A Void at Mind's Center
"I Used to Be Funny" and Life After Jokes
Aftermaths I
I used to be funny, too.
I know this because when I was an active comedian, people told me as much. Often, these people were other comics. Though I’ve long been inactive, they still tell me this. They tell me whenever we run into each other in the wild, or when I make a rare appearance at Comedy Bar to attend a friend's show, walking in on eggshells knowing that if I get recognized, I will be met with the inevitable: “Do you think you’ll ever come back?”
Someone, an old stand-up acquaintance, said it to me this past Sunday upon running into each other while walking out of the film that bears these words as its title. She introduced me to her friend, a newer queer comic, and quite kindly said, “Lily’s a great actor and filmmaker and comedian- well, was, a comedian, and I guess…”
As happens with stand-ups, the words fell out of her mouth almost by mistake.
“I guess Lily used to be funny.”
The three of us laughed the moment off, but this laughter served to gloss over the discomfort of having accidentally touched on one of the dark, oft-avoided truths of comedy as an art form. It’s a truth I’ve struggled to confront for the better part of five years, and spent equal energy struggling to find the words for. I feel fortunate to now be able to speak that truth here, plain and blunt as the tightest of jokes:
Sometimes, being funny is not enough to save you.
When we first meet Sam (a career-best Rachel Sennott), the protagonist of Ally Pankiw’s I Used to Be Funny, we find her in the midst of a post-traumatic haze. She is languid and disconnected, stumbling around her shared apartment to occasionally microwave food in between reading hate comments on social media and checking in on the unfolding source of this trauma—the apparent disappearance of Brooke (Olga Petsa), a teenager Sam has been hired to au pair. Her beleaguered housemates, Philip (Caleb Hearon) and Paige (Sabrina Jalees), fellow stand-ups in West Toronto’s alternative comedy scene, attempt to coach her through this episode with a well-intentioned-if-unproductive combination of gentle condescension and predictably-deflective riffing.
Through these attempts, several revelations about the moment emerge. First, nobody in question is emotionally equipped to handle the gravity of the situation, least of all Sam herself. Further, Sam has been unable to perform since long before Brooke’s disappearance. And, most crucially, Brooke’s disappearance is only one of several concurrent traumas that have led to Sam’s deterioration.
From here, the film’s structure begins to unfurl in a highly free-associative fashion. Flashbacks (in both the directorial and post-traumatic sense) are motivated by seemingly innocuous motifs like the scrubbing of a dish or the sight of a bicycle. Memories are nested within each other as if at random and, in what must be noted as an exceptional feat by editor Curt Lobb, we are pulled unpredictably up and down through several competing panes of both time and of Sam’s own cognition. This disorienting approach to non-linearity is a precise evocation of how the trauma brain operates in states of severe activation. Reason and temporality go by the wayside, and the self becomes an ill-defined force circling through and around memories of distant happenings, such that they become active re-happenings, concentric circles of time crushed on top of one another into the moment we call an “episode.”
Just as the trauma brain does, the plot of I Used to Be Funny orbits around the moments Sam’s system is trying to forget, showing us loosely-adjacent memories or moments of aftermath long before revealing what has induced this state in her. This mode of navigating memory and non-memory can be nigh-impossible for sufferers of C-PTSD to articulate for long after the inciting experience itself, but it is a terrain I immediately recognized from my own falling-out with comedy. Alongside Sam, the film drags its audience into that wordless realm we English-speakers are made to pave over with two woefully inadequate syllables.
My own journey as a stand-up bears many resemblances both to Sam’s fictionalized story and Pankiw’s real-world one. Like Pankiw, I grew up in Edmonton and moved to Toronto in order to find myself as a queer comedy hopeful, only to eventually wind up a filmmaker. Like Sam, I was a quickly-rising mainstay in Toronto’s alternative comedy scene, living with several other comedians in the city’s Annex neighbourhood in 2019. It was a juncture at which, also like Sam, I was besieged by a series of traumatic incidents that caused my relationship with the form to rupture entirely. But in order to do justice to that rupture, you’ll have to permit me the indulgence of explaining how I found myself there in the first place.
