Comedian to spread mental health message

Stand Up For Mental Health will be coming to St. Paul this Sunday, January 26th, bringing a one-hour stand-up performance mixing “comedy and information” to the St. Paul Civic Center at 7:00 p.m. The event is coming to St. Paul courtesy of the area Community Advocates Reaching Everyone (CARE) Team, an organization founded around twenty years ago focused on improving and advocating for mental health in Howard County and throughout the surrounding area.

Free will donations for the area CARE Team will be accepted at the event.

Founded in 2004 by Counselor, Mental Health Advocate, and Comedian David Granirer, Stand Up For Mental Health seeks to advocate for and give a voice to those dealing with mental health issues.

“Our mission is to spread mental health awareness through comedy,” said Granirer in an interview last week. “[On Sunday,] I’m going to be in St. Paul doing stand up and talking about mental health through comedy.”

Not only does Granirer, who has bipolar, bring sets designed to be both humorous and informative to cities across the world (like the set he will be bringing to St. Paul on Sunday), he also teaches a course through Stand Up For Mental Health designed to help people with mental health issues and addictions turn their experiences into standup comedy.

“I do shows on my own, and I also train people with mental health issues who have never done comedy how to be comedians, and then I do shows with them,” said Granirer. “I train the comics virtually, and then I fly in and do a show.

“I’ve ran [the program] in over fifty cities in the United States, Australia, and Canada in partnership with local mental health organizations in those cities.”

Granirer’s path to discovering standup as a tool for people struggling with mental health issues, he said, began in his childhood in Vancouver, Canada.

“Going through school, I used to be a class clown,” he said. “But then my bipolar began—and my bipolar mainly manifests as depression.”

Granirer “went around for almost twenty years with undiagnosed, untreated depression.” But once the condition was diagnosed and he “started to feel better” in his early thirties, he thought back to the joy it had brought him to make his schoolaged peers laugh and decided to test his skills at an open mic.

“I thought, ‘You know something? I think I’d like to do stand-up comedy,’” he said. “So, I took myself down to a club and I signed myself up for an amateur night.

“And I totally bombed. It was horrible. It was the longest five minutes of my life.”

Granirer said the experience had initially made him reticent to ever do stand-up again, but something drew him towards the stage.

“Then, I took a standup comedy class,” he said. “And the next time I did comedy, I was prepared. I had a set I had tried out in class, and the club was packed with friends and supporters— And it was this incredible experience.

“I just thought, ‘I have to do stand-up comedy. I don’t know what it’s going to look like, but I just have to do this.’” The idea for Stand Up For Mental Health, he said, came to him later, when he was teaching a stand-up comedy course himself.

“I was teaching a stand-up comedy course here in Vancouver. The course had nothing to do with mental health, but I would see people occasionally come through the class having a life-changing experience doing comedy,” he said. “And it also helped me a lot; it has given me a lot of confidence and helped me to talk about my mental health condition.”

Having experienced firsthand how comedy had helped him following his diagnosis with bipolar, Granirer had a revelation.

“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to give this experience to people who wanted to do stand-up comedy, but who were also looking for that life-changing experience?’” Stand-up, Granirer has found, is a uniquely powerful tool to help people build confidence and overcome the shame often felt when struggling with mental health.

“A lot of people have a lot of shame about having their conditions in the first place, and doing stand-up is a great way of getting rid of that shame,” he said. “I think comedy is a great way to build confidence, because once you have made a room full of people laugh, you can do anything.”

Granirer’s visit to St. Paul on Sunday will be “kind of half presentation, half show,” he said.

“Basically, it will include a lot of comedy about my own mental health journey; I’m going to tell people a bit about my story, and also work to help people see how comedy can help people not only cope with mental health conditions, but also just to see their own resilience and strength.”

Asked what brought him to St. Paul, Granirer— who still resides in Canada—said, “It was the CARE Team.

“They found out about me, and they said, ‘Hey, would you like to come to St. Paul?’ and I said, ‘Sure, I’d love to come.’” Everywhere he goes, the counselor, mental health advocate, and comedian said, he hopes to spread mental health awareness, as well as the message of comedy as a tool, not only for combating mental health issues, but for overcoming general feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt, or shame.

“I think comedy is a great way to build confidence, because once you have made a room full of people laugh, you can do anything.”

— David Granirer