Why I Laugh About T1D (And Why You Should Too)
Comedian Sam Morrison built a solo show out of his type 1 diagnosis. After four decades of T1D, I understand exactly why humor might be the healthiest coping tool we have.
“Is that bad?”
The first time I saw comedian Sam Morrison deliver the line — “Your blood sugar is 600 mg/dL.” “Is that bad?” — I laughed hard enough that I had to pause the video and catch my breath. Then I sat with it for a long time.
I was diagnosed in 1983. I was three years old. My mother was the one who got the 600-plus number dropped on her, in a hospital corridor, without a punchline to soften it. Four decades on, I am still managing the condition that started in that corridor, and I have learned something the research is only now catching up to: the T1Ds I know who have lasted this long all share some version of a very dark sense of humor.
Morrison is a 30-something stand-up who turned his 2021 diagnosis into a solo show called Sugar Daddy, co-produced by Billy Porter and Alan Cumming. I am a middle-aged man with a Dexcom on his arm who thinks about his pancreas more than any one person should. We have different stages. We have the same survival mechanism.
What Morrison actually did
Morrison was diagnosed in the worst year of his life. His boyfriend, Jonathan Kreissman, had died from COVID-19 earlier in 2021. His physician even wondered out loud whether the grief may have helped trigger his T1D — a gut punch on top of a gut punch.
Yet even in the hospital, he was writing jokes. “There were funny things happening and I was writing jokes almost immediately,” he told diaTribe. The first insulin injection, the late-night YouTube tutorials on dosing, the quiet terror that this was the rest of his life — all of it was going into the notebook while it was still happening to him.
Two years later that notebook became Sugar Daddy, a raunchy, tender, unapologetically honest hour about grief, sex, and managing type 1 diabetes on a comedy stage. The show sold out. The response surprised him.
“I had no idea it was going to be this overwhelming, supportive, and that so many people would connect to it.”
For audience members with T1D, the show was a mirror. For everyone else, it was a window. That double function — mirror for us, window for them — is the thing comedy does better than almost any other medium, and it is why I want to talk about it.
Why the research agrees
It is tempting to treat this as just a good story. It is more than that. A 2020 systematic review of humor as a coping strategy found that adaptive humor — self-deprecating and affiliative, the kind Morrison uses — is consistently associated with lower depression and anxiety in people living with chronic illness. The ADA’s own position statement on psychosocial care names emotion-focused coping (of which humor is a classic example) as a protective factor against diabetes burnout.
Specifically for T1D, a 2021 study in Diabetes Care tracked distress and depression in adults with type 1 and found that those who reported using social and emotional coping strategies — humor, peer support, venting with people who “get it” — had measurably lower distress scores at follow-up. Not a cure. A cushion.
None of that is a prescription to start doing stand-up. But it does mean that when you catch yourself joking about your CGM alarm going off during sex, or your Omnipod falling off mid-shower, or the fact that you have to eat candy to cure a low — you are not being flippant. You are running a coping strategy that the literature quietly agrees with.
Diabetes takes the stage, literally
Something that struck me watching interviews with Morrison: his diabetes does not stay in the material. It shows up in the show itself. A CGM alarm goes off mid-set and he tells the audience it is “just an amber alert”. He has gone low on stage and had to slow down to think. In Denver he stopped a show to take an insulin dose at 300 mg/dL and walked the crowd through what he was doing.
That last one is the move that matters to me. The sanitized, awareness-ribbon version of T1D that shows up in campaigns does not look like anything my real Tuesday looks like. The real version is the one where your body interrupts you, loudly, in the middle of a meeting or a run or a punchline, and you stop what you are doing because it is not optional.
Over the years I have finger-pricked at weddings, bolused at wakes, and once eaten honey from the jar at 2 a.m. at a friend’s house while everyone else slept. When Morrison does it on stage in front of a thousand strangers, what he is giving the room is not awareness. It is normalcy. There is a difference, and the second one is rarer and more useful.