Sob Story I
I did my first set on April 19th, 2015, at a long-defunct Irish pub off Edmonton’s Jasper Avenue party district. I was nineteen years old, and the form had occurred to me as if I’d been struck by a golden hammer with its name emblazoned on it. Since childhood, I’d been a precocious reader and inventor of stories, and my preternaturally large vocabulary (see: organic use of the word “preternaturally”) lead my family and teachers to project writerly aspirations onto me as soon as I spent half my preschool year in full character as an anthropomorphic eagle—really. But, I’d always been far more enticed by music, and the pull to express myself through sound before large groups of people was just as strong as the projections of my caretakers. Words may have been my greatest weapon, but the stage provided my greatest joy.
This tug-of-war between writing and performance played out sans resolution through my teenage years. At no point did it ever occur to me to, I don’t know, write a play? Blame my high school’s underfunded-to-the-point-of-literal-nonexistence theater program for that one. But, the solution finally presented itself to me during my first year as a lonely, unhappy music student at the University of Alberta.
The early-2010s comedy podcasting boom was in full swing, and I fell into it as a means of coping with both my isolation and, in hindsight, my closetedness. As a byproduct of this need, these shows (you all know the ones) provided me with a practical window into the craft and histories of comedy that watching The Daily Show as a precocious teen could not. Suddenly, comedy seemed accessible not just as a remote audience member, but to anyone with the inclination to do it themselves. “I’m better at words than I am at music but I hate the idea of being trapped alone in a room writing novels for the rest of my life. If only there were a way to perform words I write in front of an audience like I get to when I’m playing an instrument,” I thought. And there you have it, the golden hammer struck. I started researching open mics.
My first sets were predictably awful experiences but, as any longtime comic will tell you, it was love at first bomb. I’d found a form so attuned to my natural skillset it felt like a cosmic cheat code, and I was hooked. Within months, I was performing as much as I possibly could, no matter how bad, empty, or occasionally downright dangerous the show, to the growing expense of my emotional relationship with my family and my actual relationship with my then-girlfriend. I didn’t care. I’d found the one place in the world where for five minutes a night, I could make sense to myself and be praised for it. How lucky was I to know exactly who I was and what I wanted to do at such a young age?
Except, of course, I didn’t.
In the summer of 2016, the questions around my gender that had long been lingering at the bottom of me burst up to the surface, and I became caught up in the slow, anguished landslide of coming out to myself and beginning to seek out transition. Access to hormone therapy in Alberta at the time was (and largely remains) hellishly slow, and as I bounced from waitlist to waitlist, psychiatrist to psychiatrist, I did my best to keep up appearances. Onstage, I performed the same material as before in the same way as before, but as my connection to my transness grew, I began to feel an increasing dysphoric distance from it. Over months, the weight of performing this contortionist’s act set after set gnawed at me until I finally caved, and committed one of the worst sins available to an aspiring stand-up: taking some time off.
By the time I returned to the stage months later, now out, on HRT, and steadily femme-presenting, it did not take long to notice that doing stand-up as a trans woman in Edmonton, Alberta felt a bit different. Though well post-”tipping point,” this was still before trans rights became one of the key proxy battles in North America’s not-so-gradual collision course with fascism, and I was often the first person like me most of the crowds I performed to had ever encountered in their life. As a means of getting ahead of this, my gender became foregrounded in my act, in effect by force. Suddenly, this hapless 22-year old dipshit was expected to serve as the chief standard-bearer, historian, and scientific authority for her entire demographic in under five minutes. Seven if she was lucky enough to feature.
At times, my presence was met with violence, and on more than one occasion I had to ferry myself out the back exit of a comedy club after my set before any of my hecklers caught onto my whereabouts. Those downright dangerous shows I once did out of a sense of anarchic glee and a desire to test my mettle became total non-starters. Most nights though, the best I could expect was a confused apathy, reluctant tolerance laced with an undertone of revulsion. It seemed that no matter how funny, how tight, how undeniable, how pretty and passable I tried to be, there was a ceiling to how well I could do in all but a couple rooms. The nature of my personhood now precluded me from being graded along the same curve as the cishet men I once regarded as equals.
What got me through this period was the fact that, just often enough, no matter how badly I felt I’d bombed, there would be a lone table who approached me afterwards to insist, “we thought you were amazing, please don’t give up!” Before long, a thought crystalized in me: “if only I could live in a city full of those tables.” It was clear that even Alberta’s most left-leaning rooms would only tolerate me so much, and the rest tolerated me so little that the standard path of making my living as a regional road comic was completely off the table. So, I did what every Albertan comic who feels they’ve hit their professional ceiling does, and started planning a move to Toronto.
