Nancy Norton now has proof that being a comedian is an act of service.
She’s always intuitively known laughter was healing, but now, close to becoming a certified humor professional in a three-year program through the nonprofit Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor, she’s got research to back her up.
“It gave a new meaning to my whole career as a comedian,” Norton said from a hotel room in Austin, Texas. She’s fresh off a keynote presentation/stand-up performance on the importance of humor in the healing process for an audience of administrators from rural Texas hospitals.
“It’s not just a selfish act of needing attention from strangers — it’s actually healing,” said the Boulder comic. “I am of service. It’s important to me to be of service. It’s in my DNA, and I’m also a codependent.”
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The longtime, award-winning comedian didn’t really need a certification to know the importance of humor, though, or to improve her sense of humor She’s inherently funny and she’s got the hardware to prove it — in 2018 she became the first woman to win the Boston Comedy Festival since it began in 2000. And the following year, she took home top honors at the 40th annual Seattle International Comedy Competition.
“I’m known as an uplifting comic,” Norton said. “It’s uplifting, but with a twist. Some comics are super dark. It’s not like that.”
Norton will perform Friday and Saturday at Loonees Comedy Corner.
It’s not often a comedian comes to her craft via health care, but that’s Norton’s story. Though she knew at 4, after staying up late to watch comedians on “The Tonight Show,” that she wanted to make people laugh and be a comedian, she became a registered nurse. At 27, she found herself doing home care in Hawaii, which included hospice care and going through the dying process with patients.
“It’s a very sacred time when people are dying,” she said. “They don’t waste breath. You get nuggets from people. There’s something beautiful about the transition.”
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And what she heard from her patients, who were peaceful as they hovered on the brink of death, was they weren’t afraid or upset to go because they’d lived full lives and fulfilled their dreams, whether they were career or family-related or something else.
“When patients told me they lived their dream,” Norton said, “I said wait a minute, I forgot my dream.”
The same day she had that particular epiphany she went home, turned on an old episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and watched a commercial for a Hawaiian comedy club that challenged viewers who thought they were funny to enter a contest. So she did. And the club owner hired her on the spot.
After three years of working in the club, learning to do stand-up and bombing along the way, and all while maintaining her nursing career, she decided it was time to pursue comedy full time, but she had to leave Hawaii to do it. She traveled to the mainland, began a search for an ideal comedy home, and landed on Denver, where her fellow comedians welcomed her off-beat, quirky, original humor.
That was decades ago. Nowadays, Norton tours the U.S., headlining clubs, festivals, conferences and events, doing stand-up and keynote presentations. She’s also done USO tours across the globe, has a one-woman show, “The Yellowish-Green Girl” on PBS, and was featured on Nickelodeon’s “NickMom Night Out.”
Her shows these days tackle topics such as being a recovering codependent after two divorces (“I have a type — sociopath”), single parenting and the particular result of being from the Ozarks, but living in a progressive city. She also often includes some health care humor, and sometimes solicits stories from health care workers in the audience.
“I still have PTSD from nursing school,” she said. “Even with the therapeutic humor group I advocate for gallows and dark humor. It’s important for front-line workers, people who have to deal with so much vicarious trauma and stress. That dark humor is healing.”
Contact the writer: 636-0270
Contact the writer: 636-0270
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