discusses the trauma of his mother leaving him and his father when Wilson was just 2 years old."You think about how bonded a two year old is to their mom, all of a sudden my mom wasn't there. . . . I know this affected me in some pretty profound ways."'s Wayne Brady and's Rachel Bloom, through emotionally tumultuous teenage years into their sometimes-dark adulthoods.
As comedian Chris Gethard describes it,"I could show up at the UCB Theatre, which was like the hot theater in New York City. I could be the guy who, that night, crushed the hardest. And I was miserably lonely all day leading up to that. . . . Onstage in front of 200 people who thought I was the funniest guy they saw all night, I was miserably lonely. None of it changed."
The process of transforming pain, trauma, anxiety, and depression into stories and art, whether in comedy or another form, was a coping mechanism that many of the comedians used."Comedy is a way to transform your darkest thoughts into a form that gives them a little less power," says Aparna Nancherla, who's been on. Yet even that catharsis can only take you so far. Comedy, Gethard later explains,"is not going to save you.