KC Cares: Mending battle scars one laugh at a time

Photo Courtesy of Comedy Vets

The Comedy Vets make a habit of using something funny to deal with a serious issue. These professional comedians do gigs all over, either for veteran audiences or to raise money to combat veteran suicide.

When they’re performing for fellow veterans, it’s often in a veterans’ home or hospital, where it’s easy for the people living there to get isolated, especially if they have no friends or family visiting them.

“After we do our show, we’ve heard back that what’ll happen is the people who hear our show, they’ll start telling jokes to each other,” Comedy Vets national commander Jeff Onyx says. “Neighbors who would never talk to each other start sharing jokes with each other. Then they start playing chess or checkers together, and hanging out together. And they have somebody to walk the long dark road with.”

The sudden change in circumstances when leaving the military leaves a lot of veterans feeling as if they don’t have support.

“When you’re in the military, you have a battle buddy you’re assigned to, somebody you go through things with. When you get out of the military, you don’t have a battle buddy anymore, and this is our way of trying to connect people together so they have a battle buddy,” Onyx says.

Onyx served as a U.S. Army Chaplain, handling suicide watch for soldiers at Fort Jackson in South Carolina.

In addition to performing at clinical settings, the Comedy Vets stage shows for both non-military audiences, as well as at places that have large veteran populations in the community, such as American Legion and VFW posts.

“The comedians, because they’re all veterans, can tell stories that the audience can relate to specifically. A lot of them talk about their own history and find different ways to put a humorous twist on it. A lot of it’s very relatable to the veteran audience, where they’re poking fun at a situation from when they were in the military,” Rick McKenna, post commander of VFW Post 7397 in Lenexa says.

McKenna says he saw several people who attended a Comedy Vets show in November, come back and become members at the post.

“We’re trying to encourage, through the comedy shows and humor, people bringing people out to the events who are alone. They don’t go anywhere. They stay at home; they isolate themselves,” Onyx says. “Isolation will kill you. That’s the biggest threat to life, in most of the situations where people have committed suicide.”

Although the performers were already comedians, the group got started in 2016 after a friend of Onyx’s died by suicide.

Since then, they’ve been performing shows and collecting donations for suicide prevention charities with some promotional help from the Cosentino’s Price Chopper chain.

Onyx says the group now has 15 comedians, normally with three performing at any given gig, but they’re always looking for more. Usually, all the comedians are veterans, but they will occasionally work with a non-veteran comedian.

One of the comedians is Richie King, who served both in the Marines and the National Guard, and has been a comedian for more than 30 years. He says he loves doing everything from Donald Duck impressions to more adult material.

The humor itself for all the comedians is not necessarily military-focused, but they sometimes do related material upon request.

“We have a normal rotation, like you go to a comedy club and there’s generally the opener, the feature and then the headliner. We try to make a line-up like that to give as close to what a comedy club show would be for people who can’t go to a comedy club,” Onyx says.

They do shows all around the metro, but also in different states, usually from March to October. Comedians do get paid for their time, but they always need volunteers when they go to bigger events to staff their information booth and collect donations while they’re on stage.
When they do events that are open to the public, they post them on their Facebook page.

Onyx has run into some difficulties promoting things on Facebook, because, he says that using the key words “veteran suicide prevention” automatically limit the number of people who see it. He finds ways to work around it because the impact is worth it.

“The favorite memory was when I actually got to see that one guy everyone was saying, ‘He never talks to anyone. He never smiles, never laughs. He’s always angry and always hurt.’ Seeing that guy smile and laugh and talk to other people—that was the highlight of the whole thing,” Onyx says.