2015 Creative Resolutions: Finding the Funny in a Cancer Diagnosis
At the end of last year, we asked for your creative resolutions for 2015. We’ve created a Facebook group for all our listeners to track their progress through the year, and we are also following four people on our show, including a reggae DJ in Ohio, a calligrapher in Washington State, a diorama artist in Oakland, and an aspiring director and screenwriter in New York.
“I don’t want to say laughter is the best medicine, because that’s cheesy, but it has become my defense mechanism.” — Joseph Riedel
Joseph Riedel’s dreams of working in television were interrupted by the diagnosis of a brain tumor just before his 25th birthday. So he decided to turn his experience into a comedy web series. “I don’t want to say laughter is the best medicine, because that’s cheesy, but it has become my defense mechanism,” Joseph says.
Read an excerpt from the pilot.
Now that he’s recovered from a successful surgery, Joseph has written the screenplay, hired a crew, and started filming the first episode of A Good Sense of Tumor. He’s not afraid to incorporate his nerdiness into the show. “Like when Louie talks out issues on his show around a poker table, I do the same around a Dungeons & Dragons setup,” he says.
“I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything this year that’s super extraordinary,” Joseph says. “What I’ve done is, for me, a very ordinary thing, which is to take a very bad situation and try to deflect with humor.”
