Leading The Way: Dani Klein Modisett

We built this business to help the people who are among the most isolated in our culture – those facing Alzheimer’s. Then COVID hit, and we’re all isolated now. Everyone needs what we’re doing. It’s not a hard sell because it makes a difference, and it works …

Born out of a desire to make her mother laugh, Dani Klein Modisett’s company, Laughter On Call, was thriving. But when COVID-19 hit, she received a flurry of emails from the residential communities the company works with saying it wasn’t safe for her comedians to visit their Alzheimer’s patients anymore …

How did you get the idea to create Laughter On Call?

Six years ago, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She was living alone in New York City, and we had hired a bunch of people to take care of her. She was a tough woman, a New Yorker and very independent. She quickly fired everybody. So we hired more people, got her settled and that worked well for a few years until she stopped leaving her room. $17,000 a month seemed like a lot for her to be in a fetal position in New York City so I moved her to Los Angeles near where I live. We found this wonderful residential community called Silverado Beverly Place which is purely memory care. There’s no stigma like there is in other senior living facilities where people say, “Shhh, that’s where the memory care people are …” Residents’ behavior is accepted, and the emphasis is on community, freedom and connection. My mom’s location had a big chandelier, and it looked very Upper East Side so I thought she would like it. She did initially, and then she became withdrawn and depressed. I think she realized that she wasn’t going back to Manhattan.

I was at my dentist’s office, and you know, because it’s LA, she’s also like a life coach who’s always telling me what to do when my mouth is full of cotton. I was crying. She wasn’t drilling. I told her, “I feel so bad about my mother. I wish I could hire a comedian to cheer her up.” She said, “Oh, you should do that. Why don’t you do that?”

I went home and posted on Facebook that I was looking for a comedian interested in gerontology for a paid gig. Three minutes later, a friend from New York called and said, “I just got off the phone with a comedian in LA who wants to work with seniors so badly she’s sitting with them on park benches.” I called the comedian and made a plan for her to come and meet my mother. The first time she met my mom, she did all the things instinctively we now train for at Laughter On Call. She sat next to my mom; she got right in her face; she looked her in the eye and said, “I know you don’t want to talk to me. You’re probably thinking, who is this schmuck who just keeps talking and talking?” My mother started laughing. She began repeating the word schmuck, and then the two of them started having a schmuck-off. It was wonderful to witness because I hadn’t seen my mother laugh like that in a long time. I hired the comedian to visit my mom eight hours a week, and it changed my mother’s life. She started eating again, engaging with the community, singing. Even when the comedian wasn’t there, the visits lit her up.

I thought, this should be everywhere. There are comedians all over who need work, and the number of people with Alzheimer’s is growing exponentially. I wrote an article for AARP magazine, and I got hundreds of responses from all over the country. “Please can I have a comedian in Pittsburgh?” “Can you bring a comedian to Florida?” “My wife is in Kansas. Can I hire a comedian for her?” I wrote a business plan, pitched it and walked out with an investment deal to fund the business for a year.

Tell me more about the business.

I launched Laughter On Call in November of 2018. Families pay comedians for their time, generally between $25 and $50 an hour, for one-on-one visits with their loved ones with dementia. We are in 50 different residential facilities and training comedians around the country. Memory care communities started asking us to train their staff and their patients’ families and so I came up with a workshop that uses a teaching acronym BHILATYS (like pilates for seniors!) – breathing, honesty, imperfection, letting go of the moment before, appreciate each other, pay attention to timing, yes…and, and don’t forget to be silly. Then the facilities asked us to provide entertainment so we started doing interactive storytelling where two comedians improvise and involve the audience. It’s like Mad Libs meets Second City.

The biggest challenge about what we do is financial resources. People are spending so much on physical care and safety for their family members with dementia. Having a comedian visit is an add-on and not something everyone can afford. We are in discussions with a researcher in geriatric memory care at Harvard to conduct a study of the effects of laughter so that we can have concrete data we can bring to insurance companies to help get our work underwritten.

What happened when COVID-19 hit?

On Friday March 13th, I started getting emails and phone calls canceling our visits. On Monday, after spending the weekend mulling over what to do next, I launched “Lunchtime Laughter” at noon on Zoom, deciding to make it up as I went along. I thought, “we’re going to have fun. We’re going to create connection. We’ll have the seniors interact. We’ll do some storytelling, and I’ll give some kind of comedy lesson.” That was 112 episodes ago. We just keep learning on our feet. The episodes are free and open to everyone. They are for anybody who’s feeling isolated in quarantine and wants to feel better in a half an hour without chemical intervention. It works for us as facilitators, and it works for everyone who participates.

We are still offering our one-on-one visits virtually but sometimes those work more successfully than other times depending on how far along the person is. We have some regulars but we had one guy with no language at all, and it’s proved too difficult to keep his focus. The upside of the online visits is we can go anywhere. We don’t need to worry about insurance or about a family being concerned about a loved one being alone with a comedian. We have had to put the interactive storytelling on hold until we can get back in to the facilities. We could do it by Zoom, but the facilities don’t want their residents sitting next to each other.

What was your next pivot?

