‘It’s only going to work if people know what Fortisip is’. The inner workings of a stand-up comedy course for eating disorder recovery

Comedy interventions for people experiencing mental ill health remain opaque (Kafle et al. 2023). Existing studies typically evaluate changes in mental health indicators for participants before and after, but rarely analyse what happens during a comedy intervention. These approaches fail to do justice to the complexity and diversity of different types of comedy as artistic practice and mental health intervention. In this study, we unpack the inner workings of a stand-up comedy course for eating disorder recovery. We use a multi-method qualitative design–including interviews, journals and workshop observations–to analyse how a group of participants engaged with specific comedy exercises and other workshop content. We also analyse transcripts of comedy produced in these sessions, which is required to improve understanding of the diverse mechanisms by which comedy interventions can impact mental health recovery. We conclude that the comedy course had a positive impact on participants, specifically by cultivating comic distancing and perspective shifting, sharing lived experience and re-framing comedy as a coping skill. We also demonstrate that what happens in these workshops is a culturally significant form of comedy worthy of analysis, which has previously received limited attention in humour and comedy studies.