My Pain is Your Pleasure... by Dan Rosen

“Yo dude, I totally shat myself at my niece’s birthday last year! I’m Emily, by the way.”

This has been a fairly common way for someone to introduce themselves after a performance of my solo comedic storytelling fringe show, Game of Crohn’s. I spend 52 minutes recounting my 20+ years of living with Crohn’s disease, a hilarious incurable inflammatory bowel disease. Every time I meet someone with Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis after a show, it’s like I’m meeting someone from the same fraternity as me. The same smelly fraternity.

Crohn’s was always something I wanted to talk about, and growing up I didn’t know anyone with anything like it. But most of my friends were too grossed out by it, and when I first told people I wanted to tell bowel disease jokes, everyone would make a face and shake their head vigorously.

But then one night I did a spot at the Underground Café, where my friend Hisham was hosting. I told a bunch of jokes that fell flat, but in between I told a story about the first time I had an enema and how it all went wrong. The most embarrassing moment of my life became a punchline that cracked up an audience member. Afterwards, Hisham told me to put together some more Crohn’s stories, so that I’d have a tight five on it that I could perform at the drop of a hat. I got writing and within a couple years I had Game of Crohn’s, which I’ve begun touring at fringe festivals across Canada.

A friend of mine asked me if I was worried that people in the bowel disease community (that’s right, we have a community, wanna fight about it?) would be put off that I haven’t had the worst experience with Crohn’s. I’m lucky: I don’t have a colostomy pouch and my last surgery was quite a few years ago. But when I was performing Game of Crohn’s at London Fringe earlier this year, there was a wheelchair-bound woman in the front row who I’d talked to before the show who’d had experiences much worse than mine. She’d really been through the ringer in a way that I felt made my experience almost trivial by comparison. But she was cracking up throughout the show. She told me she “just needed the laugh.”

Stand-up comedy has brought me to a place where a large part of me actually enjoys having bowel disease because the worst part of my life now makes me laugh. And total strangers will pay their hard-earned money to laugh about it, too. I know it’s not the most pressing issue in society; I know amazing comedians who are powerful voices for the LGBTQ+ community, people of colour, and other marginalised groups.

I want to do that for people with chronic diarrhea. Become the Beyonce of bowel disease. Form my #bowelhive.

Dan Rosen - @DanTheGuyRosen