Live to Laugh with Zane HelburgLive to Laugh with Zane Helburg
The Elevate Experience
Comedian Zane Helberg shares how he went from blackout drinking to performing stand-up in rehabs, using humour to show that sobriety can still be fun. The conversation touches on long-term recovery, pandemic isolation, and the hard work behind turning a sober passion into a career.
1:09:40•24 May 2022
Live to Laugh: Zane Helberg on Comedy, Rehab Shows and Staying Sober
Episode Overview
- Laughter can give people in treatment a real experience of having fun sober, without trying to “save” or fix anyone.
- You don’t have to change your personality to stay sober; you can keep your humour, opinions and edge without substances.
- Long-term sobriety involves ongoing work and emotional lows, not just the early excitement of getting clean.
- The pandemic has intensified isolation for many in recovery, but also created new ways to connect, such as online comedy shows.
- Turning a passion into a livelihood often means relentless unglamorous work, like constant outreach and repeated reinvention.
“I just want to come here and show people that they can still have a good time… you don’t have to put drugs and alcohol in your body.”
Get ready to be moved by real-life accounts of addiction, relapse, and belly laughs as stand-up comic Zane Helberg chats with hosts Angie Manson and Dallas Terrell. A self-described blackout drunk turned sober performer, Zane talks through how years of chaos with drugs and alcohol eventually pushed him into recovery in 2012, and how that decision completely shifted both his life and his comedy.
You’ll hear how his rehab comedy project, Laugh to Live, started with a tiny detox show where just two people showed up – including a young man kicking heroin who said he’d never thought he could enjoy anything sober. That moment lit the spark for Zane to keep bringing humour into treatment settings, not to "fix" anyone, but to prove that sobriety doesn’t have to feel like a punishment.
As he puts it, he just wants to show people "this isn’t a death sentence… you can still be dirty, you can still have an opinion" without using. The conversation also looks honestly at the tough bits of long-term sobriety: emotional lows after the early “pink cloud”, friends dying from overdose, and facing the sheer grind of “still being sober” year after year.
Zane shares how the pandemic magnified isolation, yet opened new doors for Zoom comedy shows in rehabs across the US, allowing him to reach more people from his living room. Angie and Dallas compare notes with Zane on purpose, work ethic, and doing the unglamorous stuff (like making 60–70 cold calls in a day) to keep a recovery-centred passion alive.
If you’ve ever wondered whether life can be both sober and genuinely fun, this conversation might leave you asking: what if laughter is part of your recovery toolkit too?
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