SLO Comedy Festival brings laughs to San Luis Obispo

If you ask Dr. Laura Hayden, the healing powers of laughter are no joke.

“There are actual physiological changes in your body when you laugh,” said Hayden, a physical therapist, standup comedian and inspirational speaker based in Los Angeles. “It increases your immune system. … It actually changes the chemicals in your brain.”

Comedy lovers will have plenty of chances to test her theory this week at the sixth annual SLO Comedy Festival. Nearly 50 comedians are lined up to perform Thursday through Sunday at venues around downtown San Luis Obispo.

The lineup includes such standouts as Chris Bennett, Eddie Brill, Henry Phillips and Sam Tripoli.

“It’s a fun festival. I love going up (there),” said Eddie Pence, a Los Angeles comic and actor who is making his fourth appearance at the event. “Every show is a great show.”

Originally from northern Virginia, Pence moved to California at age 23 to attend film school at Chapman University in Orange County.

“I started doing standup comedy as something else to do,” he explained, with no real intention of pursuing comedy as a career. “That became the thing I love to do more than anything.”

In 2004, The Hollywood Reporter singled out Pence as one of the top new talents at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal. A finalist in the Seattle International Comedy Competition, he’s performed at comedy festivals in Las Vegas and Aspen, Colo., and appeared on CBS’s “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” TruTV’s “How to Be a Grown Up” and Comedy Central’s “Live at Gotham” and “Crossballs: The Debate Show.”

“When I was younger, I was really trying to be a physical comedian. I based all my jokes around trying to fall down,” Pence said.

Now he finds humor in fatherhood, pro wrestling and “Star Wars.” He also gets a kick out of the e-commerce site Groupon, which offers deals on such unsavory activities as “laser toenail fungus removal.”

Pence said he gets some of his best ideas “driving around … reading billboards and signs and storefronts.”

Recently, he spotted a sign at a colonic clinic advertising a “private cleanse.” “If I got a colonic, I would expect it would be private,” he quipped. “That’s not really up-selling your product.”

Just as Pence used standup to help him combat social anxiety — “Getting people to laugh was always a good way for me to come out of my shell,” he said — Hayden, who’s also performing at the SLO Comedy Festival, turned to comedy to combat her crippling shyness.

“When I had to read aloud in class in grade school, I would count down to the paragraph I had to read and start practicing,” said the self-described “extreme introvert.” “I would sweat. I would blush. It would take me hours to recover.”

To help conquer her fears, she took speech classes in college and worked as a cocktail waitress. (“Waiting tables, you have to talk to strangers,” she explained.) But it was a standup comedy class 16 years ago that allowed Hayden to discover her gift for making people laugh.

“Comedy has been the most amazing, wonderful thing that happened to me,” said Hayden, who holds a doctorate degree in physical therapy from Boston University. “My life has been improved a billion times in every way possible.”

Comedy, she continued, saved her from career burnout and opened her eyes to new creative opportunities. She’s cracked jokes in 41 states, performed her one-woman show “I Didn’t Mean to Be a Virgin in the ’80s” at Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe — “That was on my bucket list,” she said — and entertained American troops on five military-sponsored tours of the Middle East.

“I’ve met incredible people all over the world,” she said.

Last year, she published a book, “Recipes for a Broken Heart,” which features “the tender stories of the broken-hearted and the comfort foods that soothed their pain.” She also blogs about the psychological power inherent in a pair of high-heeled shoes.

Asked how comedy has helped her physical therapy practice, Hayden said, “It has given me a rounder approach to treating patients with more joy.”

Her patients, meanwhile, have inspired her standup routine — including a bit she calls “Everybody’s Crazy.”

“We all think we’re normal. You just have to spend a little bit of time outside of your regular circle of friends” to discover the contrary, she said with a laugh. “It’s just, ‘Where do you fall on the bell curve?’ ”

This story was originally published March 3, 2016 at 1:51 PM with the headline "SLO Comedy Festival brings laughs to San Luis Obispo."