At this stage, I should note that through all of these challenges, at no point did my zest for comedy or sense of it as my prime directive in life waver. Even when I took a break to allow myself to transition, I viewed it as a brief pause on my life’s calling as opposed to quitting. No no, never quitting. If I couldn’t live my life writing down my feelings and telling them to strangers, what else was I good for? It was the only thing I knew how to do and I was going to find a way to do it, even if it meant moving across the country with only two suitcases to my name. This was how I wanted to live: in a perpetual state of reducing the barrier between my mind and the world to its smallest possible margin. I’d already come out as trans for god’s sake, there was nothing else I was unafraid to say, or disclose.
Except, once again, by the time I landed in Toronto as a borderline-feral 23-year old, this was no longer entirely true.
Sob Story II
The various incidents that have afflicted Sam in I Used to Be Funny are revealed in a gradual and indirect fashion befitting her own reluctance, nay neurological inability, to look these memories in the eye. What we are allowed to understand over the course of the film’s first act is this: Sam and Brooke’s relationship has gone far beyond the bounds of a conventional child/caretaker dynamic, in which Brooke’s father Cameron (an appropriately-haggard Jason Jones) is a pivotal figure, and that the family tragedy looming over Brooke and Cameron has come to bear in an explosive fashion that prompted Brooke’s disappearance. So explosive, in fact, that police have been involved and that Sam has become the regular target of a particular strain of online discourse from which she refuses to insulate herself.
The unmoored state in which we find Sam is in no small part a result of the fact that she perceives herself to be a pariah in both the public sphere and in her own stand-up community, and that perhaps, she is not wrong about this. What is certain is that something unspeakable has happened, and left her frozen. In a pivotal early scene, Sam finds herself playing the emotional support role in the green room at Comedy Bar (who among us!), and Philip goads her into returning to the stage. During her introduction, she notices a group of older cis men reminiscent of both the police she reports to and her online harassers sitting in the front row, and is gripped by panic. She tries to mouth an apology to Philip, but even silent words cannot come. In that instant, her life’s calling is an impossibility. She runs.
The unspeakable and I are no strangers.
Two months before I was meant to move to Toronto, I developed a debilitating and gruesome medical condition that required dramatic surgical intervention. My specialists offered me a choice: I could either call off my move and await surgery in Alberta, or have my case transferred to a Toronto-based specialist who would ensure my condition was resolved there. This could risk delaying the surgery another few months, but given the already-worsening state of Albertan healthcare at the time, it may not make much difference. Either way, the choice was mine.
I chose to have my case transferred. I had already signed a lease, saved my money, made my plans. I was not about to let this development threaten my dreams, and I refused to let a temporary health crisis or the symptoms it entailed stop me from performing. My mind was made up, and to accept a compromise to this ambition would be tantamount to defeat. So, on April 13th, 2019, my body in a state of miserable disrepair, I got on a plane. The next day, I did my first set.
For the first time, I had encountered something I was unwilling to talk about onstage. I felt a physical inability to do so. Beyond having no means of addressing it funnily, if I disclosed this condition to people, it would be the first thought they had about me, and I could not risk it tainting the image I was trying to reestablish in a new city. I kept it an absolute secret from all but my doctors and my immediate family. I felt too humiliated and afraid to do otherwise.
I still do not know how I survived as long as I did managing an untreated condition of that nature and severity. By all accounts, it should have killed me during this time, and to this day, practitioners I disclose it to are astonished I’m still standing. Allow me to state now: I will not be disclosing it, nor the details of its symptoms, here. Those experiences remain mine alone to bear. What I will tell you, at least, is that it was agonizing and terribly gory. I was rotting alive from the inside out.
Somehow, I willed myself into performing through all of this at a prolific rate. I was funny. People told me I was funny. Quickly embraced by Toronto’s comedy scenes, I found myself performing multiple times per night, more nights per week than not, in a horrific state. I would run to the bathroom or into alleyways between shows to allow myself to double over in pain. I bit and screamed into wads of toilet paper. I would white out during sets or during my daytime shifts as a bike courier, somehow keeping it together.
