Kellye Howard
Every comedian loves to mess around onstage, but comic Kellye Howard has a deeper goal as the founder of the nonprofit MS-ing Around: empowering individuals to have more joy and ease while living with an autoimmune disorder. Inspired by her own diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 2013, Howard has spent the past two years giving humor-driven talks and leading improv workshops that help individuals with MS and other disorders like lupus, celiac, rheumatoid arthritis and type 1 diabetes approach their struggles with smiles.
“When I was diagnosed with it, I was already a stand-up comedian and I didn’t really know how to process it,” recalls Howard. “Because the only people I knew who had MS were Richard Pryor, who was in a wheelchair, and another Chicago comedian that I’d worked with in the past, who had a lot of visible signs of the illness from the inability to control his saliva to sometimes urinating on himself. He didn’t walk completely upright and had mobility issues. And so I was very terrified.
“I started to do a lot of research on just how to be proactive with this disease. It’s a possibility I can lose mobility. It’s a possibility I can lose vision. But what are some proactive measures I can take today that could eliminate that? And I started reading all these different books, and read about a woman who was bedridden with her diagnosis, but now she bikes and climbs mountains and does all types of amazing things because she completely changed her diet and her way of life.”
Employing homeopathic medicine and meditation to control the stress that causes inflammation, Howard came to realize that her MS “could be manageable and I could live with this.” Seeing her own turnaround take root, she developed a sense of hope that inspired her to do research on life, joy, laughter and happiness and how they make a difference in how illnesses manifest.
“Somebody can look at something as being the worst-case scenario and somebody can look at something as a blessing in disguise, and that person that’s looking at it as a blessing in disguise usually has less flare-ups and they recover more quickly from setbacks,” explains Howard. “Things like that started to really pique my interest.”
Photo: MS-ing Around
Howard studied acting at Columbia College and is a graduate of the Second City Conservatory, and also uses her skills to teach solo performance for comedy at DePaul University and improv at the Lincoln Lodge. Through her nonprofit, she also offers a program called Improv for Advocacy and Confidence (IFAC) on every second Saturday that teaches improv “as an advocacy tool, and that it’s a way to really enhance your voice as an individual.
“There’s a lot of play, a lot of laughter, a lot of joy, and people walk away feeling like they now can walk with their chest up a little bit higher when facing certain conversations or certain uncomfortable spaces when dealing with the disability.”
Another way that Howard found a way to process personal pain through comedy came in 2022, when she performed four sold-out performances at the Steppenwolf Theatre of her one-woman show “Crazy Or Nah?!” She drew acclaim for covering such issues as sexual trauma, losing her brother to suicide and the loss of two children with a powerful mix of comedy and drama.
For now, Howard has her hands full preparing for the September 12 IFAC workshop, her annual 4.5K Walk/Run/Roll Founders Celebration fundraiser on October 3 as well as the double whammy of MS-ing Around’s annual Wellness Day Retreat and its annual comedy fundraiser in March 2027.
“I’ve realized that I have cultivated some really cool tools that were making a huge difference in my life, and I wanted to give that to the people who don’t want to be part of the ‘woe is me’ groups, because there are those kinds of support groups too where they focus on what’s about to happen to them,” states Howard. “My people want to have a quality of life and they don’t want to worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow. They want to focus on today and live for today.”
Learn more about Kellye Howard and MS-ing Around here.
