My Big Break

Shane Mauss decided to jump off a thirty-foot cliff while hiking in Sedona, Arizona, and broke both heels at the exact same moment. His advice to anyone considering the stunt is practical: break one foot first, let the bone knit, evaluate whether the lifestyle suits you, and only then commit to snapping the other.

Instead of treating the accident as a freak detour, Mauss built a full hour around the indignity of total immobility. Released by Comedy Dynamics in 2015, the album tracks the agonizing logistics of his recovery: moving back into his parents’ basement as an adult, wrestling with opioid-induced constipation, and picking a spiteful fight with a convenience store clerk over a Big Gulp because he had nowhere else to direct his irritation.

Fresh off his 2014 special Mating Season and newly committed to hosting his science podcast Here We Are, Mauss anchors the bodily disaster to evolutionary theory. He uses his bedridden depression to interrogate why the human brain holds onto negative memories far longer than pleasant ones, diagnosing his own recklessness as an ancient survival mechanism misfiring in the modern world. The album hit number one on the iTunes comedy chart upon release.