Comedy Helped Hank Green Get Through Chemo. He Hopes His First Comedy Special Can Help Everyone Else

Hank and John Green began influencing online viewing long before we tied the word influencer to social media, launching their Vlogbrothers YouTube channel on Jan. 1, 2007, 17 years, 3.77 million subscribers and almost a billion views ago.

Three years later, the brothers founded VidCon, the first and largest global gathering of YouTubers, growing since 2010 to include video pioneers, stars and would-be stars on the platform that have caught and held our attention since then, from Vine to Facebook to Twitch to Instagram to TikTok.

Hank Green also co-created The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a YouTube adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that in 2013 became the first webseries to win an Emmy (for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media – Original Interactive Program). Hank, who majored in biochemistry in college, then earned his master’s degree in environmental studies from the University of Montana, has 15.7 million subscribers watching him host the educational Crash Course series on YouTube, and another 7.94 million subscribers watching him host SciShow, to go along with 7.94M TikTok followers, 1.7M Instagram followers, and 1.6M still feeding on his X/Twitter account.

Although you may have laughed more than once at his videos, Hank Green has never properly toured as a stand-up comedian until this past year, when he decided to present his diagnosis and recovery from Hodgkin lymphoma as stand-up. His special, Pissing Out Cancer, comes out Friday, June 21, as the first of six comedy specials in the can already for Dropout, the subscription streaming platform that rose out of the ashes of CollegeHumor.

Green joined Decider over Zoom to talk about making his debut comedy special, making it for Dropout, how he can still enjoy making videos for any brand of social media in 2024, and what he expects to see when he attends his first VidCon in four years at the end of June in Anaheim.

DECIDER: There’s an old adage ascribed to Andy Warhol that everyone will enjoy 15 minutes of fame. In our current social media age, are we looking at a situation where everyone will eventually have their own comedy special?

HANK GREEN: I don’t think that will be the case just based on there’s easier things to do.

That’s not what most people think. Most people now think doing comedy is easy. 

No, I don’t think it is. Having done it, I don’t think it is, but also having watched other people try to make that leap and think that it’s going to be easy. If you think it’s gonna be easy, you’re not gonna be good, basically. So I was actually very lucky to have had a friend in Missoula who is a professional comic and became my coach worked with me on everything from, you know, tiny little jokes to structural stuff to how I’m standing on the stage. We basically just rented a theater every Monday night, the Roxy in Missoula, and did it for weeks and weeks, for like eight weeks in a row, nine weeks in a row, and sometimes the same people showed up, but usually it was a different audience every night, and I went from 10 minutes to 60 in that time, and then just kind of kept grinding away on it. And I was in a really weird headspace at that point, because I was just off chemo, but it was the only thing I was thinking about

Was a comedy special ever something you had thought about before the cancer diagnosis? Or was it just going through this experience that made you think, I need to tell this story in this particular way?

I had thought about doing stand-up before, and had been encouraged away from it by a number of people who’ve done it. It is a special sort of misery, very funny sort of misery. And I have all kinds of other things that I can do. Like it’s much easier to do like an hourlong live podcast. You know, just show up, set the mics up, answer questions, do your bits. And if something funny happens, it happens. It’s much harder to be in a situation where if there’s like a 15-second gap where no one’s laughing, something’s gone wrong. And that actually turns out to be like something you have to very carefully structure and spend a lot of time on. So I thought about doing stand-up. I’d done like five, 10 minutes here and there, but more in the frame of emceeing or what you call banter, ’cause I was in a band for a while. So like between-song banter, which, you know, over the course of a tour would sort of turn into more funny bits. I had not ever thought about it seriously until honestly, while I was doing chemo, one of the only pieces of media I could enjoy was stand -up because my short-term memory was so bad that even a 22-minute-long sitcom, I’d lose interest. And TikToks had become so vacuous and empty. Once you’re on TikTok for more than four hours a day ’cause you’re stuck in bed and miserable, you can’t enjoy it anymore. But stand-up was great because even if you kind of forgot what happened in the first half, it’s still funny the whole time. Like you only have to remember what’s going on for like five-minute bits. And I just, because I was watching so much stand-up ’cause it was the only thing that brought me any joy. I started to analyze it in a way I hadn’t before and try and understand it in a way I hadn’t before.

