“Wouldn’t That Be a Funny Sketch?” — Amanda Erin Miller on Writing a Cancer Comedy With Her Mother, and Carrying It On Without Her

When Terry Miller imagined cancer cells as campers hiking through her body and setting up campsites, she turned to her daughter, Amanda Erin Miller, and asked: “Wouldn’t that be a funny sketch?”

That question became Quacks & Whacks: A Cancer Comedy, a mother-daughter collaboration about illness, the absurdity of the American healthcare system, and the ways humor can help people face what is difficult. Amanda will bring the show back to Caveat in New York on September 13, followed by a patient advocacy panel, in memory of Terry.

Turning a frightening diagnosis into a shared creative project

Amanda Erin Miller has long used performance to explore experiences that can be hard to talk about directly, including grief, mental illness, aging, and cancer. Humor, she says, lightens the load. It can make painful subjects more approachable while creating room to question systems that often fail the people relying on them.

The idea for Quacks & Whacks began with one of Terry’s characteristically theatrical observations. As she tried to picture how metastatic cancer had moved through her body, Terry wondered whether the cancer cells were “like campers hiking around my body and setting up campsites in different places.” Then came the question that changed the observation into a project: “Wouldn’t that be a funny sketch?”

Amanda began imagining the cancer cells as “idiot campers” moving through a patient’s body. Terry started making a list of the ridiculous encounters she had experienced with hospitals, medical offices, providers, pharmacies, drug companies, and insurance companies. From Los Angeles and Brooklyn, mother and daughter met over Zoom each week for months, shaping those experiences into a theatrical world of absurdist humor, clowning, puppetry, music, and animation.

At the center of the show is Sharon, a middle-school teacher trying to find answers and humane care while fried receptionists, zany doctors, and a baffling system stand in her way. The world around Sharon becomes increasingly absurd, but her needs remain grounded and recognizable.

Comedy as a survival mechanism

For Amanda, comedy does not erase the seriousness of illness. It offers a reprieve from it. Laughter can lower stress, make a difficult subject easier to enter, and give an audience a temporary sense of control over circumstances that can otherwise feel overwhelming. In Quacks & Whacks, comedy becomes both a form of critique and a survival mechanism.

The audience is part of that relationship. Sharon speaks to them and makes eye contact, treating them as confidantes while the healthcare system spins into chaos around her. The performance is scripted, but the actors also respond to the room through live improvisation.

Moving from recognition to action

Amanda and Terry wanted the conversation to continue after the performance. That is why the September 13 event will be followed by a patient advocacy panel with Shlomit Liberty, a medical professional turned medical crisis manager, and Micah Damsky, an ombudsman with the Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York.

The panel reflects one of the show’s central convictions: navigating healthcare in the United States often requires informed advocacy. By pairing theater with practical discussion, the event invites audiences to move from recognition and laughter toward questions, resources, and action.

Carrying the work forward

Terry attended two sold-out Fringe performances of the show in 2025. Amanda remembers her telling the actors not to throw away their scripts. Mother and daughter had already begun planning another mounting when Terry died in January 2026.

Returning to the work has become part of Amanda’s process of grief. The September performance marks a new point in the show’s journey: the first continuation after Terry’s death, and an opportunity to honor what they created together.

Many artists make work about illness, and many use comedy to examine healthcare. For Amanda, what will always set Quacks & Whacks apart is simple: she and her mother wrote it together.

Learn more about the production at quacksandwhackscomedy.com.