If you’re looking for a trauma-informed comic to share about ways humor can be used to de-stress, regulate emotions, and build community-look no further.

Seriously looking more is futile. For now, Kelli’s kind of it.

FIGHT, FLIGHT, FREEZE, LAUGH? [MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION]

In this 50-minute keynote address, nurse and comedian Kelli Dunham will lead participants through a fun and poignant consideration of the question: what’s laughter got to do with it? Anyone who works in the helping professions knows there is nothing funny about the difficulties our clients encounter and the traumas they have experienced, yet we’re always looking for better tools to manage the emotional and logistical impact of our own secondary post-trauma response. Enter intentional humor, stage left. In this keynote we’ll learn the capacity (and limits) of laughter in mitigating our secondary fight, flight and freeze responses, pick up some handy exercises to help build our own resilience and discover ways to decrease the amount of job stress we bring home. And we’ll laugh. A lot.

LAUGHTER AT THE END OF LIFE [MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION]

In this positive, fun and oddly uplifting presentation, Kelli details how patients, family members, and health care providers use humor in dealing with issues of serious illness, death, dying and bereavement. This presentation draws on Kelli’s more than twenty years as a community health nurse, and lived experience as the primary caregiver of two partners who died of cancer.

EVERYONE’S A COMIC [INTERACTIVE PRESENTATION]

In this combination comedic presentation/workshop, Kelli helps audience members recognize and develop their own sense of humor in order to inject positive humor to the workplace and mitigate stressful working conditions. This presentation is not LGBT specific; however, Kelli often comes out as part of the presentation in order to demonstrate how her identity as a gay person has developed and informed her sense of humor. Most suitable for smaller groups. Kelli has conducted this presentation with a broad range of groups from seniors to Buddhist nuns!

HOW ARE YOU STILL STANDING? MITIGATING TRAUMA THROUGH HUMOR: ONE NURSE/COMIC’S JOURNEY [PRESENTATION]

In 2007, Kelli Dunham’s partner Heather MacAllister died of ovarian cancer after a protracted struggle. Two years later, Kelli fell in love with Cheryl Burke, a 38 year old non-smoker, non-drinker vegetarian with no family history of cancer. Two years after they began dating, Cheryl developed Hodgkin’s lymphoma and despite the excellent prognosis, died from complications of chemotherapy. This presentation is Kelli’s response to the frequently asked question “how are you still standing” and deals with themes of mitigating trauma through laughter, enduring care even during intense caregiving and chosen hope. [Please note, this presentation can targeted either for health care providers/students or for lay people, as appropriate]

FREAK OF NURTURE: WHAT DOESN’T KILL US MAKES US…FUNNIER? [INTERACTIVE WRITING WORKSHOP]

When difficulty in our lives stretches us to the breaking point, it often cracks us open to do creative work that we’ve never attempted before. In this workshop, genderqueer nurse ex-nun author and stand up comic Kelli Dunham will help participants grapple with the nuts and bolts relationship between creativity and hardship and use writing prompts to explore how to make comic art from tragic life.

LAUGHTER IS A REVOLUTIONARY GESTURE: HUMOR AS SELF CARE [LGBT FOCUSED WORKSHOP]

As queer and trans people we’ve been the brunt of the joke way too long. We’ve been teased at school, at home and mocked on TV and in all sorts of dominant culture. This workshop is about taking back laughter as a tool of personal empowerment and using it to combat stress, communicate better, turn the rigid gender binary on its head, deal with street harassment and build resilience. You don’t have to consider yourself “a funny person” to participate in this workshop. It’s about discovering your own unique sense of humor. No clown noises required, although there’s a small chance we might all dance the Hokey Pokey together at the end.