It’s been famously said that “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”

It’s a thought that Dave Chawner takes with him into his show Mental which he brings to Brighton Komedia on Wednesday, March 25.

He offers it as a stand-up show about mental health, not about mental illness – and the difference is important. We are often told that one in four people experience mental illness, but Dave makes the point that four in four people have mental health.

“So why does the conversation so often focus on crisis rather than well-being?

“Mental flips the script. Instead of sob stories and pity porn, this show uses self-aware humour to celebrate good mental health and talk about good mental health in a way that feels practical, accessible and human. No yoga pants. No pilates. No crystals,” Dave promises.

“The show is informed by Comedy For Coping, an evidence-based comedy course I have created that uses stand-up to improve mental health. Developed in collaboration with researchers from the Universities of Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester and Kent, and backed by the British Academy, the programme has been published and peer-reviewed in multiple academic journals, with a forthcoming book based on the findings.”

In increasingly uncertain times, Dave promises an “uplifting, positive take on well-being, proving that laughter isn’t a distraction from mental health conversations, but one of the most powerful ways into them.

“In the past I have done shows about my mental health in order to use humour sensitively to engage people that have no experience of such things but also to engage people that do have experience just so that they feel less alone.”

But this is a show that focuses on mental good health: “I wanted to celebrate good mental health by having a laugh. The fact is that people laugh before they talk. Humour is actually more universal than language.

“So really I just wanted to whet the appetite and get people to engage that have never thought about it. It is saying let’s discuss this, and actually being polarising about it, I would say that humour has the edge over all the other different techniques like yoga and pilates and even running. If you are in a challenging situation, you can’t necessarily just drop everything and go for a 5k run. But you can always crack a joke.

“And I think a joke does so many things. They say that the shortest distance between two people is a laugh, and that’s one of the things that got me into comedy in the first place. Humour is not about fitting in. It is about standing out and about celebrating that. I think laughter has always been a great way of communicating, wherever you are from, whatever your race, whatever your gender, and humour just has the edge because there are so many different types of humour. What is really bewitching about humour is that beautiful line that Charlie Chaplin said that with humour you take your pain and you play with it.

“There is a great scene in Harry Potter where this is this thing called a Boggart, like a shape-shifting creature.”

It embodies a person's deepest fear. Hiding in dark, confined spaces like wardrobes or cupboards, Boggarts transform instantly upon being encountered. For Neville Longbottom the greatest fear is Professor Snape. But Boggarts are defeated by using the Riddikulus charm, which forces the fear to take a comical form. Neville uses it and sees Snape dressed in his grandmother’s clothing. And the fear goes.

“You can’t be scared and laughing at the same time. At least, that’s my argument!”

As he says, there is a cross-over between psychotherapy and laughter in terms of the way they can both get us to reframe ideas…