I got to stand-up the long way around. I trained as a nurse and worked in inpatient psychiatry. Along the way I earned my DNP at Augusta University and became a doctorally prepared psychiatric nurse practitioner. In 2019 I started posting mental health skits on TikTok. People kept sharing them, so I moved to Los Angeles to make content full time. Now I tour comedy clubs with my own show, Dr. Kojo Live!
That’s the short version. The long version has more detours, which makes sense, because I have ADHD.
Where does Dr. Kojo’s story start?
I’m Ghanaian-American, and I came up in the US school system the hard way.
In school I was in ESL. I worked twice as hard to be an average student. For years I figured that was just the deal. Some kids are good at school. Some kids reread the same paragraph six times and still can’t tell you what it said.
Nobody had a name for what was going on with me yet. That part came later.
When did I find out I had ADHD?
In my mid-20s, in grad school.
Think about that timeline for a second. I made it through grade school, through nursing school and into a doctoral program with no idea why everything felt like it was set to hard mode. I had a whole toolbox of workarounds and didn’t know they were workarounds. I thought everybody needed four alarms and a sticky note on the front door.
Getting that answer as an adult is a strange feeling. You look back at a lot of old report cards and go, “Oh. Okay. That explains a few things.”
How do you go from nursing school to a doctorate?
One degree at a time, which is a painful sentence for an ADHD brain to read.
I started in nursing and kept stacking degrees until I reached the Doctor of Nursing Practice at Augusta University. Later I taught there as adjunct faculty in the College of Nursing.
In 2019 I self-published a book about all of it, called You Already Won: A Journey Through Education, Nursing, and Mental Health Awareness. Yes, the title is a pep talk. Some of us need one in writing.
What was it like working in psychiatric hospitals?
My clinical background is inpatient forensic psychiatry, plus work with children who have neurodevelopmental disorders.
I’m not going to turn anybody’s worst day into material. Those stories belong to the people who lived them, and they stay in those units. What I took with me was simpler. I learned to listen. I learned that people want to be talked to like people, even on a hard day, and maybe most of all on a hard day.
That shows up in my comedy. I joke about my own brain first, and I joke about situations a lot of us share. I don’t joke about patients.
How did TikTok turn a nurse practitioner into a comedian?
I joined TikTok in 2019 and started making short mental health skits. Then songs. Then raps, which I will not be performing for you in this blog post. In 2021 I did a run of videos reacting to BTS as a mental health professional.
The videos kept traveling, so I moved to Los Angeles to make content full time. Today it’s more than 7 million across six platforms, which is a lot of people to disappoint when I forget to post.
Somewhere in there life got a little surreal. My workbook, Feeling Good!, came out from Adams Media in 2022 and got featured on TODAY. I spoke on the Academy’s Destigmatizing Mental Health panel. I even turned up in an episode of John Mulaney Presents: Everybody’s in L.A. on Netflix. The kid in ESL rereading every paragraph six times would not have believed any of it.
Why go from videos to live stand-up?
Because a video gets a comment three days later, and a room answers you in one second.
Online, I post something and wait. In a club I say “Where my ADHD people at? Where my autistic people at?” and the answer comes right back at me. You can’t fake that, and I’m hooked on it.
In 2026 the show is on the road as The Big Neurodivergent Comedy World Tour. This year it’s played rooms in Houston, Nashville, New York, Chicago, Detroit and Chandler, Arizona, among others.
Does the nursing background show up on stage?
It shows up in what I notice. Years around psychiatry gave me a good ear for how people describe their own brains. A lot of that is funny. Some of it is heavy. My job on stage is to find the funny part and save the heavy part for the right room.
I’m still a doctorally prepared psychiatric nurse practitioner (DNP). The show is still a comedy show. Nobody’s getting assessed between the two-drink minimum and the closing bit.
This is comedy, not medical advice. If you think you might have ADHD, talk to a clinician you trust.
What’s next?
More cities, and probably more raps nobody asked for. If you’d like to hear about new shows before I remember to post them, join the email list. I’ll do the remembering so you don’t have to.