Medical student turned comedian finds medicine in laughter

When Sage Daniels was 17, he tackled his first standup at a local comedy show. That night, he was booed off stage.

"I cried my eyes out when I went home that night, because it was a dream I had and people laughed at it in the wrong way," he recalled.

Being the honour roll student he was, Daniels had a few other options. His teachers encouraged him to pursue medicine, and that's what he decided to do.

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But the goal of becoming a doctor didn't quite go as planned. First of all, he discovered he didn't really like blood. Then, in his third year of pre-med, he lost a number of family and friends within the span of a few months.

He fell into a deep depression. And when he quit laughing, he lost something else.

"Laughter is a really big part of our community and culture," said Daniels, who is from Long Plains First Nation and lives in Winnipeg.

"When I was a kid, there was an elder that told me, 'If you tell a story and … if people don't laugh, you've failed as a storyteller.'

"So being a sarcastic kid, being aboriginal, having my culture have a very strong basis in laughter, when I became sad and depressed I was disconnected from a very large part of myself."

Daniels left pre-med studies.

"On top of losing my goal, my dream job, I lost … my apartment and I lost my friends," he said. "So that piles up and I lost myself for a very long time."

But two years ago, Daniels braved the stage once again, on a whim. He had rewritten and revised the same jokes he had told at his first comedy show.

"People laughed at me and I was laughing and we were laughing together," he said.

"It was a spiritual Zen that just [was] awoken in me and I found myself again. I found the piece of me that was missing for a long time."

Daniels said there are seven sacred healings in Native American culture, and one of those is laughter.

"I would have been a different person if I was a doctor. I'd have been a lot more cynical. I probably wouldn't smile as much as I do right now."

Now, laughter is Sage Daniels's new medicine.