Why Gavin Crawford made a darkly funny podcast about his mom's Alzheimer's

Gavin Crawford and his mother used to be really close.

"It's stereotypical to be like, you know, 'Gay kids, they're close with their moms!' But we really were," Crawford says. "I talked to her all the time and she was my friend. And then, you know, it sort of started happening."

What started happening was something too many people unfortunately know all too well: the acceleration of a parent's Alzheimer's disease.

For a long time, the comedian and writer (and host of CBC Radio's weekly comedy panel show Because News) says he was largely just in denial. But then he started noticing that he was no longer talking about mother — something he used to do all the time. 

"I was like, 'I don't like this,'" Crawford says. "So I thought I should probably try and make stand up out of it or something. Because I just have to write comedy every week, I was like, 'I need to clear this out of the way so I can make jokes about Justin Trudeau,' you know? But I started to wonder if it was really suited to that. Was it a book instead?"

Crawford started to write down stories about his mother. Around the same time, CBC Podcasts producer Daemon Fairless approached him to ask if he had any idea for podcasts. So Crawford sent him a few of the stories.

"One was about a time when she thought my husband Kyle kept inventing the Christmas tree," he says. "She would look at the Christmas tree and be like, 'Whose idea was that to bring a tree inside? That's got to be Kyle!' And I'm like, 'Um, what?'"

"Then 10 minutes would go by and she'd be like, 'That is a really good idea to put a tree in the house and decorate it. Did Kyle think of that?' I eventually was like, 'Yeah, he's invented it. We should probably market it, Mom.' And she said, 'You should!' And she got very excited that we were going to become millionaires from the Christmas tree."

Fairless ready the story and said, "This seems like it could be a podcast." The result of this exchange is Let's Not Be a Kidding, a seven-part series that debuted this week. Part memoir, part stand-up, part meditation on grief and loss, Crawford is joined in various episodes by family and friends, including his husband, sister and father, as well as the likes of Jann Arden and Scott Thompson.

"I didn't really know what it was going to be at first," Crawford says. "I thought we'd sit in the studio and I'd just tell all these sort of harrowing and funny stories, kind of tracking how it started and how it's going. But then as I was talking to people about doing the podcast, my peers — which happened to be people in entertainment — were like, 'Oh yeah, that's happening to my dad or that's happening to my mom.'"

As he was coming up with the premise, Crawford recalled how he and Scott Thompson would often just sit together and trade stories.

"Scott's mom was in the middle of dementia at the time. And she was going through a phase where she just kept relentlessly hitting on him. She didn't know who he was anymore, but she knew he was handsome and she was always kind of a fan of the men. She liked to flirt. And so Scott would be like, 'She's flirting with me, like, putting her hand on my thigh and being like, "Hello, cowboy." It's so weird.' My Mom did a bit of that too, only with my husband. She'd come down and be like, 'Who's this handsome drink of water?' And I'm like, 'Mom, it's Kyle.'"

As he thought back to that exchange, Crawford called Thompson up to ask if he would come in to record those stories.

"We just sat down in the studio for, like, three hours probably, and just laughed our asses off. And then it kind of just branched out from there."

Crawford explains that typically, if you have a "comedy brain," it's likely your "threshold for dark" is probably pretty high as it is.

"If you couple that with going through things that are genuinely pretty dark, you end up making jokes that are just too dark for the average person," he says. "They feel so bad for you. So to be in a room with people where you can be like, 'Did you ever stand beside them with the pillow and think, "Should I, should I not?"' and they genuinely understand was really liberating."

"It became kind of a bit of a sad clown club. Everyone sort of gets sad and cries a little bit, but also ... it's fun!"

Given the context, what more could you really ask for?

You can listen to Crawford and company cry and then laugh and then cry and laugh some more on CBC Podcasts.