Nobody noticed; not my peers, my friends, my roommates, my employers. I successfully performed the part of a healthy 23-year old doing all that’s expected of a woman that age. It was a private hell punctuated by secret emergency room visits and pleas to specialists to expedite my surgery. All the while, my career was ascendant.
By late summer, I was increasingly struggling to cope. I’d begun to go on regular eating and drinking binges to soothe my physical and emotional distress, entering into dissociative fugues without warning and suffering episodes characteristic of what I now know to have been my rapidly-emergent case of C-PTSD. Again, all of this was secret, and it would be further aggravated by several catastrophic events that would arrive in the months to come.
I’d like to again emphasize before I proceed that through all of this horror, comedy remained the bedrock of my life. It was my reason to persist in my suffering and, although I was falling apart at the seams, it felt as if I just tried hard enough, just got enough laughs and booked the right shows, it could keep me together. All of this must surely be worth it, somehow. If tragedy is not accompanied by reason, then what is the point?
What this devotion did not account for was that my act was becoming increasingly dishonest as a means of deflecting from the unpleasantries of my life. My place where I could tell nothing but the truth became the place where I could tell it the least. I could not talk about what I was going through. I didn't know how to talk about it even if I’d wanted to, this hurt beyond words that loomed over every moment.
Bereft of “confessional” material, I began to lean into what I felt people wanted of me, fabricating stories and observations that aligned with what a young woman of my sort “should” be experiencing. Again, my transness became foregrounded in my act, so as to combat what I quickly learned was the far more insidious flavour of transmisogyny that Toronto queer comedy crowds wielded against the small handful of us in the scene at that time. I became cynical, bitter, predictable, and inauthentic.
Whatever my comedy was, it was no longer “me,” but I did not feel I could be anything but my comedy. People loved it. I was showcasing and headlining within six months of my arrival in Toronto, and had never felt more miserable.
I will not litigate what transpired between the period of late 2019 to mid 2021 in the same level of detail with which I’ve outlined the events of 2015 to 2019. In part because some of these events overlap with the stories of others that are not mine to tell or to center myself within, and in part because I still find myself not ready and not willing to discuss some of them publicly in photographic detail. The point I wish to illustrate in giving a more macro-level overview of this period is the swiftness and severity with which these events compounded each other, and how they impacted my relationship with comedy on both a creative and community level.
This, to me, seems the more productive means of framing these events within the broader scope of this piece. Confessional writing should not come without boundaries, and these are mine to uphold. For now, it’s what feels right.
Enough stalling. This is, improbably, the short version.
Without realizing it, I had moved to Toronto and found myself in an abusive living situation, one of my roommates a clinical narcissist who preyed on the younger women they lived with, among countless others beyond our walls. Their actions within our home would prove, in hindsight, a key factor in the destruction of my mental health over the course of that year. Gaslit and manipulated, this did not become clear to me until they were publicly outed for their abuses, rightfully so but in a viciously ugly fashion befitting the social media climate of the time. Our apartment became the subject of international gossip site articles. I issued needless mass apologies, assuming quite reasonably that as a young trans person without a leg to stand on, my career was over by association.
What followed was a months-long battle to extricate them from our apartment, during which time we endured continued manipulation and retaliatory tactics, requiring routine spells of sleeping on couches and going into hiding. Through all of this, I performed. I had been scheduled to showcase three days after they were outed, at a show they were meant to host. Bleary-eyed and out of my mind with terror, I gave likely the best set of my career. I walked offstage to the Comedy Bar green room, and collapsed.
Later that same month, I did seven shows in five days, every one of them terrible. I was a stranger to myself, and my material, yet felt I had nothing else to hold on to if I did not continue as planned. Mind you, I was still privately battling grave illness throughout this time. I forced myself to curdle onstage before crowds of strangers night after night because if I could not do that, I might as well have been nothing. Every second of it hurt.
It is uncomfortable to admit, but when the COVID-19 lockdowns arrived, I was morbidly relieved. I no longer knew where stand-up ended and I began, and this maelstrom had, if nothing else, forced me to reestablish a tenuous line between the two of us. But further catastrophe was soon to follow.
