Index:

It Ain’t What It Is, It’s What You Make Of It
or (11 Years Of Freedom From My Right Breast) by Carolyn Buttram

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Jellyfish Boob Stings Cancer Survivor and Other Gilda’s Club Tales
By: Kate Carter

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I Dare You.com Radio -
4 Part Interview with Carolyn

Jellyfish Boob Stings Cancer Survivor and Other Gilda’s Club Tales
By: Kate Carter

“Have you ever tried to chase a boob in the ocean?” asked Carolyn G. Buttram, lifting up a 38DD fake breast. “In and out. In and out. Those damn things float.”

Turns out, those darn things look like jellyfish, too. Buttram is an inspirational humorist who competed at The Punchline Comedy Club for Gilda’s Club Greater Atlanta’s Laff-Off. She waxed poetic—and side-splittingly funny—about a father with young kids who thought her fake boob was a jellyfish.

“So he starts beatin’ the hell out of my fake boob, kids are screaming and every guy in the vicinity comes over to beat my fake boob,” she said. “… He finally decides it’s dead, so he scoops it up and shows it to his children.”

Buttram is a breast cancer survivor—one of many people at the Gilda’s Club Greater Atlanta (GCGA) events who have been touched by cancer. GCGA is working hard on a $1.2 million fundraising campaign to build a Clubhouse in the city of four million, and its Week of Laughter—which includes a Side-Splitting Breakfast, a Laff-Off featuring a stand-up comedian contest and an Interview & A Movie with Gene Wilder—is meant to generate momentum toward the goal. In 2007 alone, GCGA hopes to raise $500,000.

Gilda’s Club was founded in 1993 in honor of Saturday Night Live star Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer. The nonprofit provides emotional and social support to those living with cancer, as well as their family and friends. Clubhouses around the country provide a physical refuge for people living with cancer to socialize, laugh, attend lectures, and slip away to think.

And because Radner was best known for her humor, it only fits that GCGA, in its quest to open a Clubhouse, throws events focused on humor. Many jokes at the Laff-Off were too off-color to write about, but drew rumbles of laughter from the crowd of more than one hundred GCGA supporters. The jokes ran the gamut from cancer humor to physical humor to redneck humor.

Headliner Al Ernst of Dalton, Georgia combined redneck humor with physical humor. Hoisting his pants up to his chest, slumping over and donning a country-fied baseball hat, he imitated a Georgia native giving instructions to foreign runners competing in the Atlanta 1996 Olympics marathon. Needless to say, his antics were nearly incomprehensible, even to ears accustomed to southern accents.