[Recovery Pen is a blog devoted to the addiction that is New Orleans.]

It's the classic New Orleans experience: you greet the day with a throbbing head, a dry throat, and a stranger in your bed. You resolve to quit drinking, today, a resolution which lasts for the four hours until your next-door neighbor invites you over for beer bongs. Although the best cure for post-drinking angst is more drinking, sometimes a good laugh can help. As self-admitted attention addicts, the four men who comprise The Comedy Addiction Tour don't care if you're a drunk, as long as you show up and laugh.

But if you're committed to your alcoholism, you might want to skip this show, which allows all four "friends of Bill" to relate their addiction and recovery experiences with disarming honesty and hilarious detail. Billy Robinson, who grew up in the projects in Ohio, describes an early AA meeting when he confused a reference to "the highest authority" with the Housing Authority. Starting off the evening, Jesse Joyce spoke of his many injuries he suffered from drinking, and how he lied about them, such as blaming a broken ankle on a game of basketball. "But that doesn't work when you forget and lie to the guys who saw you drunk," he explained, saying that his friends who watched him puke on himself and then fall down three flights of stairs didn't buy the basketball story.

All of the men discussed their other addictions: food, sex, women, endorphins. Not only are all of them different manifestations of the same addictive drive, but they're all funny. In regards to his compulsive eating, Mark Lundholm asked the audience if anyone else ever ate food off their own shirt. "Off someone else's shirt?" he added. And although Kurtis Matthews confessed to being addicted to women, he made a point to interject at numerous times that he'd never gone to a hooker. "Although I probably should have," he said, alluding to a marriage gone wrong.

Although drunks and drunkenness make for a rich mine of humor, these guys joked about other topics as well, such as their own aging, romantic relationships, their families, and television. As Matthews said, "when [I] feel really bad about my life, I watch television." And the addict-in-recovery's favorite show? Cops, of course, which opened the door for Matthews to make several standard white-trash jokes. Robinson also took the tried-and-true humor route as well, joking about his ghetto family, like his grandmother with spinning hubcaps on her wheelchair. With Robinson, though, a comedic tension existed between his obvious whiteness and his ghetto speech and mannerisms. Although he played it for effect, with a sly demo of how "all black girls dance the same," he came across as the real deal. Who knew Ohio was producing black people with skin as white as The Man?

I suppose it behooves a comedian to have an odd appearance, as it's just more material for the act. The opening comedian, Jesse Joyce lamented his "squirrelly coke eyes," because they often lead people to pester him for drugs. "I hate going into dance clubs," he confided. And it doesn't help with his other addiction - women - either. "When I see a cute woman, I have to tell myself, 'squirrel down, squirrel down,'" he said, furrowing his brows and scrunching his eyes down to normal proportions. When I asked him for his picture, he let me choose: "squirrel up or squirrel down"? And I shouldn't have been surprised that this woman addict would want me in the picture with him.

The creator of The Comedy Addiction Tour, Mark Lundholm closed the show with his more serious brand of humor. Although undeniably funny - regarding his cigar-smoking habit, he called cigarette smokers "pussies" - he exhibited the poignancy and introspection of someone who's faced down their worst self. After years of homelessness and crime, he tried to kill himself, but when he pulled the trigger on a gun in his mouth, it didn't go off. "And then I thought, 'I am truly unsuccessful,'" he confided. Of the four comedians, Lundholm was the most frank about his pain. From a family of alcoholics, he began drinking his mother's vodka at age seven, thinking it would endear him to her. It didn't.

"The humor muscle develops in response to pain, grief, and shame," he theorized. "Nothing is funny until it hurts." He went on to compare "normal" people to "the rest of us." Using a metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle, he said the real difference between normal - "which just means most" - and the rest of us is that even though we're all putting our puzzles together one piece at a time, normal people have a picture to work from. The rest of us, well, we just muddle through.

The New Orleans connection is hard to miss - by now, we're all strutting around with 6-packs of humor abs, trying to figure out if we're still "normal" after two years of tragedy, or if we ever were. And if we can't drink, or shouldn't drink, at least we can still laugh.