Wait. How do limit your TikTok viewing to less than four hours? Many of us need to know!

Yeah, the real trick is to sort of watch videos you hate and then TikTok will continue giving you videos that you hate. 

That is how TikTok works. I just talked to Sam Reich before hopping on this Zoom with you and he told me that you initially sent a rough cut of your special to him, not hoping to be the first special on Dropout, but just looking for his advice. 

I don’t think I knew that they were doing comedy. Like I don’t think that I knew Dropout Presents existed. Like I had said to Sam, you guys should do stand-up. And he was like, it’s complicated and hard. Comedians are weird about it. The problem with a special, and I am now in this world is that once you do it, you can’t tour it anymore. And you make most of your money touring the comedy. Like I make more money touring it than I got from Dropout. So like once you do this special, you can’t do the material anymore. And so, he explained that to me as a person who never toured with comedy before. And I was like, oh yeah, that makes sense. But I think that makes a ton of sense for them.

And I did want to hear, I’d send it to a few funny friends of mine, people who are just sort of funny people and people who do stand-up. ‘Cause I wanted to, like, the feedback I was getting in the room, you know, the audience seemed very happy. The feedback I got after the shows were very happy, but that’s like, you know, I’ve got fans. I’ve got people. I’m a guy who has like people who are gonna walk into the room and have a good time, kind of no matter what I do. And so I wanted to send it to people and be like, what do you actually think of this? I filmed every one of the ones I did at the Roxy so that I could be like a football player, go over the tapes and be like, what worked, what didn’t work? It’s such a like navel-gazey experience. I listened to my shit so much while I was building it. It’s like listening to my own comedy as a podcast, the same jokes over and over and over again. And like it’s wild, you tell a joke with a very slightly different inflection and it falls flat. There’s a lot of learning and spending time, but I recorded all of them, sent them out to some people who I respected and the feedback that I got back was good. So that’s mostly what I wanted. I thought maybe I would just film like a one or two-camera shoot of me doing it in Missoula, and then I would put it out. Like I did want to put it out, but I did not imagine that it would look like the thing that Dropout has made.

How has going through this entire process of touring and then filming and editing a stand-up special, how has that potentially changed how you approach TikTok or other social media, which you still do on the regular? 

I mean, I will say that it made me less interested in it, because (stand-up) was a very fulfilling creative outlet. And while I was doing it, it scratched that same itch. And also maybe in like a healthier way, where I wasn’t, so like, creating on the internet is a specific thing, it’s a specific skill, it’s a specific experience, and there’s an amount of, and like this isn’t, I hope this doesn’t come off sounding like comedians complaining that they can’t say anything, because obviously you could make lots of jokes, but there’s an amount of like, you do have to keep in mind all 100,000 people or 10 million who are gonna see the TikTok. And that’s holding space for a lot of different experiences that when you’re doing it for a room of, you know, like I did a double show in San Diego. And the first show, it’s six o’clock and the audience was like a six o’clock audience and then the second show was at nine o’clock and that audience was a nine o’clock audience so that second show had an extended joke about two guys, to cure each other’s bowel diseases, one guy with constipation, one guy with diarrhea just shitting back and forth into each other’s asses which like is not a six o’clock joke, it’s a nine o’clock joke, and like that’s nice to have.

9 p.m.? More like 9 BM. Sorry. It was in my head, I had to get it out. 

(laughs) And so there is, especially when it’s like an individual room, and there’s only 100 or 200 people in there, there’s just sort of more safety as a creator to experiment. And like that, this safety is less there on the day when you’re filming the special and you want to sort of stay more on script. But that safety allows for a risk-taking that is very inspiring and you make mistakes. We all make mistakes. And so you have to leave room for making mistakes, whether that’s like just not being funny, which also happens when you’re taking risks like that, or whether it’s like, oh, I told a joke that made somebody feel sad, or I told a joke in a way that made somebody feel sad. And I also learned that in that process. Like there’s a joke in the special, it’s not really a joke, but it’s, the second worst part of getting diagnosed with cancer is that you have to call your mom, unless your mom is dead, in which case the second worst part is that you can’t call your mom. And I used to tell that as a joke, but then I realized I was making people sad. And so instead, I just turned that into like an acknowledgement. 

