Of course this is pre-responsibilities when we were just living on vibes.
Long before my husband and I got married, we were just two idiots running amuck in Los Angeles. We were, and still are big fans of Doug Benson. If you don’t know Doug, stop reading this right now and go get caught up. He’s a really rad dude with incredible stories.
At the time, Doug had a live podcast called Getting Doug With High. The entire premise was exactly what it sounds like. Interviewing guests while smoking or consuming cannabis. There was a magician, insane segments, it was a whole thing. Absolutely absurd, hilarious, and completely iconic. And of course some of my favorite episodes were Jack Black , and the Workaholics group.
Well, Doug did these shows live from time to time in the heart of LA. My husband (then boyfriend who hadn’t put a ring on it yet) and I bought tickets and started going. After one of these shows, the magician, Gabe, had saw my posts on Twitter. He reached out and invited us backstage, but we had already left at that point, so I said we’d meet up at the next show.
After the next show, of course he’s invited us backstage. Which backstage was really an alley behind Largo. But still, this was so exciting for us. Just being fans of Dougs and getting an invite was the coolest thing ever.
We go backstage and meet Doug, who couldn’t have been nicer. He’s a gentle soul and I can say after multiple meets, he genuinely likes his fans.
This starts to become the norm for us. We go to his show, we go backstage after and hangout. We start meeting some of the coolest people.
We met Horatio Sanz. Horatio was one of the absolute nicest guys. I remember standing there with my boyfriend being so completely nervous. Horatio was one of the first ones to come out where we were, and treated us like friends. We yapped for over half an hour.
Around this time, Ron Funches had started exploding in comedy. I loved him on Undateable and @Midnight. I remember being so stoked for his appearance on the show. The minute he came backstage I just remember running towards him screaming his name. He had the biggest smile on his face. He is just as kind and genuine as you could hope. These are some of my favorite memories from our days in Los Angeles.
Comedy has always played a huge role in my life. It didn’t just entertain me, it truly saved me. I carried a lot of weight growing up. Trauma has a way of making the world feel unbearably heavy, and for a long time I didn’t have many places to set that weight down. But comedy was always there. It was my release valve. The thing that reminded me that life, even at its most brutal, could still be absurd and ridiculous and worth laughing at. It quite literally helped heal me.
Part of that healing came in the most unexpected forms. Growing up, we didn’t have cable a lot of the time. I relied on whatever the free channels could give me, and one of those gifts was 3rd Rock from the Sun. I watched that show like it was a lifeline. It was weird and warm and completely out of its mind in the best way, and it felt like a little window into a world where things could be funny instead of just hard.
So you can imagine what it meant when we got to meet French Stewart, Harry himself. We had just left from one of Doug’s shows and were waiting on our Uber. I look to my left and two blocks away coming our way is someone in a powder blue suit with the biggest smile I’d ever seen. He was an absolute gem. Just one of those people who radiates something genuinely good, and meeting him felt like thanking a piece of my childhood without having to explain why. I froze when he tried to shake my hand.
And then there was the night we met Jay Chandrasekhar. If you know us at all, you know Super Troopers is not just a movie in our house, it is a religion. We have a signed copy of the scrip from Super Troopers 2 on our coffee table. Meeting Jay was one of those full-circle, pinch-yourself moments. Here was someone whose work had made us cry-laugh until we couldn’t breathe, just standing there in an alley behind a comedy club like a regular human person.
I don’t think people talk enough about how laughter can literally drag you out of places you didn’t think you were coming back from. Like not in some poetic, Pinterest quote way. I mean in the very real “I was not okay and somehow I’m laughing at something completely stupid right now and it’s the only thing keeping me from falling apart” kind of way. That kind of laughter saved me more times than I can count. It gave me a break from my own brain, from the weight, from everything that felt too loud and too heavy, even if it was just for a few minutes. And those few minutes add up. They keep you here. They remind you there’s still something good, something light, something worth sticking around for, even when everything else feels like it’s closing in.
If you do anything at all today, choose to laugh.
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