Prior to the outbreak, I had at last secured a surgery date for the condition I’d been battling for over a year. It was deemed “elective” and postponed indefinitely. Shortly thereafter, I developed symptoms of a debilitating chronic illness to accompany my acute one. I existed in a state of constant, extreme pain, fatigue, and cognitive impairment, to which there was no apparent end.
I began to withdraw entirely from the world. I’d grown resentful of the comedy community’s desperation to perform again despite the risks. It seemed grotesque to me that anyone would put something so frivolous over all else what for many, myself now included, was a matter of life and death. I resented that people felt they had anything they could say when I had been relegated to a place of wordlessness.
There was no longer any healing or catharsis to be found in disclosing my experiences. I wanted nothing more to do with the theatre of being seen and heard. Like a mortally wounded animal, I tucked myself away into a dark, secure corner, where I could shiver until the end.
With a month’s notice, the surgery to repair my acute condition was rescheduled for November 3rd, 2020. I knew already that it was to be an immense undertaking that would involve a lengthy, months-long period of convalescence concluded by a second operation that would leave extensive scarring across multiple areas of my body. This did not faze me—such was the severity of this condition that I would endure whatever necessary to be rid of it.
Almost immediately upon waking, I began to develop major complications that neither myself nor my medical team were yet equipped to identify. As a result, I ran an inexplicable fever, and was placed in strict quarantine. Bedridden and unable to walk, for five days I saw only nurses in hazmat suits, my family stranded on the opposite side of the country. In these five days I suffered two near-death incidents, alone.
By the ninth day, I had stabilized enough to be discharged. Upon my return home, I suffered three further near-death incidents in the weeks that followed, the worst of which would have placed me back in the hospital indefinitely, an almost-certain death sentence. It is only by the grace and resourcefulness of my at-home caretaker, a dear friend who slept on my bedroom floor for a week, that I avoided this fate.
My complication was at last identified remotely with the help of my convalescent nursing team, one month after my surgery date. Normally, such a complication would be operated upon, but given that I was already due for a second surgery, a third would pose a greater risk in my state than managing the complication itself. What management entailed, however, was a near-total restriction of my diet, limited to liquid and soft foods, as anything more might kill me.
Already severely-weakened by my lengthy hospitalization, I spent the six months following my first surgery in a state of catastrophic malnourishment. Through all this, I managed gruesome aftercare processes and the severity of my concurrent, as-yet untreated and undiagnosed, chronic illness. Still, I disclosed all of this to nobody but my family, roommates, and caretakers. I endured that winter in secret, the sole resident in a realm of silence and gore.
Suffice to say, by the time I’d recovered from my follow-up surgery in April 2021—now diagnosed with a major illness I would (and will) have to manage for the rest of my life—I was unrecognizable from the person who’d walked off that plane from Edmonton exactly two years ago.
I was barely 25 years old.
Aftermaths II
Mid-way through I Used to Be Funny, the other half of Sam’s hapless situationship, Noah (Ennis Esmer), corners her outside the alleyway by Comedy Bar. The encounter is terse, but he gently asks if she’s thinking of performing again. Sam’s answer is non-commital and contradictory, shooting down the possibility, then offering that she does have one bit she’s been working on, actually. Her body language closes up, and she refuses to look Noah in the eye, eventually shuffling away without explanation. In the years since recovering from my surgeries, I’ve experienced countless versions of this encounter whenever I re-enter comedy spaces.
My first time returning to Comedy Bar after lockdown, in the fall of 2021, I had to pause outside and stop myself from trembling before I walked in. As Sam at one point asserts about having pushed the scene away, “it just makes me feel like shit to be around the people who were there.” I felt that I wore an unshakeable stain in the eyes of my peers. The ones who were there when I was there, the ones who stayed there when I wasn’t there. I was the girl who was good—really good—then the girl who vanished without explanation. I saw the tinge of “what happened” in the eyes of my peers when they recognized me, as if faced with the ghost of a past self.
But how do you tell an old work friend you almost died for no reason, and then didn’t for no reason? That you spent six months bed-bound? That, for no reason, you will be managing constant and severe neurological pain for the rest of your life? How do you tell another comedian that, when you try and imagine yourself doing comedy, all your mind sees now is a mouthless void panicking on a stage?