Right, but it’s gonna be tough no matter what. 

Yeah, you get to call your mom as a nicer, as a, you know, like it’s funny to get to frame it in different ways.

I think you really hit the proverbial nail on the head, though, with the real kind of existential issue facing comedians and social media. When you perform live stand-up comedy, like you said, you’re performing for those 200 people or 2,000 people, you’re performing for a specific audience who’s all in in on it. It’s a social contract. And you can also gauge in real time if someone is offended. Social media takes that completely out of context, presenting your joke to complete strangers. 

It’s a real problem. I’ve seen comedians make mistakes where they get mad and they are mean onstage. And in that moment, I don’t think they thought they were doing the right thing. I think that they were having an emotional experience. And like, when I see someone who’s having an emotional experience, as a human in a moment where they’re like, they can’t log off. They’re on the stage. You know, they’re doing their job. I have grace for that kind of mistake. I think the thing that’s really annoying about it, taking this weird structure of society right now and being like and thus the real problem is we can no longer make jokes In a world where there’s like more jokes than have ever been joked, we have so many jokes right now. There’s so much funny stuff in the world, right? Like there are more successful working comedians right now, probably than ever there ever have been. Like this is like a renaissance moment for comedy. There’s so much good stuff going on.

And you know, it’s hard to leverage TikTok success into ticket sales, but like it’s not impossible, people do it. And like I have discovered comics on TikTok who I then went and have seen in real life and they’re rooms full of people and it’s very exciting, like a potential marketing vehicle. But it is wild that you do kind of, you don’t have to, but a lot of people are like, it’s harder to do it without doing that (TikTok and other socials) now. It is interesting. But I don’t make internet videos strategically. I do it because it like satisfies my monkey brain and doing this satisfied this, like a lot of the same urges. And I like woke up one day and I was like, I haven’t posted on TikTok in six days. Like I need to post something. And there’s also like an element of like, for me personally, TikTok has become less fun as the culture has itself become less fun. There’s a lot more sort of like we’re trying like things. There’s a lot more of a sort of importantness, and it’s taking itself seriously, which is a totally normal trajectory for a social media platform And I feel less as a 44-year-old man. I feel sort of less like that’s my space. 

Do you feel though that, as you described, your desire to even post videos 17 years later is a sign that you have somehow avoided that online content fatigue that I’ve seen inflict a lot of my friends who who were early YouTubers and then realize, oh I’m stuck in this prison of I have to keep making “content”? 

Yeah, I don’t know how I have overcome that fatigue, but I think there’s a few things. Like we don’t work very hard on our videos on Vlogbrothers, which is like the core foundation for the thing, that they aren’t that much work. So there’s like space throughout the rest of the week for other interesting creative projects, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t good, like they are also, while not being that much work for me. It’s like maybe a day of work a week. They are interesting and they are, it is more about the relationship between the content and the people watching it than it is about the content itself. And that is so much more interesting to me. Like, you kind of think of it like a person is in the universe, like probably one of the most complicated things aside from other people that we know of, like in the known universe, the most complex thing that we know of, aside from like elephants and octopuses and people. But like an order of magnitude more interesting than that is like one person talking to another person is like the sort of network that exists between us that sort of informs all of our decisions and builds whatever it is that society and civilization and culture are. For me, if you imagine like the piece of content as the thing then like that’s great, that’s like one of the most complicated things in the known universe but then if you imagine the relationship between the content and the people then that’s like another 10 times more interesting, because it’s like, how is that being interpreted by all of these individual people and what is it creating in the world and that is the thing that that Vlogbrothers has always been about, and that has never stopped being interesting though it has at times been, I’ve been close to burnout in that space when it’s been like full of friction for some reason like when you know, the audience wants something different than what we want to do. And I think that a lot of creators have that problem. Or because it just feels like the numbers are going down unexplainably because algorithms are changing or people’s preferences are changing. But like, we just haven’t had that much of that. And I think in part it’s because we are, we culturally look like the kinds of people who are leaders. like we’re white guys and so we get less confused hate for no reason than a lot of the women I know and people of color I know who’ve been in similar positions who burned out because they just get, there’s just more friction. There’s just more people who are consuming their content in bad faith. I think that like John and I were particularly well set-up to not have that particular experience.

