A dissertation is not simply a really long paper.
At its best, it is evidence that someone has stayed with a question long enough, studied it deeply enough, and wrestled with it honestly enough to offer the rest of us a new way of understanding it.
That is why doctoral study can be so difficult. You have to decide what deserves years of your attention and keep returning to it—digging, questioning, and learning long after the novelty is gone.
Watching KevOnStage perform Grief Sucks, I realized scholarship does not always happen inside a university.
Source: Paras Griffin / Getty
Sometimes life is the scholarship.
Humor is the scholarship.
Being an intercessor between people and experiences they do not yet have language for is the scholarship.
And sometimes God creates spaces in our lives that we never would have chosen, then asks whether we are willing to study what happened there deeply enough to discover something about our purpose.
That is what I believe I witnessed with Grief Sucks.
KevOnStage’s research subject is himself.
His case study is the death of his older brother, Jason Fredericks.
His methodology is comedy.
And Grief Sucks feels like his dissertation for what I believe could become lifelong work around showing people—particularly Black men—how to thrive, build, create, love, and continue living through grief.
When I spoke with Kev after seeing the show, I told him that if he never did anything else, he should feel good about what he created here.
I meant it.
Because underneath the comedy is a thesis Black communities desperately need:
A Black man can experience devastating pain without making the people who love him collateral damage.
Walking out of the show with my friend Monroe, I found myself saying, “We don’t get to see Black men grieve in a way that doesn’t hurt the people around them.”
We know the other story.
I cheated because I was grieving.
I disappeared because I was grieving.
I became angry because I was grieving.
I hurt people because I was hurting.
Then everyone surrounding the grieving man is asked to absorb the consequences because he is going through something.
Grief Sucks offers another possibility.
Kev hurts.
Deeply.
And nobody has to bleed for us to believe him.
Black Men’s Mental Health Cannot Only Matter In Crisis
We live in a world that swears it cares about Black men’s mental health.
We say Black men need therapy. Safe spaces. Permission to be vulnerable. Somewhere to put everything this world requires them to carry.
But caring about Black men also means considering who they trust to conduct these conversations, where those conversations happen, and what language allows them to enter before crisis becomes catastrophe.
Sometimes the doorway is a therapist’s office.
Sometimes it is a barbershop.
Sometimes it is church.
And sometimes it is a comedy club where a Black man stands underneath stage lights explaining why grief is stupid.
Kev is not pretending to be a therapist.
He is doing something he may be uniquely equipped to do.
He is being KevOnStage.
Early in the show, Kev creates an absurd equation proving Jason was more his brother than he was anyone else’s anything.
Kev wins.
Except everybody loses.
Because grief is stupid.
And that establishes the rules for the night.
The antagonist is grief.
Its absurdity. Its jealousy. Its intrusive thoughts. Its ability to allow you a perfectly beautiful afternoon before suddenly reminding you that somebody you love is still dead.
He lets grief be hilarious without asking us to believe it is insignificant.
That is craftsmanship.
It is also care.
This Is Black Masculinity Without The Performance
When Kev recalls learning Jason had suffered a seizure, he admits his first instinct was to continue toward a scheduled comedy show.
Then he tells us why.
He was scared.
Changing direction would make what was happening real.
There is an entire lesson on masculinity inside that admission.
What happens when “I was scared” gets to be a complete sentence from a Black man?
What happens when the people who love him do not have to become detectives searching underneath rage, silence, infidelity or avoidance to find the fear he refuses to name?
Throughout Grief Sucks, Kev cries.
He laughs.
He admits jealousy.
He names intrusive thoughts.
He talks about guilt.
He says he misses his brother.
None of it makes him less masculine.
It reveals how small our definition of masculinity becomes when strength is only allowed to look like emotional silence.
We Need To See Black Men Love Black Men, Too
Another thing overwhelmed me watching the show, particularly with so many Black men in the room.
This was not primarily a story about regret.
Jason knew Kev loved him.
Kev knew Jason loved him.
Jason taught him sports, drums, how to tie his shoes, how to shave his head and countless other lessons. In the absence of the fathering they needed, Jason became brother, teacher, protector, manager, friend and sometimes father figure.
There is power in watching one Black man publicly describe how another Black man loved him.
Not merely respected him.
Not hardened him.
Not provided for him.
Loved him.
Toward the end, Kev talks about missing Jason’s hug.
That hug contained memories, inside jokes, dreams, history, years and laughter.
And now he cannot have it anymore.
Suddenly the comedy club is holding something enormous.
The Laughter Is Part Of The Care
Kev shares an idea that may be the intellectual center of the show: grief is not a journey.
Journeys have destinations.
Grief is a language.
You do not finish a language. You become increasingly fluent in it.
That is where Grief Sucks becomes pedagogy.
Kev is giving people vocabulary.
And vocabulary can become a catalyst for care.
Walking out, Monroe and I joked that Kev had preached. I called the man a bishop.
But underneath the joke, I meant it.
Good ministry gives people language for what they have been carrying.
Education does too.
Art does too.
Comedy can too.
And they are learning while laughing.
The laughter is part of the care.
Joy does not have to be the opposite of mental-health work.
Sometimes joy is the doorway.
The Cost Of The Art Is Bigger Than The Ticket
There is also something audiences should understand about what Kev is giving them.
Source: Earl Gibson III / Getty
Every night he performs this material, he has to deliberately position himself somewhere near one of the deepest wounds of his life.
The grief may change shape. His fluency may deepen. But Jason does not become less dead because the joke gets tighter.
That is part of the sacrifice of this art.
He is returning to the grief to honor his brother.
To honor his own journey.
And, whether everyone in the room understands it or not, to offer something to the community.
We buy a ticket to a comedy show.
What Kev is giving cannot be fully quantified by what we paid to sit in the seat.
That is what artists sometimes do.
They survive something, study it and then return with language the rest of us can use.
Kev once explained that he began stand-up because Jason believed he could do it before Kev fully believed it himself.
He borrowed his brother’s confidence.
You cannot manufacture that history.
You have to live it.
And maybe that is why comedians can still occupy one of their oldest positions in Black life: conductors of culture and educators of experience.
At a time when people continually ask whether anyone truly cares about Black men’s mental health, a Black man is standing onstage actualizing one answer.
He is gathering Black men and the people who love them.
Giving pain vocabulary.
Making vulnerability survivable.
Allowing joy and sorrow to occupy the same body.
Showing that a Black man can hurt without weaponizing the hurt.
Maybe a catalyst for care does not always arrive looking like an intervention.
Sometimes it arrives carrying a microphone.
Sometimes the safe space has a two-drink minimum.
Sometimes healing sounds like an audience laughing until they realize somebody has given them language for the thing that hurts.
If a dissertation is the culmination of studying a question deeply enough to contribute something new to how the rest of us understand it, Kev has done the work.
Life was the university.
Grief became the field of study.
Comedy became the methodology.
Care became the contribution.
And KevOnStage’s dissertation has been successfully defended.
