For one teen's grieving friends and family, laughter is the only medicine | John Moore

Nothing in this story happens if, 17 years ago, a rising young Denver comedian doesn’t make the dumbest damn video you will ever see. One that a 6-year-old Thornton boy finds on YouTube and instantly decides is the funniest damn thing he will ever see.

Adam Cayton-Holland’s 2007 opposite-of-viral video, titled “Mustache Day,” has been viewed all of 863 times – ever. That’s an average of about once a week. And it’s a good bet young Tanner Lund was responsible for, oh, about 200 of them.

In it, 25-year-old Adam takes a pill that will give him a full mustache in a month. Not over a month, mind you. It will simply appear, fully grown, on the 30th morning. “And in that moment, I believed I would have all the power of the world at my fingertips,” said Cayton-Holland, whose character marks his calendar and wakes up on Mustache Morning a happy, bushy-faced shaveling convinced that his newly hirsute lips will surely earn him free iced mochas at Starbucks and the respect of park geese.

It does not.

“Tanner found that video, and he was like, ‘I love Mustache Day! Everyone loves Mustache Day!’” said his mother, Renee Lund. “It was hysterical.”

Renee, a mother of four, started following Cayton-Holland and his comedy pals, Ben Roy and Andrew Orvedahl. When the trio officially branded themselves as “The Grawlix,” “I was a groupie from Day 1,” she said. Lund took Tanner to see sweaty, all-ages concerts by Roy’s punk band Spells. And when Tanner turned 13 in 2015, she started bringing him with her to The Grawlix’s live monthly comedy show at The Bug Theatre.

I take it back. There is one unavoidable, terrible, eviscerating thing that happens in this story that no number of silly videos, punchlines or fake mustaches could have kept from happening.

“My son was killed by a drunk driver on March 26, 2022,” Lund told me last Saturday after the Grawlix’s most recent show at The Bug. It was four days after the second anniversary of Tanner’s death at age 19. Day 735 of what Renee calls “this stupid grief journey.”

“He was driving home on a Saturday afternoon and turning into my mom's neighborhood when someone smashed him into a light pole,” she said. 

Just like that. As Joan Didion wrote, “Life changes in the ordinary instant.”

Lund was not here at The Bug alone, as another grieving mother might be, in some sad and solitary effort to keep alive the rituals that bonded mother and son until they were shattered in one vehicular instant.

Instead, she was here with a growing community of Tanner’s closest friends who have been gathering at The Bug on the final Saturday of every month since November 2022 to do something communally that they very much liked to do with Tanner in life: Laugh.

At first, “Tanner’s Troupe” took up the front row of the Bug Theatre. After a while, two rows. Now, it’s three.

Some of them, like James Beckstein, met Tanner in kindergarten at Hulstrom Elementary in Thornton. Others graduated with Tanner in Horizon High School’s Class of 2020. One met him at Front Range Community College, where Tanner was studying engineering.

Another, Jurek Shafernich, never even met Tanner in person. The two connected while playing online video games, which have the capacity to pair up competitors who are located anywhere in the world.

Jurek, known by many in the group as just "Fish," so thoroughly found his “found family” in this particular group of people that he picked up and moved here from McLean, Va., to live among them.

“But he waited until we all turned 18 to move out here,” added Beckstein, “so it wasn't like – weird or anything!”

More like incredibly special.

“It's just nice to be able to come here and see everybody happy in one place every month,” Beckstein said. “I think that's the big thing.”

The monthly comedy ritual

“The Fun Lunds” … (Quick detour: If you can’t tell, I’m encouraging this group to come up with an official name, and right now the unfortunate leading candidate is “The Rat King.” That’s a clever but fungal reference to brain-infected humans in the popular video game “The Last of Us.” We can do better.) 

“The Bug Buddies” begin each monthly gathering with a meal at nearby Illegal Pete’s, where empathetic owner Pete Turner makes sure they get 50% off every time. “The Grawlix Groupies” have been coming to their monthly show for so long, they have become part of the act.

Each month, the Grawlix invite two national standup comics to perform with them – but the presence of three rows of excited, anachronistically young fans might just throw a comic. Ben Roy says it’s important that the Grawlix clue in their visiting jokesters just in case there might be any triggers in their material.