 Right. As white guys, the hate we get is usually in good faith.

Oftentimes, not always! But like there’s a higher chance and that it’s easier to take it seriously because of that. Yeah. 

Except perhaps when you talk about Twitter/X, which leads me to the question posed by one of your most recent videos. Why are you still on X? 

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That’s a great question. I don’t know. Habit is a big piece of it. I don’t get much out of it right now. And I have been thinking about different ways to try and scratch that itch. Because again, I do this because of my monkey brain, not because of strategy. And one of those is, we started a newsletter, which is sort of very similar. And it’s like, I can have a place to say the things I think. We’ll get feedback. If I just say it to my wall, it’s not scratching the itch, but if I say it to a newsletter and then I get emails back that are like, you know, here’s what that made me think, then that that feels similar. And then there is an element of like, after whatever 15 years or however long I’ve been on Twitter, I have a very strong habit of this is where I go to find out what the world, how the world feels this morning. And Threads does a similar thing and it’s interesting because it’s like oh, now I get to see the way that two worlds are feeling this morning and it does give me a sense that Twitter isn’t the whole world which is the most important feeling for anyone on Twitter to have or anyone on TikTok or Threads or anywhere that where there’s sort of like you know, Instagram is less of a world discussion type platform but anywhere where like you sort of wake up and you sort of think that you’re getting a vision of what the world is like. It’s very good to take a step back and realize that the whole world is not the same as whatever part of whatever platform you are on this morning. 

Yeah, for myself personally, I’ve taken all of those kinds of text-based interactions to Bluesky. How much of a part of it might also be the fact that, our generation, we were promised the information superhighway. And it turns out it’s just a traffic jam of misinformation and disinformation. So how much do you feel it’s a civic duty to still be there as a beacon of, well, here, if you want actual information or you want to be educated on what’s really happening, I’m still here. 

There are moments of that. I have a friend who, this is a terrible metaphor, but I can’t get out of it out of my head. He says that he used to go to Twitter with his clean bucket of water to pour it into Twitter to make the sewage that is Twitter a little more clean. But then after a while, he realized he was just sort of raising the water level of the sewage. And I was like, “Oh, no!” I didn’t even think that’s where that metaphor was going to go. So it’s not that you are tainting yourself, it’s that you’re just making the world worse by participating at all. I get both perspectives. and I don’t know which is right. In general, I have never been able to think to myself, “This thing is evil, and thus we’re bad. I guess it’s better than evil, and thus I should not interface with it.” Because I feel like if you do that, you’ll be searching for your whole life, I heard this phrase once, I can’t remember who said it, for a tool with no blood on it. And I just think there aren’t any. Like you have to live inside of the imperfect world. And so for me, it is less about like how do I, how do I make the world better? That when I’m on a platform that is I think bad and more: How do I just be myself while I’m here?

But sometimes I will see something on Twitter, especially when it’s like from people who I sort of ideologically align with, that I think is a deep misunderstanding of reality. And I’ll be like, well, I guess today I spend three hours writing a thread about climate change and carbon emission targets. Fine! Because I understand that no one understands this. You’re not supposed to! It’s ridiculous that you’re supposed to be like being asked by the world to understand f—ing everything. But then when like you feel like you are, and so you get told the thing and you’re like, oh, I agree where you see a thread. I mean, there’s so many it’s amazing if you read a Twitter thread It can make you believe anything regardless of whether it has any alignment to the truth.

