Leave ’Em Laughing, and Enlightened: "Now I travel the Buddhist circuit, offering to teach the standard silent retreats and daylong workshops, but also offering a comic “performance” to begin or end the meditation practices. I often start my performance/lecture by telling the students, “Be here now.” Then a pause. “Whoops, you missed it! But don’t worry, the here and now will come around again soon. So stay alert.” Recently, I have started performing in legitimate theaters, helping to bolster my income. But a friend said that because I still teach Buddhism through my comedy act, maybe I shouldn’t charge people for the show. “Remember dana,” my friend told me. But I don’t take that caution seriously. The Buddha’s teaching may be too precious to be bought and sold, but if you can make people laugh while contemplating our common suffering, you deserve to be paid for it."

Leave ’Em Laughing, and Enlightened - NYTimes.com: "It occurred to me that I was able to make my students laugh — a lot. Buddhism is mostly about exploring and accepting the human condition, and my teaching usually came with a few jokes about our common predicament. Over the years, I have composed some little routines that I called “misguided meditations” — Buddhist shtick based on the tradition’s profound wisdom but more directly geared toward humor." CLICK LINK TO READ FULL ARTICLE
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