By the end of her set, thoroughly charmed national comedian Mav Viola seemed all-in to ditch life on the road and go live with these impossibly upbeat young people on a comedy kibbutz somewhere. The group represents an inclusive swath of skin colors and gender identities, which was particularly endearing to Viola, a self-described “badass, gender-bending goofball with a passion for standup.” (Not so much for pronouns. “I don’t know what my pronouns are,” she joked. “Or what pronouns are.”)

If you didn’t know any better, you might think this must be a church group – maybe because every comic on Saturday worked that assumption into their hilarious exchanges with the group.

I remember thinking if these really are evangelical kids attending this funny and at times profane comedy show as a sanctioned youth activity, this just might be a church worth looking into.

After the show ended and two dozen of them rushed the stage for a group picture with their comedy dads, I actually did ask one of them what church they belonged to. He laughed kindly and pointed me toward Tanner’s mother as the house music cranked up and a spontaneous dance party broke out to “Poison” by Bell Biv DeVoe, 1990-style.

“They did tell me a little about the group beforehand, and I absolutely loved it,” Viola said. “I thought they were all great. Their energy was great. Just knowing they were open to us playing with that all night was just awesome.”

Just a boy and his cat Clancy

What’s most amazing about this Tanner Lund phenomenon is they did not organically grow this community because Tanner died. They did it because of how he lived as a kind and empathetic young man on this planet. So who was he?

“OK, so he was a musician,” said Beckstein. “He loved playing guitar. He loved playing video games. He had a cat that he absolutely loved named Clancy. He loved to skate. He was just a fantastic guy.”

He loved purple, flannel, crazy socks and a girlfriend named Keelyn Wilson. And turning his quirks into random acts of kindness.

One quirk? “Tanner used to love going thrift-store shopping, and one time he found a giant wheelchair for $5,” his mother said. “Apparently he thought it would be cool to have for whatever reason.” What he soon came to realize is that giant wheelchairs take up a lot of bedroom space.

When local comic Andy Juett posted that he needed to find a wheelchair for a friend who didn't have a lot of money, Tanner instantly offered up his wheels – keep the $5. Juett said he’ll never forget the teenager’s unselfish act.

“What struck me was what a kind person he clearly was and what a genuine soul he seemed to be,” Juett said after Tanner’s death. “He clearly loved his mother and his sweetness was evident. He made my friend’s life better for a brief moment, and I’m glad I got to meet him. He was just a big sweetheart.”

Renee Lund started bringing Tanner's growing friend circle to Grawlix shows in 2022 out of particular concern for his girlfriend, Keelyn, and best friend since grade school, Manuel Rodriguez. Wilson was driving the car behind Tanner and witnessed the accident. Renee turned to comedy in the perhaps naive hope that, over time, the sound of laughter might start to drown out all their collective tears.

Cayton-Holland remains thoroughly charmed that his silly mustache video forever connected Tanner and his pals to his comedy trio in the most unlikely way possible. “I mean, Tanner was just a baby when he first saw it,” he said.

But what a first impression. 

“Think about it. Renee introduced us to Tanner, and Tanner has introduced us to all these other great kids,” said Roy.

Tanner’s death, he added, was a gut-punch shock. “It was really hard to watch – especially to watch what Renee went through. I mean, Tanner was a really, really, really (bleeping) great kid. And now, thanks to him, there are all these other great kids in our lives.”

But if there was one person in the room on Saturday who could directly empathize with Renee Lund, it was Cayton-Holland, who has written an award-winning memoir called “Tragedy Plus Time” that explores his sister’s suicide, as well as a subsequent one-man play called “Happy Place.”

“The whole thing just devastates me for Renee – and for Tanner,” Cayton-Holland said. “I can't ever make it better. But if I can help them forget about it and laugh for an hour and a half, then there is value in that. To be able to be sort of a balm to somebody in that kind of pain is awesome.

“I mean, when you think about it, it’s all so ridiculous. We're all these fortysomething dads and they're like these twentysomething kids. But they love us, and we love them.”

The healing power of laughter in death and grief has been well-documented. Humor buffers us from the negative effects of stress. A study from the University of Berkeley found that those who can eventually embrace laughter after the death of a loved one experience significantly less anxiety and depression.  

Lund has survived, in body at least, any mother’s greatest fear. Now, thanks to The Grawlix and “The Grawlix Groupies” (I’m going with that one) she’s holding any mother’s second-greatest fear at bay. As she puts it: “That her child will be forgotten.”

That’s not likely to ever happen to her as long as the calendar keeps producing a last Saturday of every month.

“It has been such a rollercoaster,” she said. “But having this time together every month has helped immensely.”