By Julie FrenchThe Daily Northwestern

On April Fool’s Day 2004, Grant Suhs found out that he had brain cancer. He called his mother at work to tell her, and her co-workers, believing it was Suhs’ idea of a joke, urged her not to believe him.

Suhs, then a Communication freshman, was not joking for once, and his mother drove up to Northwestern later that day.

After he got over the initial shock of his diagnosis, humor set the tone for how Suhs fought the disease and coped with being a survivor.

“On some level, (family and friends) don’t want to hear about everything you’re going through, so if you joke about it, it makes it easier to talk about,” said Suhs, now a Communication junior.

He has turned anecdotes about his illness into a one-man comedy show called “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” It will make its Northwestern debut Friday night.

He first performed the show in the summer of 2005 at the Beverly Arts Center on Chicago’s South Side.

In the show, he discusses experiences such as freezing his sperm in case chemotherapy made him infertile and developing crushes on his attractive nurses.

“He’s been blessed with a remarkable sense of humor, and I think he’s applying that in one of the best ways somebody could,” said Weinberg senior Ben Clark, who has known Suhs since the two met in their freshman-year dorm.

“I would describe his attitude to the disease as defiantly funny,” said Clark, a former Daily staffer. “He was kind of giving the middle finger to cancer.”

Suhs said his battle with cancer was not easy – he endured chemotherapy, radiation, brain surgery and two stem-cell transplants – but he decided the only way to deal with it was not to worry about it too much.

“Having cancer is just sort of an absurd experience because it’s your own body trying to kill you,” Suhs said. “As Albert Camus would tell you, once you recognize experiences as absurd or meaningless, that gives you the ability to transcend them.”

Not all of Suhs’ views of cancer are quite so philosophical, however.

“I’ve always thought of cancer cells as little Wal-Marts,” begins one of his jokes. “They spring up in different parts of your body, squeeze out healthy local cells and offer terrible health benefits.”

The idea for the show came to Suhs early one morning while he was recovering from surgery, Suhs said. One of his night nurses asked him about his experience on his high school speech team and suggested he talk about his cancer after he recovered.

“I thought, ‘That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,'” Suhs said. “But at the same time, she was right, and it’s been pretty cathartic.”

Suhs, a communication studies major, said he had always thought about performing, although nothing on the scale of a one-man show.

Now, however, he wants to expand it through an independent study project and perform his show in downtown Chicago.

In the future, he said he sees himself working as a speechwriter or a motivational speaker.

“Profits are down, but I beat cancer, so work harder!” he jokes about how he might motivate audiences.

But in all seriousness, Suhs said he would like to challenge people to increase their understanding of cancer through his show, especially about what it’s like to be a cancer survivor.

“There are some parts that are really funny, but some parts are uncomfortable, and that’s intentional,” he said.

Most of the show is a collection of anecdotes about his ordeal. Friends who saw his previous performance called Suhs a master storyteller.

“(The show) is incredibly funny but also insightful and profound,” said Weinberg senior Adele el-Khouri, one of Suhs’ friends. “He’s just incredibly honest, which is why I think he can do a show like this.”

Suhs will perform at 7:30 p.m. on April 6 in Lutkin Hall.

Tickets are $5, and the proceeds will go to the Bear Necessities Pediatric Cancer Foundation, where Suhs interned after his recovery.

“What I hope is that by laughing off these horrible experiences of cancer, perhaps people can laugh off their own problems,” Suhs said.

“That’s not to say I don’t take having cancer very seriously, but you can’t let it drag you that far down.”

Reach Julie French at [email protected].