For all intents and purposes, Ryan Sickler is a big fan of living. Walking, laughing, breathing – the whole nine. So, it only makes sense that he took the opportunity to deliver the most artistically cordial yet deliberate middle finger to death as it came a’knockin’, and celebrate living at least one more time.
With his new full-hour special, Live & Alive, which landed on YouTube at the tail end of October, Sickler returned to the stage with a vengeance. Not aiming fury at anyone in particular, except maybe the doctors that nearly killed him after a simple procedure in 2023, the proud Baltimore native followed through on his life’s mission of bringing highlights to the low lights after pulling himself from the ashes of a near-death experience — and he delivered a moving piece of art with the help of a small team, decades of his own production experience, and the drive of a single dad wanting to stick around for his daughter.
After complications due to his lifelong battle with Factor V Leiden, a rare blood disease that causes clotting in his lungs, Sickler’s ticket was all but punched before he scraped himself off of his hospital bed, started intense physical therapy, and boarded airplanes — still rockin’ those blood clots, mind you – to take his experiences to cities and stages all over the country.
He did that nonstop for two and a half years, and Sickler is content with acknowledging that his mission is officially accomplished.
“This was a mission for me to literally get up off my back, like I’ve done my whole life, and highlight this low light,” Sickler tells Vanyaland. “I needed to share this story in this fashion with the message of ‘it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.’ Sometimes, the thing that knocks you down is the best thing in life for you. You just have to get up, keep going forward, and turn it into something.”
Even as an artist who has delivered a venerable truckload of material to his growing fan base via the internet over the years, whether it’s via his stand-up specials, his hit podcasts The HoneyDew and The Wayback, or the Patreon offerings that deepen the experience for his fans, Sickler is still quite savvy to the notion that, as he puts it, “the Internet is forever a dick.”
While that belief is based, of course, on the negative vitriol that gets thrown at him from the deepest corners of the web, the Baltimore native continues to find the good within the ugly, and in the case of the new special, focus on the balance between the nay-sayers and the folks that are proving to be ride-or-die supporters of his craft.
“The response to this special has felt fucking awesome, because I have cultivated a great group of fans over the last 15 years of podcasting. If you go and look at the YouTube comments on this special, maybe ten of them are negative,” says Sickler. “There’s always that bunch that are like ‘Didn’t I hear this already?’ but I will never clean those comments. It’s good to have that positive-to-negative ratio.”
While fighting the pushback in the comment section hasn’t been at the top of Sickler’s to-do list to say the least, he’s always had a constant battle with himself when it comes to being his own worst critic. However, the amount of time, energy, and money that he dedicated to his latest project has him finally feeling proud of himself. Of course, a hit special is surely something to have pride in, but Sickler is taking it a step further: he’s proud of the fact that he was able to prove himself right that he could utilize his years of production work for everyone from Oprah to the CW network to strut his stuff and show that he could pull off the production needs of this special, and curate a finished product that looks, sounds, and feels smooth.
“I really knew deep down that I could do this special on my own, without the backing of a big production company. So I did. I actually made money on my special because I was able to sell tickets to the live show against it. I paid for the production, and was able to pay the crew with the money I made from tickets to the show,” says Sickler. “I had to pull every string I could think of to make it look like we had a six-figure budget, and we did that. It does take a longer time to go your way, but I’m a storyteller, so I know a thing or two about taking the long road to get there, so it didn’t surprise me that it took longer to get the special to where it needed to be.”
As has been a big part of his job description over the years, Sickler understood the assignment with his new hour, and made light and laughter out of a deeply traumatic and dark moment in his life. Beyond that, he’s hoping the special’s relatability stretches beyond the stage, and gives viewers the confidence to fight for themselves, and be their own advocate when it comes to their health.
From the streets of Baltimore to comedy stages all over the country, and into the hospital room where he nearly took his last breath, a lifetime of luck has followed Sickler just as closely as the grim reaper himself. However, it’s nestled tightly in the fact that his career has ascended dramatically over the course of the last few years where Sickler feels the most luck; Lucky for his craft, his perspective, and most of all, his life.
As a proud 3.0 student, Sickler has carried himself through the ashes of a relentlessly ruthless life with a straight B average – but now, his latest offering of positivity and perseverance to the world has him feeling like he can finally give himself an A+ on something he’s done, and he hopes it connects with viewers on the same kind of level by giving them their own boost of inspiration to dust off and keep giving this life hell while we still can.
“I hope people walk away from this special feeling like this was a celebration of life,” says Sickler. “Not in a sad way or anything like that, but I want people to be inspired by it and think ‘fuck yeah, this dude scraped himself off the ground, got up, and then crushed.”