Keeping students from drinking is impossible, comedian Wendi Fox said.
The purpose of her Alcohol Insanity Tour, the show she performed Wednesday night at Texas Tech is not to get students to stop using alcohol, but to get them to make more responsible choices.
"I'm not an idiot," Fox, a motivational speaker who circulates to different college campuses, said at her show. "You guys are in college. I'm not going to tell you not to drink. I know if there were no such thing as alcohol you guys would be doing Jell-O shots of Nyquil."
While this may not be the typical approach to educating students on alcohol abuse, Fox said it is more effective. In her presentation, Fox tells stories about her experiences with alcohol. She uses stories from her life, detailing both her personal struggle with alcoholism and her family's history of alcohol abuse.
"Every stupid thing I've done, I've done drunk," she said at Wednesday's show. "Every stupid person I've done, I've done drunk."
Fox said sharing her experiences with alcohol makes her presentation more credible to students.
"If I've never done what they've done, they're not going to listen," she said. "But I've been their age, done what they've done and thought what they've thought. (My show) is the conclusion that I've come to -- I've been very lucky."
Fox began doing standup comedy after studying psychology at Purdue University for three years. Her act was mostly observational humor with a few references to her personal life and her childhood.
However, in 1989, her career changed directions. She had been touring college campuses as a comic, but when the person scheduled to give a talk on alcohol abuse canceled his show, Fox's agent called.
In the beginning, Fox said, she was less than enthusiastic about the idea, but the positive responses she got after her first show made her consider doing a different kind of presentation.
By mixing her personal experiences, both tragic and humorous, with her philosophies on alcohol abuse and addiction, she created a different kind of presentation. She said the message of her show, by combining comedy and education, seemed to affect people more than a serious lecture on the dangers of alcohol would.
"I got really good reports back," she said. "(The students) said, 'This is the best speaker we've ever had at our campus.'"
While finding the humor in her family's history of alcohol abuse may seem like a difficult task, Dushan Galic, Fox's friend of 20 years said she is up to the challenge
Galic, who knew Fox when she was starting out as a standup comic, said she has a natural ability to be funny, and she can make almost any subject a laughing matter.
"Michael Jordan was born to play basketball," he said. "She was born to laugh. She can be funny about anything."
Many of Fox's anecdotes came equipped with punch lines, drawing laughter from the audience. Other of Fox's stories, such as one involving her inebriated uncle murdering her aunt, are not intended to be funny. Fox said finding the balance between the hilarious and the tragic can make her act difficult. Alcohol can make people behave in funny ways, but it also ruins lives.
For this reason, Fox said although she gives five different presentations on college campuses, her talk on alcohol is the hardest.
"The alcohol show is the most difficult," she said. "You can be funny with some things, but you have to be very delicate with others. That show, if it doesn't go well, can be a train wreck."
Though the alcohol presentation gives her the most problems, Fox said it is her most popular show. She said she prefers the program she gave Thursday, "Self Esteem Thru the Spirit of Child." The program deals with her struggle to find the person she used to be when she was happier and did not need stimulants.
No matter how difficult the material is, Fox said she finds giving her educational speeches more rewarding than her career as a standup comic.
"I would rather do observational humor that may change the world than the stupid kind of 'Did you ever notice that when you have one sock in the dryer, you can't ever find the other one' kind of jokes," she said.
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