Live from Wealthy Street

Matt Sharpe with StandUp Therapy joins us to discuss Live From Wealthy Street - a comedy show to benefit the Kent County Mental Health Foundation. 

Tickets can be found here: https://standuptherapy.live/live-from-wealthy-street/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Brett sometimes calls me out because I was the only
guy in the three high schools that I went to
that wrestled and played tennis. Yeah. Our next guest is
Matt Sharp. This is West Michigan's Morning News, Steve Kelly
and Brett Bikita is a practicing psychotherapist and stand up comic.
You don't hear that very often now, But Matt, thank

(00:21):
you so much for joining us on West Michigan's Morning News.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Well, thank you so much for having us. Great to
be here with you guys.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Next week, live from Wealthy Street, Stand Up Therapy presents
some really big artists and a couple that you're going
to know that have been on this show for decades.
But Matt talked to us a little bit about stand
up therapy and what comedy brings to the world of
mental health. The fundraiser is for.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Be nice, absolutely, but this is going to be such
an incredibly fun event. Let me talk about that just
for a siting, because I get to be one of
the featured comics, which I'm looking forward to. Our opening
act is the one and only Rick Weiss to our
plant doctor friend, and Brian Atkinson is gonna be our
closing headliner. All great comics, and we do have an

(01:11):
incredibly special comedy debut, Miss Terry Debor, our meteorologist friend,
and so she is actually people have asked is she
a host or she just gonna get up and talk. No,
she is doing a comedy set. She's been working on
her material. We've gotten to work with her on some
of it. It's going to be great. She's actually incredibly funny.
We're so looking forward to this.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
Well, we've had her on our show for one hundred
years before she traped off for other adventures, and now
we know what those were, so I can't wait to
hear that next week.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
Absolutely, it's going to be a very fun show and
we are very excited. We're going to be raising some
money for the Mental Health Foundation to be nice people,
and so we're just excited about that as well. The
idea behind Stand Up Therapy Live is, obviously we want
to use humor in comedy and we want to bring
a little awareness and mental health because honestly, when we
laugh and we can have fun and enjoy and just smile,

(02:05):
we have so many wonderful things that happen to us
in our body physically with stress release and with oxygenation
of our blood, we just feel better emotionally, and if
we're honest, most of us usually like to be around
happy people more than not so happy people. So it's
fun to just be laughing in and finding the humor
of life.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
So, Matt, I was going to bring that up, because
you must have an exceptionally unique perspective on this doing
what you do for your day job, next to being
a comedian. But that age old adage that laughter is
the best medicine. Do you really truly see that?

Speaker 2 (02:39):
You know, it's fun for me as a therapist. You know,
I obviously laugh a lot with my clients, not that
we ever make fun of them or their situations. But
one of the tools that we use in therapy is
called cognitive reframing, just helping people understand their situation from
a slightly different perspective. And that's really what comedy and

(03:00):
humor does is it forces us to reconsider what we
just assume about a situation. And when we can do
that in a fun and surprising way, you know, laughter
is our natural response to that, So we do have
a lot of fun. Of course, people do ask me
if I use stories from my clients as joke material,
and of course not. I mean obviously anyone who's in

(03:21):
therapy is a brave individual and that and you know,
hippo violations, you know, we try to avoid those at
all costs.

Speaker 4 (03:28):
Matt, one of the things I wanted to throw out
to you is, just because this is kind of a
new event, what should people expect. Our families welcome. As
far as kids, I know, it's clean as far as
a clean netted comedy or is it more kind of
an adult based thing.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah, everybody who is going to be performing is doing
clean comedy. So there's no no knaughty words and no
nothing that's going to make you need a shower afterwards.
So we are telling people it is a family friendly event,
but we are we generally recommend, you know, kids, you know,
thirteen and up, not because of the content, but just
you know, we need a little bit of life experience

(04:04):
to get some of the jokes, and so younger kids,
you know, it's they just not they can't always follow
what we're doing. So but as far as content wise,
it can be clean. Families are welcome. If families want
to buy tickets, I suggest a hurry. We are starting
to get down to it and tickets are starting to
disappear on US.

Speaker 1 (04:23):
I have my tickets for next Wednesday at Wealthy Theater,
the historic Wealthy Theater. As we mentioned, Rick Weis will
be there. Terry Deboor is making her comedic debut, amongst others,
Matt Sharp with stand up therapy. Great stuff. Thank you
for your help

Speaker 2 (04:39):
Today, Thank you for having me, guys appreciate it.