THE BIPOLAR BUDDHA
Joking about mental illness is part of the cure for Winnipeg comic
Comedian Big Daddy Tazz has survived days when the black dogs of depression left him wanting to end his life. But luckily for someone who was suicidal, he was also a procrastinator and easily distracted. “My life sucks and I’m going to kill myself, but I don’t have any rope!” he riffs in a comic sketch called the Bipolar Buddha.
“So I’ll get that tomorrow, or the next day ... Hey, the Flintstones are on!”
Go ahead, gasp. Then laugh. That’s a typical audience response to the bracingly honest jokes by the Winnipeg comic whose act is laced with self-deprecating references to his mental illness.
Chat with Tazz for an hour — the time races by, because he also has ADD, so ideas spill out fast and furious — and the engaging, open and very funny 46-year-old will have you chuckling about manic delusions, anger management and lithium.
But his message is perfectly serious: to break down the stigma that still surrounds mental illness, and especially to help children and teenagers navigate the kind of dark waters that nearly swamped him during a difficult Saskatchewan childhood.
Tazz is one of the headliners at Ottawa’s Cracking-Up the Capital, a four-day comedy festival beginning Feb. 6 that will raise money for local institutions associated with mental health. He plays a gala at the NAC Feb. 9, sharing the stage with Patrick McKenna, John Wing, Tracey McDonald and Don Kelly.
Not all the comics at the festival have such a personal link to mental health issues. But, as Tazz is quick to point out, virtually everyone is touched by mental illness in some way, through friends or family.
And if you think depression, bipolar disease, alcoholism and ADD are not laughing matters, he begs to differ.
“Here’s what I’m doing,” Tazz explains. “If you make light of it, people will laugh at it. If they laugh at it, they feel safe talking about it. If they talk about it, we educate and prevent.”
And there’s lots to poke fun at. “I’m on a lot of meds,” Tazz says in one sketch. Lithium, for example, helps him control mood swings. “All that did was make me gain 40 pounds, lose my hair and my sex drive,” he jokes. “But are you happy?” he asks rhetorically. “For a fat, bald, flaccid guy I seem to be doing OK.”
When he goes through airport security and is asked if he has baggage, Tazz can simply roll his eyes: “You have no idea.”
He sees the humour everywhere. He recently visited a friend in the psych ward of a hospital and noticed a large anti-allergy poster warning “No nuts.”
“Well really, that’s the funniest thing ever, to me.”
Laughter really is a great healer, says Tazz, who has been known to sign off skits by telling his audience, “Thanks for being my medication.”
“My meds don’t always work,” he says. “The cognitive behaviour therapy doesn’t always work. But I’ll tell you what works. If I’m depressed, and I step on stage, see people laughing and wiping the tears from their eyes ... there is nothing you can manufacture to put in my mouth or in my veins that will give me that same sense of calm, accomplishment, self-adulation, as that will. Watching other people laugh is one of the best things in the world.”
Tazz’s act is not all bipolar banter. His comedy is wideranging, incorporating everything from his childhood days in a tiny town that consisted of a grain elevator and one other family — “Halloween was a bitch” — to mean teachers who choose their profession because “being a Nazi is illegal.”
Tazz turned to humour early. He adored watching comics like Johnny Carson on TV, and as the fat kid with thick glasses, found that becoming the class clown helped inoculate him from being picked on. “I knew if I made people laugh, I’d stop being the fat kid and start being the funny kid.”
He always knew he was different, and had his first suicidal thoughts at eight. Both of Tazz’s parents had undiagnosed bipolar disorders, and he was often sent to live with relatives on farms in Saskatchewan. He declines to go into details, but says that making his parents laugh at his jokes was one of the few emotional bonds he forged with them.
Tazz also got into trouble for being disruptive at school, something that helped him understand his older son, who also has ADD. And yes, he and his son, now 18, have always joked about their common tendencies. “There are no short conversations with two ADD people.” When his son was kicked out of class, Tazz would talk to him about how he could activate the “off” switch on his ever-buzzing brain.
Tazz himself wasn’t diagnosed as bipolar until his late 20s, but for years he refused to accept the verdict. “It was f-you, this is not me.”
Instead, he endured depressions that left him unable to function, interspersed with manic episodes that robbed him of his conscience and made him believe he was invincible. “I could spend $40,000 in a week, or I could be sexually promiscuous and that would be OK, or I could say things to hurt people and think it was funny, and not even realize I was hurting people. My comedy would become very biting, I would be very insulting.
“I’ve hurt people more than I can ever love them back ... it’s just been the last few years that I’ve been able to forgive myself for the things I’ve said and done.”
It wasn’t until 2001, when he hit “rock bottom in my mind,” that Tazz finally sought the help of a psychiatrist.
Ironically, he was booked to do a show for the Mood Disorders Association of Manitoba, and phoned the executive director to cancel: “Listen, I’m feeling suicidal, I just don’t think I can do the show tonight.”
“And she said, ‘You can’t take your life tonight, you have a show to do. I’ve sold 120 tickets. Come and do the show and we’ll get you a psychiatrist.’ ”
These days, Tazz says life is good in Winnipeg, a friendly city with a vibrant arts scene that has nurtured his career for 20 years.
He works full time as a comic and keynote speaker, doing much of his work for corporations and associations, and also running a booking agency for other comics and performers.
About one-third of his gigs are fundraisers for various causes. He doesn’t travel to Ontario that often, tending to head west or to Atlantic Canada instead, so he’ll be a new face for many comic fans in Ottawa.
Tazz also runs a program in Winnipeg high schools called Stand up Against Stigma, where he talks to students about mental health. “It’s empowering for our children to understand that different is good. You don’t have to fit into the same mould as anybody else.”
He’s “open, honest and brutal,” which the kids love, although he says teachers are sometimes uncomfortable when he talks directly about suicidal thoughts and how to seek help.
Most of all, he wants kids to realize that it’s “OK to speak about mental illness, and that if you feel depressed, or you feel manic, or you feel suicidal, the more we talk about it, the more it’s going to be OK in the social stream.”