Something in the power of seeing 1/19  at the end of the first one, you’re like, oh, there’s gonna be 18 more. I gotta see where this leads. 

Mm-hmm.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you about the upcoming VidCon. which is something you and your brother started 14 years ago. 

It’s true. 

You’re on multiple panels, one of which is “Live, Laugh, Learn, Educating the Internet.” How do you feel like VidCon has changed? 

Oh, well, I mean, interestingly, I haven’t been in four years, which is shocking. So two years COVID, one year I got COVID and couldn’t go, another year I got cancer and couldn’t go. And so I am very curious, as the founder of VidCon, who has not been to VidCon in four years, to see like, because obviously it had changed the last time I went. That was the sort of the second big TikTok year, what, no? no, no. That was pre-TikTok was the last time I went. I mean, I did go the year I got COVID. so I was like there for a little bit of it. And that was very, it was very TikTok-y that year. Nothing changes as fast as media right now. This is the example I always use when we were kids. It was, the dance was the Macarena for like six months. People did the Macarena for years. We did the Macarena for f—ing years. And now there is another TikTok dance that everybody’s learning like every two days. And I mean, like, if you’re a TikTok dancer, there’s another TikTok since you’re learning every like multiple times per day.

And the speed at which culture is created is the biggest difference. Just the wild thing is that like how much that has changed since 2010, when it already was, it already had accelerated a lot. I remember thinking back, like the thoughts I was having in that 2010, 2014 era was like, the fracturing of media has allowed it so that there’s all these kinds of things that there was hunger for, are now existing. When like the gatekeepers were like no way anybody’s gonna watch like a cool Asian. Cool Asians? No, Asians are nerds! Asians are doctors! There’s no cool Asians and then Ryan Higa was like what if there was a cool Asian and the Asians were like actually and also other people, I should say. They were like actually it is kind of nice to see like a hot funny Asian guy. And the space there, the fracturing there seemed so huge in 2012. And now, like the fracturing of all structures of fame and even a lot of structures of status, a lot of structures of power, like this is where it all seeds from. And it appears to still be accelerating. So that is like the thing that has changed about VidCon is the thing that has changed about media, which is just the continuation of the fracturing of fame to the point where, I look at the list of featured creators on the homepage and I recognize maybe half of them and like I’m me, you know? – 

That’s the thing about getting old, you look around and realize theres’s a new generation who were in grade school or perhaps not even born when you were doing the thing you’re still doing now.

I’m used to that. I was kind of old when I started. We were 27 and 30 when we started this, which was old for this game. So I’m used to that. And I love watching the cultures come up and it’s always very exciting and joyous to see young people create culture. And in whatever ways I find that is comfortable for them, and for me to sort of slot into the side of it has always been enjoyable. But it may end up being something that I can’t do forever. You know, someday I’ll just be a sort of fond memory for the millennials and maybe some Gen Zers. 

Do you think this special will be just a fond memory for your comedy phase? 

I have no idea. I’m so curious. I’m so curious to see, like, I don’t know how it will be received. I feel like a constant worry that I will be perceived as a line stepper that like I sort of jumped jumped the line of the 15 years of grinding it out in comedy clubs. Honestly I would never have felt comfortable doing something like this if I didn’t feel like I had something to say. I just felt like I learned so much going through cancer diagnosis and treatment, about myself, but also about cancer and about biology and about medicine, and I wanted to share that. I think that we’re all gonna deal with cancer. Like, either we will deal with it directly in our own bodies or we will deal with people that we love dealing with it in their own bodies, and I think that it is now survivable enough that we need to take off the taboo. We need to take off the dark blanket that is on top of it and say, “Look, this is a thing that is gonna be part of your life. And let’s just, let’s let it be part of our lives.” And obviously other comedians have tackled this topic before. You know, I’m very inspired by them. But I just like, with the angle of like, not only am I a cancer patient and a funny, very funny guy, but also like a science guy, like the opportunity to tell that story if felt like, OK, well, I should take this opportunity that I’m being given by Dropout. 

Hank Green: Pissing Out Cancer is out now on Dropout.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.