uh, second though, equally important, you have to have some serious issues of some kind. Like I didn't realize how much work it would be to do stand-up, uh, because of course part of the work is to make it look like it's not work. And to do that work and to hone that craft, like, you have to have a reason and it can't be to make a bunch of money 'cause that's not what happens. So I think I'm, like, pretty funny and I'm funnier when I get, like, a chance to write it down first. But until I got cancer, I was only broken in like normal little ways. Having cancer though has given me some new issues and maybe some of those issues are healing now or they're just being buried again. I don't know, but I was broken enough and enamored enough of all of the stand-up that I was watching that I was like, "I can do that, and also I will and I'm gonna work really hard at it and get a coach and have people help me." So thanks to Sarah Aswell and Ben Acker for all of their help with my comedy. I should say that on the stage, but it's not very funny so I don't.

I needed something that was very complicated but very simple, like making people laugh about cancer. So this would usually be the video where I, like, talk about why I decided to do stand-up comedy, where I then say, "And here my tour dates and come see me," because like I think that it's pretty good. I would like people to see it. It's like 70 minutes of a cohesive stand-up storytelling time that people seem to be having a really good time experiencing. And I think I'd sell a fair number of tickets, uh, but I don't think I'm gonna do that. There's a couple of problems.

First, my doctor said that I should avoid stress if possible because it can increase the chances of relapse. That was a big deal to me, and while doing comedy, very fun, at least while I'm on stage, not relaxing. Second, as I have healed, it has become like less compelling to me. I, like, I don't know. A month ago, I was like, "Oh my God, it would be amazing to go on tour and do like a full month of nights," but now I'm like, "That sounds bad. I wanna be home with my family." The way I did this is I had a standing engagement, uh, where every Monday day in my town I did a show for a couple of months and it was really great and I sort of worked up from doing, like, 15 minutes to doing more than 70, which is honestly too much. And I've learned so much from doing it, uh, not just about doing stand-up but about myself and about my relationship with my disease and with disease in general. It is a really remarkable art form and one that I think is not considered to be or treated as art by people who think about art, but it obviously is and is maybe one of the most important forms of art. It's the only form of art that we evolved a special noise to appreciate. Like we do humor and people go like [Laughter]. That was very weird.

Humans are unique in that we laugh and we cry. Other animals do not do either of those things, which is very--I don't know. That's a thing. We have special, specific, physiological reactions for those two things, which yeah, I think that means something. But I am doing a two-stop tour while I'm in Upstate New York. I was all already out here to do a thing at Rochester Institute of Technology and of course almost no one will be able to actually come out and see one of them, but hopefully I will get it filmed and release it somehow 'cause I do like it and I do think that it's worth people's time. 

John, a quick second part to this video. During the Project for Awesome, we have a perk called the Nerdfighter Art Perk and it raises a lot of money every year. The way that it works is that people make stuff. They have to make at least 20 of whatever thing they are making and then, people buy the perk and then you get something made by another member of this community. You don't know what it's gonna be, but it's gonna be lovely. It is fun and it is good and if you would like to create art for the Nerdfighter Art Perk, there is an application in the description down below. You have to apply before October 27th and you have to be able to send us the art before January 15th. We're looking for stuff that is not terribly difficult to ship so not stuff that's fragile or large basically. You can find out more about all this stuff at the application below.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.