Suicide isn’t funny. But Angie Belcher’s stand-up course Comedy on Referral is helping men at risk of suicide learn how to laugh through the pain.
The course — which is backed by the charity Rethink Mental Illness — gained funding in 2022 with an NHS grant through the North West London Integrated Care Board. Belcher said that the classes are designed to encourage trauma victims to “process their trauma in a different way” by reclaiming the narrative of their life story.
“This enables survivors to consciously use comedy to change their perspective of their experiences, but it also puts them in a physically powerful position because being on stage is very powerful,” Belcher told The Guardian.
According to the International Association for Suicide Prevention, an estimated 703,000 people die by suicide worldwide each year, and the rate for men is nearly double that of women.
Belcher’s students include men who are over 18 who have attempted suicide, and who have often lost friends and family by suicide as well.
“We’ve never done anything like this before and we’re very excited about it because we’re hoping it will reach men who, even though they’ve been diagnosed as at high risk of suicide, don’t think they have an issue and so won’t go to counselling or attend anything signposted ‘suicide prevention,’” said Lourdes Colclough, head of suicide prevention at Rethink Mental Illness. “This is a different way of engaging with this hard-to-reach group.”
Working alongside psychologists, Belcher and Colclough designed the lessons to gently guide pupils through writing assignments, group games, and one-on-one work. The six-week course ends with a grand finale: a comedy show in front of an audience of 100 people.
Using comedy as a healing tool is not an entirely novel concept. Stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt has long been vocal about how performing comedy helped him get through the loss of his wife in 2016.
On top of the catharsis that comedy brought him personally, Oswalt said that writing and performing throughout his grief journey helped others heal, too.
“My goal — as always — is I want to be funny, and I want to get laughs,” Oswalt told NPR. “But laughter, I think, can loosen up a lot of poison that has kind of settled into your muscles and your soul; not to get too Oprah about it. And maybe incidentally I'm helping someone out with their grief.”
Belcher knows that her Comedy on Referral classes may be an unconventional way to support people in her Bristol community, but that doesn’t lessen the significance of her mission.
She said: “I want participants to leave the course with a different part of themselves — their comedic persona — so that they can enjoy their lives in a different way and hopefully in a better way.”
A version of this article originally appeared in the 2024 Gender Edition of the Goodnewspaper
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