On this episode of the Cancer and Comedy Podcast, Dr. Brad Miller sits down with Rabbi Bob Alper — quite possibly the only practicing rabbi on the planet doing stand-up comedy on purpose — for a conversation about faith, illness, and the strange holiness of making someone laugh on the worst day of their life.
Bob has been on stage for nearly 40 years, from the Comedy Store to Sirius XM, sharing bills with names like Bob Newhart and Jerry Seinfeld, all while serving congregations and conducting High Holiday services for more than three decades. He's also a bladder cancer patient of ten years running — a diagnosis he's turned into one of the few comedy bits in history to feature the words "urethra" and "cystoscopy."
With warmth, self-deprecation, and a rabbi's ear for story, Brad and Bob get into:
The 2000-year-old Talmudic trick Bob still uses in every sermon and every set: open with a joke, relax the room, then get serious
Why 50 years in the pulpit is really "50 years of experience performing in front of a hostile audience"
The moment he spotted blood in a urinal in Vancouver, Washington — and what came next
How he reframed cancer to strip it of its power: four scrapings, a decade of checkups, and a doctor who says this isn't what's going to get him
The true story of the podiatry resident who observed his cystoscopy (and the punchline a fellow comic gave him)
Laugh in Peace: Muslim, Jewish, and Christian comics on one stage — and the two student leaders who never spoke until a comedy show made them go to dinner
The grim, closed-door humor of a Philadelphia cancer center staff ("in cancer, the Mets always win") and why that gallows laughter kept them whole for their patients
"The Woman Who Rode Horses into the Sea" — the dying patient with no family or friends who was remembered not as a diagnosis, but as the hero she actually was
The Vermont driver's license photo that has become a piece of pocket gold, the DMV clerk who told him "we've been waiting for you," and the free cup of coffee it earned
His mother at 86, hours from death, delivering a perfect laugh line about her 90-year-old boyfriend — the gift Brad and Bob both call the thing you remember most
And the line Bob calls the highest point of his entire comedy career — a woman dying of cancer who came up to him after a show and said: "For an hour and a half, I forgot I was sick."
This isn't a celebrity comedy interview. It's a working playbook for anyone whose life has been knocked sideways by illness, grief, or loss:
Hear why comedy isn't just entertainment — and why even an agnostic rabbi hesitates, then insists, on calling it holy
Learn how naming the embarrassing, undignified parts of treatment out loud takes their power away
Understand the difference between humor that heals and humor that wounds, and how caregivers walk that line
Get Bob's answer for the person convinced they will never laugh again: not today, maybe — but someday. And the grieving mother who proved it
You'll come away with hope, a few laughs you didn't expect from a cancer conversation, and a reminder that healing isn't only about eradicating disease — it's about being seen as who you really are, all the way through.