It’s no accident that “cracking up” is a central metaphor for madness and hilarity both. It’s also no accident that the funniest people in the world-and the most incisive and brutally truthy-are so often intimate with the wilds of the mind. What’s the nexus between the raw power of comedy and the raw agony of suffering? What’s the difference between what an audience finds crazy funny and a psychiatrist finds just plain crazy?

On May 9, Arts in Mind returns for a program on the real lives of stand-up comics, featuring a performance by Maria Bamford, with commentary from journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and psychiatrist Donald Rosen, medical director/CEO of the Austen Riggs Center.

Maria Bamford is a celebrated comic whose credits include appearances on The Tonight Show, Conan!, and Jimmy Kimmel Live, Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn, among many others. A subject of several Comedy Central specials, she is also the creator of The Maria Bamford Show, a web series that explores the many worlds and characters in her life and in her head in the wake of a classic crack-up. Maria’s albums include Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome and The Burning Bridges Tour. She also starred in the Comedy Central series, The Comedians of Comedy and Netflix’s Comedians of Comedy: The Movie.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, a journalist renowned for her immersive reporting, has spent the last TK years writing a book on the real lives of stand-up comics. Adrian’s 2003 book, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx, was a New York Times bestseller and was chosen by over 20 publications as one of the top ten books of that year.