Features: Life

Last modified Saturday, January 12, 2008 7:26 PM PST

Funny you should mention that

By: RUTH MARVIN WEBSTER - Staff Writer
Local psychatrist freelances as a comedian

"Are you in therapy?" Dr. Howard Richmond, aka the Comic Shrink, often asks his audience.

"Well, you should be," he continues. "You see, we all have baggage. We go around year after year carrying our stuff around. And the problem with most of you is that you're not going to baggage claim."

During the day, Encinitas resident Richmond is a physician board-certified in psychiatry and neurology. By night, he's a stand-up comedian. In October, he performed for 40 minutes at the California Society of Addiction conference in Los Angeles.

Locally, he performs at the Calypso Cafe in Encinitas on the first Sunday night of each month, where, he says, he gets a great chance to work out his material and generally hone his delivery.

Other comedians also perform with him at the dinner show. On Jan. 6, Richmond shared the spotlight with Escondido's Peter Pavone and Patrick DeGuire, a comedian from Chula Vista, who had just returned from entertaining the troops in Iraq.

'I had to do it'

Richmond lived all over the world before coming to San Diego as a resident at the UC San Diego School of Medicine. He first dived into stand-up in 1995 when he read about a nine-week class taught by Sandy Shore on Saturdays at the Comedy Store in La Jolla. "I found myself getting nervous," he explained. "That told me I had some fear, and I had to do it."

He said the first few times he was sent on the stage to try to make people laugh, his heart raced and his palms sweat. "That happened a lot at first," he said, "but when I got some laughs, I loved it."

Vista resident Vicki Barbolak, winner of Nickelodeon's 2007 Funniest Mom in America contest, was in the class, too, and became a good friend of Richmond's. "We would go to bars and do comedy and bomb, and we did that for a couple of years," said Richmond, who performed with Barbolak at the Seaside Center for Spiritual Living in Encinitas last month.

"Howard is so good looking," said Barbolak, "that it's hard for us girls to keep our minds on what he's saying. So I listen to him with my eyes closed and he's very funny in the dark."

Barbolak added that Richmond's form of comedy is unique. "He's really unusual," she said. "No one is doing what he's doing."

But Richmond said he stopped performing comedy entirely in 1997 after a particularly terrible night. "I felt such shame and humiliation," he said. "I took a year and a half off and then when I got back into it, I started doing more spiritual, psychological humor and I think I sort of hit my mark. Now my material is more intelligent, rather than the usual stuff."

Richmond said he would never poke fun at difficulties like mental illness or make light of mental health in his routine. "I don't think there's anything offensive there," he said of his material.

"There is so much stigma about people who have emotional and psychological challenges. We all have those challenges ---- that's my position. And when I do that thing about baggage claim, we all have 'baggage' ---- so it makes it light and fun, and I hope that it is destigmatizing it. It just shows there is a lighter side of life, and when we remove judgment, there is so much more space for healing."

The best medicine

At the same time, he does acknowledge ---- as do many in the medical field ---- the therapeutic benefits of laughter. A T-shirt he wore at a recent performance read, "The weirder he is, the better you feel."

According to William Fry, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Stanford University who has studied the effects of laughter for more than 30 years, laughter increases the heart rate, improves blood circulation, and works muscles all over the body.

Richmond agrees. "In the comedy venue, when we laugh, it releases emotional tension," he said.

Laughter is also credited with increasing the release of endorphins, chemical substances that numb pain and help the body protect against depression. And in 2005, cardiologists at the University of Maryland Medical Center found that laughter ---- considered an aerobic exercise ---- may also help prevent heart attacks and other heart diseases.

It seems medical research is beginning to support what Groucho Marx already knew when he said, "A clown's like aspirin, only he works twice as fast." Humor is increasingly used in a variety of therapeutic situations, including hospital clown projects and hospital "humor rooms" stocked with books, videos, funny posters and sometimes even whoopee cushions.

Richmond has used humor in his private psychiatric practice in Encinitas to build a rapport and relationship with certain patients.

"I had a patient of mine who wasn't getting better," he recalled. "She would sit there each time, her knees together and her toes pointed into the ground, her eyes always cast down.

"One day, I got up from my chair and lay on the floor in front of her and looked up into her face. And she couldn't help it, she cracked a smile."

That small act of comedy helped him break down her wall of defenses, and they began to see improvement in her condition after that.

In another instance, Richmond said, he got off his chair and curled up under his desk. Then he asked his patient, "Is this how you feel, all bottled up?" She said it certainly was.

"Comedy has given me permission to experiment and reach out to people," he said. "And find a language that we both can relate to."

Trained as a civil engineer before going to medical school at the University of Florida, Richmond said he has come to recognize that building bridges between mind and heart is his true calling.

He also plays the guitar, says he surfs badly but loves the ocean, is a yoga enthusiast and was even a plaintiff on the "Judge Judy" show (he brought a small-claims case against a vanity publisher who took $5,000 but did not publish his book "The Healing Field").

"I have had many incarnations," said Richmond. "But now I'm 50, and I love what I do."

Contact staff writer Ruth Marvin Webster at (760) 740-3527 or rwebster@nctimes.com.

Comedy and Cuisine: Stand-up comedy live at the Calypso Cafe, 576 N. Coast Highway 101, Encinitas

Four-course French Caribbean Dinner and show for $39

Call (760) 632-8252

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