MOORHEAD — The lab theater was transformed into a comedy club on Friday, Nov. 8, where students and special guests were given the opportunity to perform stand-up comedy. At the event, titled “Laughing Through It,” a jam-packed audience of approximately 100 attendees were given the opportunity to enjoy jokes about a variety of topics, the most notable being mental health.
Darren Valenta, a communications professor at Concordia, instructs the first-year seminar course titled: Stand-Up Comedy and Engaged Citizenship. This year is the second time the course has been offered, and Valenta decided to bring in guest comic Ally Weinhold to work with his students.
“A lot of the work that she has started doing is using standup comedy as an intervention in, you know, conversations about mental health and addiction,” Valenta said. “I thought it would be interesting to have her come visit and teach students how to express themselves, but also to do so based on something that was really going on in their lives and is important to them.”
Weinhold, a stand-up comedian and social worker based out of Los Angeles, spent the week in Valenta’s classes leading workshops about comedy and how it relates to mental health, which is what much of Weinhold’s work focuses on. Weinhold speaks very openly about her life experiences, including her development of a substance use disorder at a young age and the death of her close friend by suicide. Furthermore, she discusses the impacts these and other events have had on her mental health.
“Most of my content is kind of about my mental health journey, or just like my observations on, like how society treats mental health versus physical health, and like how weird people are about it. I’ve been to treatment for multiple things. You know, I’ve had a lot of mental health help in my life. Yeah, I think it’s very important. I know I wouldn’t be alive without it, let alone, like functioning, right? So I’m a huge advocate for it,” Weinhold said.
The performance of original stand-up material was optional for the students, but regardless of if they shared it or not, Valenta encouraged students to create material based on their own experiences.
“And at the end of it, hopefully they’ll be able to say, like, ‘here are some jokes I wrote, or I wrote a sketch, or even just that they learned a little bit more about improv or something like that. To be able to say that you’ve worked with a professional comedian, I think is a really cool experience. And then, for the folks who perform on Friday, just an opportunity to get before their peers and share something about themselves, it’s a great feeling to get some laughs,” Valenta said.
Weinhold has done plenty of comedy workshops, many of which have focused on comedy as a therapy. While researching for these workshops, Weinhold found Valenta’s dissertation and reached out. After corresponding via email for approximately two years, Valenta invited Weinhold to work with his students.
“I love doing stuff like this. It’s been life changing for me. I have a group of friends who are also stand ups, and we write together, and we pitch together, and we work on each other’s stuff all the time and make it a collective thing, because the community piece is missing in stand-up more so than other forms of comedy, I guess. So I’m excited to see what students come up with,” Weinhold said.
Five students performed at the Laughing Through It event and were met with a warm and enthusiastic crowd. Additionally, Valenta and Weinhold both did sets of their own, which both focused on their experiences with mental health.
