Over the decades since stand-up comedy came into existence, many practitioners of that trade have been addicted to tobacco, which just organically goes along with late nights and premises where drinks are served. And they will open up about it!

In fact, you can’t make them shut up. In recent years a lot of them, if their incomes allow it, have become cigar aficionados, and getting together with fellow comics with the simple purpose of smoking luxury-brand cigars has become commonplace.

Some are very knowledgeable about one particular addictive substance, like Matt Lieb is about heroin. But it isn’t always a substance that gets them. Some talk a lot about being addicted to their mobile phones, and some actively resist. Ari Shaffir fought off the lure of fancy devices for years, insisting on a flip phone with minimal capabilities. In his world travels incognito as an ordinary tourist, he has been known to go entirely phone-less for weeks at a time, much to the chagrin of show-biz colleagues and business-people.

Often during performances, and very often in conversational podcasts, comedians will agonize over the minutiae of phonership, and go into painful detail about the limits they set and the etiquette they observe with their devices.

Regarding one particular addiction, pornography, your average comedian is lavishly revealing and candid. They will even cop to personal oddities, like Moshe Kasher admitting a longtime fondness for fat girls. Some have discovered that sex addiction is a real thing, and males don’t seem to mind admitting to it. It seems, in fact, to be a badge of honor. But for a woman? Not so much.

Thanks to entrepreneur Pope Lonergan — who has actively sought out alcoholics and other addicts to give them stage time — the attorney, stand-up comic, and self-described sex addict Davina Bentley was able to share her story with the world.

She had just experienced a promising start as a stage comedian when, at approximately the same time, her father died and an eight-year romantic relationship ended. Bentley referenced the “series of incredibly maladapted behaviors… not within the normal coping strategies of most people…” that could easily be defined as sex addiction:

I took a year of boys. When you lose everything, who cares what you say on stage?

The excessive promiscuity ended when a date turned violent, but for a while, she still went for “super-inappropriate men.” After transitioning from full-time corporate attorney to part-time lawyer, Bentley finally reached the promised land of full-time professional stand-up, affirming,

I love being a lawyer. But comedy is a reason to live…. It’s a false, manipulative way of gaining control but it’s incredibly cathartic. The way I speak on stage is how I talk when I’m speaking to my girlfriends or trying to shock my mum or siblings. And that critical, cerebral sense of self-crisis makes for the best comedy, at least to my taste.

Of course there are other kinds of humor, like the pedantic kind. A (now untraceable) meme making the rounds on Facebook allegedly originated from a genuine advertisement for an actual product. The words are,

We will make you stop drinking alcohol in your sleep or we’ll give back your money.

…. To which a reader responded, “If you are drinking in your sleep, you’ve got some pretty serious problems.” Of course, the copywriter meant, “Follow our process while you sleep, and consequently when you are awake, you won’t want to or be able to drink.” In an ideal world, more thought would have been put into sentence structure.

This seems like a picky, inconsequential point. The trouble is, any sort of addict is all too ready to grasp at the most fragile straw, in order to preserve their familiar lifestyle and build a structure of denial around their habit. Give an addict any excuse to believe that the people who want him to quit are ignoramuses, and he or she will take that excuse and run with it.

“If they think I should stop drinking, but are themselves unable to even write a coherent English sentence, it proves they know less than I do. So why should I listen to them?” This is difficult for the non-addict to absorb, but a hooked person is not only very defensive against any efforts to help, but very choosy about the qualifications of anyone who suggests that help is needed.

“How dare that 250-pound cookie monster insult my habit?”

Written by Pat Hartman. First published December 13, 2024.

Sources:

“Bill Burr Addicted to Cigars,” YouTube, undated.

“Ari Shaffir hates how everyone is addicted to their phone,” YouTube, undated.

“Pope’s Addiction Clinic: where stand-up and Alcoholics Anonymous meet,” INews.co.uk, June 11, 2018.

Image Copyright: Lisa Gansky/Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic