SOUTHBRUNSWICK- If you saw 72- year-old Steve Franzman on the street, you might give him some change, thinking he’s a homeless man. Wearing a straw hat, a doctor’s coat, bright, pastel-colored clown shoes and a sign that reads “Eat at Joe’s,” Franzman looks clinically insane. In reality, he’s a comedian/educator who does workshops called “Humor as Therapy: The Power toHeal.”He spoke to about 20 people at the Charleston Place Community Room on Jan. 10.
“I’ve had three major surgeries,” Franzman said. “The last surgery I had was a heart transplant. I used humor to get me through the seven months I spent in the hospital. If I can make you laugh, I’ll feel better.”
Franzman’s presentation included a multitude of jokes, some information about why humor helps people heal and some background on his life. The audience seemed to gobble it all up, and sat attentively, engaged and laughing, at his appearance of nearly an hour.
“You have to hook the audience right from the start,” Franzman said. “People want to laugh, but people don’t know me from a hole in the wall.”
“It’s great,” said Marie Murphy of Kendall Park. “I believe that laughing a lot helps you not to be depressed. I try to think very positively.You have to think positively, because at this age, it’s easy to sit there and be very depressed.”
“It was very fun and light,” said Rose Crane of Kendall Park. “You don’t have to think. He has such a good personality.”
Sometimes Franzman combined jokes with information on his life.
“I’m 72, I was born in the middle of the depression,” Franzman said. “My parents were very, very respectable people. They were in the iron and steel business. My mother would iron and my father would steal.”
Franzman said that he thinks of jokes all the time. Other jokes he gets from other people, although he often puts his own twist on them.
“[Jokes] just pop inmy head,” Franzman said. “My humor is based on senior humor. There is something about bodily function jokes that work very well.”
He thinks of jokes just living his life and sitting in the waiting room at a doctor’s office.
“I saw a shiny magazine that tells you how to simplify your life,” Franzman said. “There was something in there about ‘how to know when to dump your doctor.’”
So Franzman came up with a comedic list of five ways to know when to dump your doctor, one of them being when the doctor takes your temperature with his finger.
He also does historical jokes, including one about Moses getting lost in the desert because, like all old men, he refused to ask for directions.
Franzman has been doing “Power to Heal” talks for about a year-and-a-half, but his progression to doing this has been a long one.
“Thirteen years ago, I started speaking to people about organ donations,” Franzman said. “These were talks about life and death, but Iwould talk about life. If you talk about living, you don’t talk about dying.”
Then he began doing stand-up comedy at a Princeton Walk club that got together called The Village People.
“We were trying to get more people to join and off the top of my head I said ‘I’ll do an hour of stand-up comedy,’” Franzman said.
Then, six or seven years ago, he began to perform comedy at the South Brunswick Senior Center. Franzman said that he walked in to the senior center offices and told the woman there that he was a standup comedian andwould performfor free.He was immediately accepted.
“I said, ‘but, you don’t even know if I’m funny. She said, ‘I don’t care!’” Franzman said, laughing.
These on-stage performances led the way to his “Power to Heal” routine.
“I would come out on stage and do a routine,” Franzman said. “Someone would say ‘I can’t sleep at night,’and I’d say, ‘Try sleeping during the day.’ Someone would say, ‘I can’twalk onmy legs,’and I’d say, ‘Try limping.’ That’s the kind of humor that led to this routine.”
People have often asked Franzman if he would do this professionally.
“I doubt it,” Franzman said. “There’s no pressure, I don’t charge.”
Franzman is happy where he is.
“I’ve got to be the luckiest guy in America,” Franzman said. “I got the ultimate gift [a heart transplant]. This is my way of saying thank you. This is my gift back.”