Army Wife Comic Turns Pain Into Laughs

May 28, 2007 — -- Jan Donahue is married to a man she seldom sees.

Her husband, Minnesota National Guard Spec. Kevin Donahue, has been deployed in Iraq for the last 15 months.

During that time, Donahue has (in no particular order) lost her job, used up all of her retirement money, had surgery for kidney stones, raised two teenage boys and tried to keep the bank from foreclosing on her home.

"There was a couple of days there — there was really no reason for me to continue going on with life. I just had had it," Donahue said.

Then a few weeks ago came news from Iraq that her husband wasn't coming home as planned -- his tour had been extended several months.

Donahue fell into a deep depression, but pills and other forms of therapy were getting her nowhere.

So, she tried something different to cure her depression — something the medicines could never do.

For the last two months, Donahue has been making fun of the lonely life she and other military spouses lead, in a stand-up comedy act that she's been honing in performances around Rochester, Minn.

Taking Her Show on the Road

In her act, she makes fun of her own depression: "There I sat in front of the TV till five or six at night. Then I got up and turned it on."

Her on-again, off-again preparations for her husband's homecoming are grist for her act.

"I went out and bought myself a new razor. Thought I better practice, you know," she jokes about shaving her legs.

And there's the frustration of dealing with the military bureaucracy: "And what is up with the military acronyms? They sit down and they type the alphabet and we're supposed to figure it out."

Donahue found that turning her pain into comedy was therapeutic.

"What makes you the angriest and hurts you the most is what you can turn around and make funny," she told ABC News.

Donahue says she has two missions: to remind everyone that there's still a war on, and to buck up the families directly affected by it.

"It was everything I was going through," said one audience member who saw Donahue's show. "Just having somebody put it into a comedy perspective instead of everybody just saying, 'Oh, he's gone.'"

Jan's husband is due home in September. In the meantime, she's branching out, with a gig at the Improv Comedy Club in Los Angeles next month.