Welcome to our new series, The Cancer Diaries, brought to you by the Cancer Society. With 1 in 3 Kiwis diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes, the ripple effect of a cancer diagnosis spreads far and wide across Aotearoa. Over the next few months, we are going to bring you a range of stories from people who are affected by cancer: those who have dedicated their life’s work to fighting cancer, those currently living with cancer, those who have lost their most precious loved ones to cancer and those who have recovered and are now experiencing the second act that comes with surviving one of the hardest experiences a person can have. This month, we speak to Dr Jo Prendergast, who used her experience as a psychiatrist, a stand-up comedian and then a cancer survivor to create her new stand-up show, Cancer & Cartwheels. She talks to Capsule about the power of dark humour, finding comedy in the absurd and helping people living with cancer feel less alone in their experience.
You can read our previous stories here.
Capsule x Cancer Society
As the famous saying about humour goes, ‘comedy equals tragedy plus time’. But for Dr Jo Prendergast, a psychiatrist, comedian and cancer survivor, the transition from tragedy to comedy came faster than expected; an off shoot, she says, of being a stand-up comedian. “If we have an accident, before we even hit the ground, we’re thinking, ‘I might be able to use this on stage,’” she jokes. “It is a comedian reflex.”
For Jo, discovering a lump in her breast was the start of her cancer experience. Just five months after having a routine mammogram – and after seeing her GP to check out strange sensations in her torso – she was doing a self-check when she felt a marble-sized lump in her breast. The night before her follow-up appointment with her GP to discuss the results, she was advised to bring a support person with her. She knew what that meant.
After telling her husband the likely outcome and preparing to hear the official news the next day, Jo retreated to her safe space: having a bath and dictating her thoughts into her phone. That was where she thought of a light-hearted joke – “Maybe I’ll be like Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek and have a wall full of wigs, and it’ll be a really fun thing?” – and started to put together a list of things she could do that would feel meaningful.
“This is word-for-word, but then I thought ‘maybe I’ve got a tragic personal story for my next comedy show,’” Jo recalls.
Working as a psychiatrist in Christchurch, Jo has helped her clients – and herself – through a lot of the trauma that Cantabrians have lived through over the past decade plus. The earthquakes, the terrorist attack, the Covid lockdowns. She knew from her experience in those that finding projects to do that felt meaningful was her best way of coping. And all of those learned experiences had prepared her for a stage two breast cancer diagnosis at 52.
“The night before, even before I got the details of my diagnosis, came my brainstorming of silver linings and meaningful things that I could do with this diagnosis,” she says. “I don’t think I would have done that if it had come 10 years earlier, but I’d found that finding meaning and purpose in doing projects had been helpful in other difficult situations. It was my go-to.”
Coupled with that came the comedian’s instinct to find the comedic absurdity of everyday life. One of Jo’s clearest memories of this was when she had to do a PET scan, a full body scan where they are looking to see if you have stage four cancer. “It was very confronting,” she says. “So, I thought ‘through this process, I’m going to try and notice anything that is weird or funny.’”
Going in and out of the scanning machine, she was trying to hear what song that was playing in the background, only to realise it was Christmas carols… in June. So, then she started mentally compiling a list of songs that would be appropriate to play at such a time, like Radioactive by Imagine Dragons, because she was literally radioactive at the time. “That was a lot better for my brain than thinking, ‘I might have stage four cancer, I might have stage four cancer,’ the whole time.”
Throughout her treatments, Jo kept on dictating her thoughts and feelings in a free-flowing manner in her phone. By the end of it, she had 80,000 words. Picking through to find both the funniest jokes and the most relatable content, she created her one-woman show Cancer And Cartwheels, which has sold-out around NZ and Australia and which Jo will be performing at the NZ International Comedy Festival.
“I very purposefully have got ‘cancer’ in the title, so that nobody can come along and say, ‘I didn’t realise this was a cancer show,’” Jo explains. “I was going to call it ‘Boobs Behaving Badly’ which is a lot more fun, but people might think it’s a different kind of show.” She wanted consent from the audience for what they were about to hear – cancer, after all, affects 1 in 3 of us, and she didn’t want to blindside people.
Doing comedy about cancer is by far the most vulnerable her content has ever been, Jo says, but it’s all in aid of making people who have experienced cancer feel less alone and reducing the overall stigma around women’s health.
“I think a lot of the reason why I feel this show is important is I’m trying to talk about the untalkable,” Jo says. “Women’s health is the kind of stuff that can be talked about on stage, it doesn’t need to be vetoed. It’s like ‘dick joke? All good, go for it!’ whereas say the word ‘vagina’ and the whole world goes ‘aaaah! That’s not very comfortable.’”
In her show, Jo has about 15 minutes dedicated to vaginal atrophy – a condition she didn’t know existed, let alone would have been brave enough to speak openly about, in her pre-cancer life. It can be a polarizing part of the show, she says, but it’s worth putting herself out there to help the many women experiencing it feel less alone.
Along the way, Jo has performed for a lot of people who have been through breast cancer, including performing for a room of those living with metastatic stage four cancer. Jo’s writing is designed to see the dark humour in cancer but also normalize how chaotic and overwhelming the cancer experience can be.
“One woman called me over when I was walking down the street in Adelaide and she said, ‘Thank you so much for your show. So many of the things you talked about have been going round and round in my head, and I just felt like I was being stupid. But I came into your show, and you were talking about all those things and I just felt so relieved.’”
That kind of feedback for such an intensely personal show is “extremely validating,” Jo says.
“Going through cancer can be so isolating, especially if you’re going through chemotherapy and you’re immunocompromised, so you’re isolated from people at the time when you need them most,” Jo says.
She’s also passionate about the message that self-checking your breasts is your best line of defense and has already had an audience member tell her that they went home from the show, checked their breasts and found a lump. “It was breast cancer, and she got treatment a lot earlier than she might have otherwise,” Jo says.
As challenging as her cancer experience was, Jo says it was also a culmination of her life’s work so far. “If there was a Venn diagram of Doctor Me, Comedian Me and Breast Cancer Survivor Me, then the centre of the diagram is Cancer And Cartwheels. It’s an overlapping area of what I needed to do with all those different experiences and skills.”
Dr Jo Prendergast’s Cancer & Cartwheels is on as part of the NZ International Comedy Festival, with some ticket sales going to the Cancer Society. For more ticket dates, click here.
If you or someone you know has cancer and would like to talk, contact Cancer Society’s 0800 CANCER (226 237). If you’d like to support the Cancer Society, visit www.cancer.org.nz/donate-now/
