The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Merit Kahn walked into her first stand up comedy class in 2014 with one goal: to be funnier in her keynotes. She had no intention of becoming a professional comedian. She was already a keynote speaker, a sales trainer, a certified emotional intelligence expert, a former Gerber baby model, and the youngest general sales manager of a Personal Achievement Radio station in Chicago, a station that literally played Tony Robbins tapes like a music station plays hit songs. She had a vision. She was on the path. Stand up was just a tool.

Then she did seven minutes of original material in front of three hundred people and walked off stage asking herself what just happened. Something had shifted in her body that she could not explain and could not ignore. Not the stand up exactly. Something bigger. The realization that she could take everything she had lived, the breast cancer gene, the preventive mastectomy at forty with a five-year-old at home, the divorce from a narcissist, the secret family she just discovered three weeks before this recording and she was still reeling from it, all of it, and turn it into something that loosened the grip on other people's hardest things.

The result is Optimistic Personality Disorder, a one-woman comedy show she has toured from Moab to Cape Coral, selling out theaters full of people who bought a thirty-dollar ticket to something they had never heard of because the tagline stopped them cold: if a TED talk and a tequila shot had a baby, it would be this show. The show runs through five decades of her life. The sixth decade, the one with the secret family, the engagement ring shopping while he still had a wife, is still being written. She thinks she knows why she could not write it until now.

This episode is for anyone who is gripping something so tightly that there is no room left for what needs to get in. And for anyone who has forgotten that finding the funny is not disrespecting the hard. It is how you survive it.