I started reading articles in Forbes, Atlantic Monthly and Harvard Business Review about the negative impact disconnection is having on businesses and their culture and the way shared laughter is being underutilized right now. I thought, we should do this for corporations. We can package what we’ve done and call it Recess so people don’t have to participate at lunch. We have 20 people who join us every day. We start with a comedy prompt. Yesterday it was “You’ve agreed to go on the expedition to Mars, and you have one last meal on Earth. What would that be?” Everyone gets to share and in doing so, they reveal something personal about themselves which creates a feeling of connection. We improvise and play comedy games. We have standup day. We have improv day. We do storytelling. Every day is different, and we have lot of fun, but what’s different about Laughter On Call is that we come from healthcare, so we’re interested in people’s mental wellbeing. We want people to feel better about themselves so they can do their best work for their companies.

We’ve been offering these workshops for about four months now and have gotten a great response. Sumitomo Bank, Microsoft and Citibank are all interested in offering these sessions as part of their wellness initiatives. Part of what’s happening is people have realized this isn’t going away any time soon. Even when there’s a vaccine and everybody’s had it, COVID-19 will forever change the fabric of corporate work and the need for everyone to be in the office. It will prove that not everyone has to be there all the time. But how do you preserve corporate culture when people are working from home? This is not just a COVID pivot. These workshops are an opportunity to teach people new skills and new ways of communicating. They bring levity into interactions that will serve the corporate culture.

What has allowed you to navigate this pandemic time so well?

I built this business to help the people who are among the most isolated in our culture – those facing Alzheimer’s. Then COVID hit, and we’re all isolated now. Everyone needs what we’re doing. It’s not a hard sell because it makes a difference, and it works.

One of the smartest things I did was to continue Lunchtime Laughter even after my unusually supportive investor got on a call and thought it wasn’t landing as well as it could. That perhaps we should shut it down until it’s more specific. I said, “Nope. I’m going to keep going. I think we can figure it out. We can discover what works through the process.” It’s hard, but this is the thing about being a comedian. You’re always learning publicly. You try a joke, and it may not work. The only way you’re going to know is to try it on stage. I feel similarly about Laughter On Call. We’re going to fail publicly. We’re going to make some mistakes but we’re not making them for 4,000 people; we’re making them for 20 people right now which will allow us to go to Microsoft and Citibank and other companies and be successful. I’m holding webinars for 250 people. I couldn’t have done that six months ago. I feel really blessed that everything has unfolded the way it has. I’ve been really lucky, but I also never gave up.

In my career, I’ve always tackled difficult subject matter and made people laugh so we could talk about it. When you allow people to laugh about something, you give them permission to talk about it honestly. I’ve done the same thing with Alzheimer’s. Let’s bring some laughter into this so people can talk about it and not pretend it isn’t happening. It’s everywhere, and it’s super painful. I always acknowledge how painful it is. I was crying about my mother this morning. But every second isn’t painful and that’s what people need to know. There are moments of connection, laughter and joy, and that was the impulse for starting Laughter On Call. In the corporate space, it may not be life and death, but people do feel a sense of hopelessness from being quarantined and isolated at home as they deal with a pandemic that doesn’t seem as though it’s ever going to end.

What have you learned so far?

–That I could run a business. I can manage people successfully, and I can handle a lot. I was a writer, an actor, a comedian and a producer. As a CEO, I’m doing all of that but I wouldn’t have known that was the job description if I hadn’t started the business.

–That I could start a business with one idea and then keep growing it idea by idea. From now on, when I have an idea or someone who works for me has an idea, I’ll pursue it, because you never know. Maybe it’s not the first idea but that one takes you to the next one which takes you to the next one, and so on, and the sixth idea is the one that can really land. It’s a yes/and philosophy of improvisation that I’ve learned through running my own business.

–How important it is to hire the best people

–That you know more than you think you do

–That you’re capable of learning at any age. I’m 57. I got this idea at 55.

–How courageous caregivers and comedians are. What I observed when my mother was being cared for was the amazing amount of courage caregivers exhibit every day, just by showing up, not knowing what’s going to happen. I feel the same way about comedians. It takes tremendous courage to get up on stage and stay present in the face of whatever comes at them.

When the world returns to some semblance of normal, what will you take with you of the work you're doing now?

We’ll maintain our online presence. It’s not something we’re doing just to bridge. During COVID, we’re committed to reaching people who are isolated. We’ll continue reaching people this way after the shelter-in-place is over.

Dani Klein Modisett is a writer/comedian/actor and author of Take My Spouse, Please, proving her thesis that couples who laugh together stay together. Her first book, Afterbirth ... stories you won't read in Parents magazine, based on a live show she created, brings laughter to the most challenging moments as parents. Dani taught Stand-Up at UCLA for ten years. Over the past few years, she coached keynote speakers, business leaders and Congressional candidates to use more humor in their interactions (https://www.kleincomedy.com). Her writing has appeared in AARP, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Parents Magazine and many websites. In 2018, in response to her mother's Alzheimer's diagnosis, she launched "Laughter On Call," pairing comedians with Alzheimer's patients. Since then, the business has grown to include workshops for healthcare workers, families and corporate teams using Improv games and Stand Up tools to create connection through shared laughter with everyone who is feeling isolated, all currently being held on Zoom.