(Editor’s note: The date has been updated. Because of Hurricane Helene, this event has been rescheduled for Dec. 7, 2024)
Some of the funniest people comedian Nurse Blake knows are the ones who pack his audiences.
“Nurses are probably some of the funniest people out there because we see life and death in such a raw way where we have to kind of use humor to get through. To me, nurses are the funniest. We’re also the most inappropriate because we have a dark sense of humor,” said the comedian, during a recent phone interview. He will bring his Shock Advised Tour to the Miller Theater Dec. 7.
The comedian who does actually work in health care has nearly two million Facebook followers and more one million followers on Instagram. He started posting reels in 2017.
His dad was a respiratory therapist. Going into the medical field was never not an option for him, but Nurse Blake saw nursing as providing more opportunities. The reels were a by-product – a coping mechanism.
“I started posting videos in 2017. People were watching them in the Philippines, Europe and Australia. I thought what I was going through was so specific to just me. Nurses all over the world go through the same things. It made me feel less alone. Doing this job of making videos, it saved my life when I was in a dark place. It made me feel less alone and keeps making me feel less alone,” he said.
But he didn’t save his sense of humor for the other nurses on the job. He also used it with his patients and their families
“I started bringing it to my patients when they were struggling with health issues…I would always joke around and be as real as I could be. It also helped me build really great rapport with them because at the end of the day, they’re not going to remember what medications we did or what procedures we did, it’s how we made them feel,” he said.
COVID was a turning point in many ways. It exposed a nursing shortage and shed light on nurse’s work conditions in hospital settings.
It also showed him just how important comedy was. Early in the pandemic, he paused with his videos because of the uncertainty of the virus. But nurses missed the content and told him that they needed his humor.
Now a nurse educator, he’s also a nurse advocate. He has been known to show up at picket lines as a sign of solidarity for striking nurses. He calls strikes the highest form of patient advocacy because nurses only strike when all other avenues have been exhausted.
He said he’ll probably never work in a hospital again because “I have a really big mouth and would never get through the HR process,” but he’s there to provide the comic relief for those who do.
And people don’t have to be nurses to enjoy his comedy. Nurses are regular people with similar struggles, he said.
He jokingly gives advice to anyone with a medical emergency on Sept. 29 to “have the ambulance drop you off at the theater, and we’ll take care of you there.”
Charmain Z. Brackett, the publisher of Augusta Good News and Inspiring: Women of Augusta, has covered Augusta’s news for more than 35 years and is a Georgia Press Association award winner. Reach her at charmain@augustagoodnews.com. Sign up for the newsletter here.
