–HENNY YOUNGMAN
My secretary buzzed me the other day and said, “There’s a man in the waiting room who claims to be invisible.” I said, “Tell him I can’t see him right now.”
–Dr. CLIFFORD KUHN, professor of psychiatry at the University of Louisville medical school and would-be comedian
OK, Henny Youngman telling psychiatrist jokes is one thing. But a psychiatrist telling Henny Youngman jokes? Take my shrink, puh-leez! The next thing will be gynecologists doing monologues. Or performance art!
Billed as “the laugh doctor,” Dr. Clifford Kuhn has been spritzing Youngmanesque one-liners at comedy clubs all over Florida and the Midwest, while on a six-month sabbatical from the University of Louisville. Appropriately, his jokes are about stress, marriage, sex: “My wife is reading a book on diet and sexual performance. She stopped feeding me Minute rice. Replaced it with wild rice. Long grain.”
The funny thing is, he’s serious about it. Normally, Kuhn is based at the university’s Genesis Center, a behavioral-medicine clinic that specializes in nontraditional methods of healing, including music and meditation. He says he took up comedy because of his interest in using laughter to ease patients’ suffering from pain. At first, some of his jokes were so bad they hurt. You could have heard more laughs in a urologist’s waiting room. Yet like any good spritzer Kuhn kept trying, and today his act is, well, improved. Lately, he’s had them rolling in the aisles at clubs like The Comedy Zone in Orlando, Fla. (“I’ve got a patient who’s so guilty he has ‘my fault’ insurance.”) Well, anyway, he’s keeping them awake. “If he’s a psychiatrist, he’s the kind of person I’d like to see,” said Dot Dickinson, a visitor from Waterlooville, England. Actually, most people were there to see the headliners; Kuhn is just a 15-minute opener for the featured comics. But patrons smiled uproariously when the psychiatrist quipped: “I’m not really this bald. I’m going through a hair transplant-and I’m the donor.” Which was funnier, at least, than “What comes to mind about that?” And undoubtedly cheaper.
Kuhn says his comedy quest was much influenced by Norman Cousins’s 1979 best seller, “Anatomy of An Illness,” in which the author claimed that watching Marx Brothers movies helped him overcome a disease doctors had pronounced fatal. That meshed with Kuhn’s own clinical observations, and got him thinking it would b useful to find out what makes “to the degree that it could be prescribed.”
To get some answers, he began interviewing comics at The Funny Farm, a Louisville comedy club. Club owner Tom Sobel helped him get a grant to study the effects of laughter on cancer and rheumatoid arthritis patients. So far, the data confirms findings that “laughter increases tolerance for pain,” says Kuhn. Eventually Sobel suggested he try getting laughs himself. When the sabbatical came up, he hit the road, with the approval of his university bosses.
Since his shaky beginnings, Kuhn has honed his material and his timing. But there are still nights when he’s about as funny as a nervous breakdown. His surest laughs come on jokes of the take-my-wife stripe, which seem to tickle a common funny bone, e.g.: “After 27 years of marriage we’ve finally achieved sexual compatibility. Last night we both had headaches.”
Kuhn is aware he’s something of an oddity-“this balding, middle-aged, conservatively dressed guy,” doing standup. He keeps working on his style, a cross between a borscht belt social director and a befuddled high-school principal. But he finds patrons tolerant of his shortcomings-even his tendency to blandness-although one woman came up to him in Orlando and said, “You’d be funnier if you were dirtier.” Some clubs admit booking him for the curiosity value. “We thought it would be kind of interesting for the public to have a psychiatrist up there telling jokes,” says Brad Greenberg, head of the group that owns a string of 80 Comedy Zone clubs. Greenberg feels Kuhn does quite nicely in the short run.
But the doctor has no illusions of becoming a full-time comic. At best, he says, he hopes to wind up in demand at workshops on humor and healing. And inevitably, he’s planning a book about his experiences. Meanwhile, he’s been keeping a journal on his coperformers–short of swiping their gags, of course-and thinks he’s gained some insights. One thing the audience buys into, he says, is the “absurdity” of taking oneself too seriously. He feels he’s most successful when he’s able to get across the idea of “here I thought I was so smart and it backfired.”
Whatever triggers laughter, Kuhn agrees with Cousins that a daily dose of it can help keep the doctor away. But he doubles Cousins’s prescription of 10 minutes. “If people aren’t laughing a cumulative 20 minutes a day,” he says, “they’re probably not getting the most benefit for their health.” Sure, doc, but why not 45 minutes-the length of an average psychiatric session? The shrink could provide the jokes: “Psychiatrist says to this guy, ‘You’re crazy.’ Guy says, ‘I’d like a second opinion.’ Psychiatrist says, “OK, you’re also ugly’.”
Patient goes away happy. Shrink, for a change, earns his fee. And Henny Youngman collects royalties.
