Few things are more deflating than cracking a joke that doesn’t get a laugh. It’s not only bad material that can land a comedian in that unenviable situation but also the climate in which the quip is told. Let’s just say today’s scary headlines and potential constitutional crises aren’t exactly an invitation to laugh.
Leaning into the darkness — and finding the light — can be quite a challenge for a comedian. Just ask Vermont expat Carmen Lagala.
“You can tell when you’ve lost a room after going too dark,” Lagala, 39, said in a video call from Connecticut, where she had traveled for a weekend show. “Things get real quiet, and people start looking nervously at each other because you brought up Palestine. And, you know, I don’t want to bum people out — I’m there to make them laugh — but I’m honestly not physically able to shy away from the trickier topics.
“I gravitate towards the dark stuff because I want to destigmatize it,” she concluded.
Destigmatizing the dark stuff is a theme that runs through Lagala’s almost 15-year standup career. For her, laughing through pain isn’t just a method for dealing with trauma — it’s essential to letting people know they’re not alone. In fact, there’s a focus on mental health in the set she’ll perform during a pair of homecoming shows at Vermont Comedy Club in Burlington on Friday and Saturday, April 11 and 12.
Lagala started out performing in the Burlington area after she graduated from the University of Vermont and ran the city’s first comedy club, Levity, during its short life in the early 2010s. She moved to New York City in 2014 and made her television debut in 2018 with an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”
Lagala has earned a reputation as a comic who revels in the uncomfortable. Take her most recent special, “Sweet Batch,” which debuted on YouTube last year. In it, she tells the story of her mother asking if she’s “getting enough D,” in relation to her sex life as a pansexual person.
“If you don’t know what pansexual is, that’s when you live in Brooklyn for 10 years and just want to fit in,” Lagala jokes in the special.
Opening up about her mental health challenges is another way for Lagala to turn something historically taboo into a point of connection.
“I’m on Zoloft now,” she said in the video call. “Which makes it really funny to look back at my old Seven Days interviews — like, I need to redeem myself; I swear I’m not that unhappy. Tina Friml will have a quote like, ‘Everything is great. Comedy is wonderful,'” Lagala added, referring to her fellow Vermont comedy expat, “and then I show up with ‘I am the darkness!‘”
Lagala said she likes doing crowd work when she gets into the topic of mental health, riffing on everything from medication to picking at her cuticles. “I was shocked how many people in the audience were like, ‘Me, too!’ when I talked about it,” she told Seven Days. “I’m weird, sure. But so are you. And that’s fine!”
The way Lagala sees it, as soon as someone can laugh at their fear of being stigmatized, it begins to disappear. She compares it to thinking there’s a monster in the room when it’s just a pile of dirty laundry: It’s scary until you turn on a light.
“The overall aim of the set is to get people to just talk about this stuff,” she said. “You don’t have to solve anything for anyone. You just need to let them know that they’re not alone … And yes, you can, and should, laugh about it all.”
Lagala will have to deal with her own anxieties as she returns to Burlington to perform. While it’s not rare for her to come back — she performed in Barre last December — there’s a good chance of spotting old friends, family members and random acquaintances in the audience.
“It’s always weird to see your childhood dentist pop up at a show,” she quipped. “All I know is, I better sell out some of these hometown shows, or I’ll just quit. That’ll be it. Or maybe burn the whole city to the ground. One of those. Maybe both!”
I think she’s bluffing, but let’s not test her. Pop over to vermontcomedyclub.com to grab some tickets.
This article appears in The Money & Retirement Issue 2025.
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