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Spotlight: Laughing While We Cry: Mental Health Comedy

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Ellen Conan O'Brien, Dancing with the Stars win Ben Stein's Money. You can Google this guy. You can hear all about them. But today we've got them here on Swell. And my hope is that this conversation just continues and continues. Why? Because what's better than talking about our mental health and laughing about it? So the latest project, obviously, is what you just heard, which is a great podcast called Mental Health Comedy with Ed Krasnik and Jennifer

Ed Crasnick will slap you silly upside your head. His whole career including his podcast. https://s.swell.life/SS #swellinterview

@EdCrasnick62
Ed Crasnick
@EdCrasnick62 · 3:41

@DBPardes

And, you know, I'm a big fan. Deborah is an artist, and she lives her life artfully, which in today's world is, I don't even know. First of all, most people aren't living. That's the number one thing we're here, but we're not truly present anyway. Resilience. Yeah. To me, it means being able to respond to whatever is going on inside of you and around you. Other than that, it means nothing
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The power of humor to drive resilience

I'm going to rise up like a Phoenix from the fire there's scaffolding we can build with best practices that we might have read in some selfhelp books. But what's so amazing about your career, which has dug into the role humor plays during crisis? I would love for you. Take us into a moment of your life where you wanted to rise up and humor was the way you were able to cope
@EdCrasnick62
Ed Crasnick
@EdCrasnick62 · 3:39

@DBPardes

At any rate, my mother was very funny, and that was the Genesis of me learning about humor is that my mother had a unique ability to turn darkness into light. And it's a classic story when I was a little kid, five years old and I would watch with my mother. I'd watch Days of Our Lives, and I wish we had different days of our own lives. But no, I would watch it. I was even watching
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Hurting feelings ...

And I guess I want to ask you now let's be real about where we are. We're on Swell, a phone app where people are connecting, and some people are really here to hear voices and to feel raw and real and authentic and not have clever pictures of sausages and flowers and not have memes that they stole from someone else's post. We're here to be raw and original, and I'd love for you to talk about when it comes to your emotions and being raw
@EdCrasnick62
Ed Crasnick
@EdCrasnick62 · 3:31

@DBPardes

Or let's talk to those parts of yourself that are speaking now. Or let's make something. Let's externalize it. And there's a lot that's in this so humor and emotion, how do you not hurt people's feelings by being vulnerable by being real and out of that moment will come great things
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Your goals for this new project

But some of us also know that timing is everything. And to your point, it's like when you choose not to make a joke and you drop into the serious, it makes the next funny really funny? I think so. That's my thought about your thought. But now question for the next thought, which has to do with your intentions around this new podcast because I really want to support it, and I want it to be successful. And there's a million podcasts out there
@EdCrasnick62
Ed Crasnick
@EdCrasnick62 · 4:46

@DBPardes

I'll tell you right now, I'm not good at it, but I also have moments where I know what's real. I know what the truth is. I know what the truth of myself is, and I know that I'm telling myself a lot of crap, and I don't need to do that so I can make a different choice and anyone can. I love it, but I want to populate the show with entertainment. And so we're having, like, SNL type sketches
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Lightheartedness: a Swell guide that is starting now !

Light heartedness can include the commitment to making a funny face in the mirror every morning, to contort your face in the mirror every morning and say, this is just a face and to bring my heart lighter, I'm going to make a funny face every morning. That's like a suggestion, and I'm just wondering if you have any other suggestions to bring out the light hard and us so that we can move through life with it
@EdCrasnick62
Ed Crasnick
@EdCrasnick62 · 4:58

Light-hearted

And that's the important thing about light heartedness repetition is like a big thing exaggeration storytelling. I know this is not making anybody feel particularly more light hearted, but I would just say that lighthearted is breathing. It's like watching the Marx Brothers. It's like listening to a Beatles song. It's like listening to early Beatles. I sound like Al Jiro now up and ride on the midway
@DBPardes
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:25

What makes you lighthearted? OPEN TO ALL. let’s do this! Thank you Ed!!!

You mentioned a bunch of stuff that makes sense. It's all about playfulness. It's all about consciousness, knowing that if we're in the dumps, there are things we could do that sound sort of, you know, kind of a little bit. What's the word I'm looking for? Like, contrived, but not really, because all the Zin Masters say the same thing
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