Humor as a wrecking ball for stigma
The hardest part of T1D has rarely been the injections. It has been the stigma — the assumption I caused it, the unsolicited dietary advice, the cousin who asks if I have “tried cinnamon”. For children and teens in particular, diabetes stigma is a documented risk factor for worse glycemic outcomes because hiding the condition gets in the way of managing it.
Comedy done well dismantles that. Morrison does not punch down; he invites the audience to laugh with the absurdity of the condition, not at the people living with it. When he asks, on stage, “Did Willy Wonka invent diabetes?” — the joke only lands because he has made the audience complicit in the weirdness of treating a disease with Skittles. By the time the laugh arrives, the stigma has nothing left to hold.
This is the same engine driving diaTribe’s Spoonful of Laughter initiative, which pairs comedians living with diabetes with audiences who need to stop being afraid of them. The public-health logic is simple: familiarity is the opposite of stigma, and comedy is one of the fastest familiarity engines humans have ever built.
What I actually laugh about, day to day
You do not need to be a comedian for any of this to work. You need a running joke, a safe audience, and the nerve to name what is actually happening. The humor I run on, after a lifetime with this disease:
1. The absurd names of the tools
Omnipod. Dexcom. Freestyle Libre. Nerds Rope as medicine. The whole naming convention of diabetes tech sounds like a brainstorming session at a cartoon studio. Saying that out loud to a friend, for the 200th time, does not make the tech any less important. It makes the tech less scary to someone who just got diagnosed.
2. The group chats
My closest T1D friendships live in a series of text threads where we send each other screenshots of our worst overnight CGM graphs with the caption “rate my trend”. It is morbid. It is funny. And on the nights when it is neither, those threads are also where we tell each other this was hard, I am not okay, please check on me. Comedy clears the runway for those sentences.
3. The specific brands and specific numbers
Nothing defuses a medical encounter faster than being specific. “I was at 2.8 holding a slice of pizza and a glucose tab in the same hand” is a joke and a diagnostic report. My endocrinologist laughs. She also writes it down. Both things can be true.
4. Redirecting the bad advice
When someone tells me I can cure T1D with essential oils, I have learned to respond with something short, polite, and absurd enough to end the conversation — not with anger. The anger is for later, privately. The comedy is for the moment. My blood pressure thanks me.
When humor is not enough
I need to be honest about the limit. If you are in a dark place with your diabetes — if the fear of a hypo is keeping you from exercising, if you are skipping insulin because you cannot face the injections, if the numbers on your CGM feel like a verdict every time you look — a joke will not carry that weight. No coping tool is a substitute for a mental-health professional who understands chronic illness.
Comedy is a shock absorber. It softens the ride. It does not stop the car. If the car feels like it is going off the road, call your diabetes team and ask for a referral. The best endocrinologists I have worked with across four decades have been the ones who treated mental health the same way they treated A1C — as a number that actually matters.
Give yourself permission to laugh
Living with T1D is relentless. It does not have to be joyless. Sam Morrison’s journey from a hospital bed diagnosis to a sold-out theatre shows that humor can coexist with the serious business of managing a chronic condition — and the research agrees with him. Whether your outlet is stand-up, memes, or a well-timed Omnipod joke at dinner, giving yourself permission to laugh is not weakness — it is strategy.
— John Chitta
This article builds on diaTribe Foundation’s Spoonful of Laughter profile of Sam Morrison and the 2020 systematic review of humor as a coping strategy in PubMed. Views on humor as a coping tool reflect four decades of personal experience living with type 1 diabetes since my 1983 diagnosis, not clinical advice. If you are struggling with diabetes distress or depression, please contact your care team or a licensed mental-health professional.
References
- Psychosocial care for people with diabetes: A position statement of the American Diabetes Association · PubMed (Diabetes Care position statement)
- Diabetes Distress and Mental Health in Adults With Type 1 Diabetes · ADA Diabetes Care (2021)
- Humor as a coping strategy: A systematic review of the literature · PubMed (2020 systematic review)
- Spoonful of Laughter — challenging diabetes stigma through comedy · diaTribe Foundation
- Problem and Emotion-Focused Coping in Adults With Type 1 Diabetes · PubMed Central (Journal of Diabetes Research)