The answer to all of this, of course, is that I didn’t. I haven’t, until now. And, like Sam, in none of these encounters did I ever know how to answer that inevitable “will you come back?” For a while, my answer was a vague “not yet.” Then it was “maybe,” then “no,” then “maybe,” then “probably,” then “no,” again, then “maybe” again. Sometimes I told the other person what they wanted to hear, sometimes what I wanted to hear.
At no point did I ever really know how I felt at my core, nor how to even find out. The sorrow of my 20s and the realities of my still-untreated illness loomed too heavy to allow for any kind of clarity. All I could see was a grief-laden murk. So, I lied to whoever needed it. Better that for now than to open a chasm of hurt for others to see in the sweaty basement of a bar.
In the film’s climactic encounter, Sam, pushed to her limit by the accusation that her PTSD is a consequence of her own choices, breaks: “I don’t eat, I don’t sleep, I can’t do anything. I’m not funny anymore, why would I want that?” Why would I want that.
I didn’t want it either. It just happened that way. Sometimes, things just happen. I’ve spent many years learning to accept that, and it has taken the entire process of writing this piece to figure out how to say that, finally, I have.
For all the social progress that has been made in recent times regarding our collective understanding of trauma and post-traumatic stress, there remain unconscious flaws in how we tend to conceive of it. By default, we imagine the fallout of psychological trauma as an abstract happening. But it isn’t. Our brains are material objects, and the emotional trajectories of our lives play out on a cellular level. Neural pathways misfire, dim, become damaged or reshaped, regenerate, and die out in response to our outward experience of the world. There is bodily tangibility to the intangible experience of psychological change.
The fact of the matter is that, on a quite literal level, my mind no longer bears any neurological resemblance to the mind of that young girl who only ever wanted to stand on a stage and share her deepest thoughts with a crowd of strangers. Her brain was scrambled, obliterated, and reconstructed by circumstances out of her control. She no longer exists.
I spent many years grieving her, feeling like I’d failed at something for being unable to get her back, for being unable to reclaim what was once the sum total of my identity no matter how hard it burned me. Words were my greatest weapon, the stage my greatest joy. Now, I could no longer access either.
Over the course of my long-term recovery, I regularly tried to. And while many comedians are able to transform the dark of their pain into light for others, that is not the brain I wound up with at the end of all that I endured. It just happened this way.
Sometimes, I still find myself missing that girl. But I no longer feel like I’ve failed her.
The concept of “quitting” in stand-up comedy is heavily stigmatized, and can be deeply threatening to other comedians. It is an artform that requires an unavoidable degree of ritual humiliation in order to be done properly, and the idea that one can just stop risks planting an unwelcome seed of “if I could just stop, why on earth would I keep putting myself through this” in the mind of a comic. On the contrary, dedicated professional stand-ups view the form as their life’s pride and joy, and the idea that one would deny themselves what many comedians view as the one thing that makes them happiest is equally mystifying.
I sympathize with all of these impulses, and once felt them strongly myself. I would, however, like to offer an alternative: I never quit. I just changed.
To quit implies a choice, and I had no say in how my traumas impacted me. But I can choose to accept them, to claim them. Consider this piece my public declaration of having done so.
While I Used to Be Funny ultimately argues for hope after trauma in the form of a return to the stage, I would like to argue that there is equal hope to be found in the opposite. To no longer be doing comedy does not mean that I, nor my life, have become joyless and stale.
Yes, I “used to be funny” in the professional sense. But day to day, I am still as prone to goofiness and unable to resist a joke as ever. And I have been fortunate, in the years since my medical crises, to have discovered the languages of acting and filmmaking as the fitting vessel for a self-expression beyond words, to say nothing of my private (though perhaps not for long) returns to music and creative writing.
I am also grateful to have found substantive treatments for my illness that, after years of disability-induced isolation, now allow me to live a life of abundant creativity and community, and take great pride in the person my trials allowed me to become. I like her a whole lot more than that young girl who went away. And while I wouldn’t wish what I went through on anyone, I would no longer give it up, either. Like it or not, it will always belong to me, and me alone.
It just so happens that the stage is no longer a viable conduit for all this newfound abundance. But, five years removed, I can see now that the light I’ve found away from it is far greater than what it was ever able to give me in the first place. I hope that same light reaches you too, wherever it remains to be found.
So sorry for all you had to endure but thank you for sharing and glad things are headed in a happier and healthier direction.