Comedian Dai Henwood, who publicly revealed his stage-four bowel cancer diagnosis last year, has co-written a book on his experiences with Jaquie Brown (right). Photo / Michael Craig
When comedian Dai Henwood was approached to write about his cancer, he asked friend Jaquie Brown to collaborate. Kim Knight spoke to the pair about The Life of Dai - a new book that has been described as “part memoir, part masterclass in finding hope and joy”.
The comedian is taking questions from the audience.
Can he demonstrate his famous high kick? What is he predicting for the Warriors vs Penrith? How did he tell his children he had incurable cancer?
At an Auckland Writers Festival event, something extraordinary is happening. Dai Henwood is making them laugh, making them cry - and allowing them to ask the hardest questions in the world.
Henwood went public with a stage-four cancer diagnosis in January, 2023. The interview with friend and television host Jaquie Brown screened on The Project the night Auckland flooded. It was the city’s wettest day in history; a deluge of awful news.
Henwood had been dealing privately with his diagnosis for almost three years. New Zealand was in its first Covid lockdown when he drove on deserted streets to an empty hospital where medical staff descended (and he means this in the most grateful way possible) “like hyenas” on a rare patient.
Anxiety-reducing midazolam was administered ahead of a colonoscopy. Henwood was the equivalent of three-champagnes happy when a voice said: “That’s a tumour.”
Dai Henwood is a 46-year-old stand-up comedian and television star whose credits include 7 Days, Family Feud, Dancing with the Stars and Lego Masters. His father Ray (ONZM) is remembered as an actor and core cast member of television’s Gliding On. His mother Carolyn (DNZM) is a former judge and youth justice advocate. He is married to Joanna and they have two children, Charlie and Lucy. At last count, he had undergone 26 rounds of chemotherapy and six major surgeries.
Where do you start the story of someone’s life?
At the Aotea Centre, at the conclusion of that recent Writers Festival appearance, Henwood signed bookplates (“sounds fancy, but it’s just a sticker”) for advance copies of The Life of Dai. That same night, there was a Comedy Festival debate in an across-town venue where Henwood once triple-billed with hip-hop artist Savage and astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
But there he was. In front of an unexpected audience, on an unexpected stage, with a book about living with cancer. This is the Friday night gig the 10-year-old comedy obsessive who spent his days listening to Monty Python records and Eddie Murphy tapes could never have imagined.
“I was so scared of cancer,” Henwood tells the crowd. “Then I had to do this crash course ... cancer has been an amazing teacher. I feel I am a better man, better husband, father, comedian and member of society because I’ve had to deal with cancer.
“Once I got through the deep grief ... it made me think, ‘Every moment is important. Every moment is beautiful. Even if it’s hard.’”
The Life of Dai is a co-write with Jaquie Brown; the 276-page extended version of their television interview, drawn from hours of conversation recorded between chemo sessions. It’s split into three acts: Comedy. Peace. Love. And it is, writes Brown in the foreword, “part memoir and part masterclass in finding hope and joy in the face of unthinkable challenges. This isn’t a book about cancer: it’s a book about living”.
Imagine her surprise when Henwood asked her to collaborate. Once, she nearly killed him.
Brown was the host and Henwood was the team captain on music channel C4′s comedy quiz show Pop! Goes the Weasel. It was the 2007 season finale. He didn’t know she had arranged for 20-litres of mayonnaise to be dumped on his head; she didn’t know he was severely allergic to eggs. Life-threatening chaos ensued. But 13 years later, and Brown is on the roster of a close circle of friends quietly leaving bean casseroles and face oil on Henwood’s Auckland doorstep.
The comedian has metastatic bowel cancer, meaning it has spread to other parts of his body. He tells his oncologist he doesn’t want timelines; he tells his readers “nobody tells you when to die. If they did, I wouldn’t listen. That’s the suburban anarchist in me”.
Everybody’s cancer - from diagnosis to treatments to the way their body reacts to treatments - is different. Henwood is through the early, raw pain. Now, he tries to hold on to a single, simple thought: “I am alive and I am living now.”
If you thought “mindfulness” was contingent on organic cotton leggings, green smoothies and downloading the right app, Henwood has a book for you. (Sample chapter headings: “Why you don’t see statues of Buddha doing shots of vodka”, “LSD and that time my babysitter took me to a Public Enemy concert”, and “I don’t wanna reincarnate as a cat”).
For the record, that Henwood high kick is still comedically impressive, the Warriors won their National Rugby League match - and kids tend to focus on what’s in front of them. Henwood relays the advice he got from psychologist Nigel Latta. “Say the facts and wait for questions; be honest, but don’t flood them with information.”
On stage, Jaquie Brown introduces Henwood as “the walking positive spin”. At his home, for a joint interview ahead of the June 7 book release, she explains how he has helped change her own life perspective.
“We always imagine there’s another day and another day and another day. It’s easy to put things off. Like Dai says, we’ve all got a clock. We don’t know what’s going to take any of us out. So ... it’s finding the joy and the pleasure in every single moment you’re in, even the uncomfortable ones ... have I said all the things? Have I loved the people in my life with the deepest heart?”
Henwood, Chapter 37: “Yeah, I have cancer and this is ‘unfair’, but how I respond to this event is what defines me, not the event. I suppose my response to this event is my life’s work.”
The roots of that response go serendipitously deep. Henwood was 13 when he spent a month in Japan with his dad, who had been cast in a production of The Phantom of the Opera. The teenager was introduced to New Zealand actor and Buddhist monk Helen Moulder, who invited him to join her at a zazen meditation. The two hours of slow, silent contemplation that followed would, ultimately, change his life. That day he saw dolphins and rainbows; in the longer term, he discovered that, for him, there was “something inherently calming about Eastern religion”.
Sure, he “got on the piss for 20 years”, but he also continued to study and read deeply. Meditation would, eventually, be a pathway to sobriety. And getting sober would be a major factor in dealing with his cancer diagnosis.
Henwood had actually been experiencing bowel cancer symptoms for years. He blamed the blood on the toilet paper on drinking and a poor diet. A doctor thought he might have a fissure, but an endoscopy resulted in an all clear. Then he quit alcohol - and the bleeding didn’t stop.
Talking about this stuff saves lives. Henwood recounts his involvement in Radio Hauraki’s “Day in Loo” bowel cancer awareness event. Later, an email from a listener: He’d heard Henwood speaking, finally went for a check-up and seven pre-cancerous polyps had been snipped out.
“Even if I’m only the one voice they hear out of three that convinces them they need to go and get that checked, then sweet. That was worth doing.”
At Henwood’s house in suburban Auckland, incense smoke wafts across the backyard. There’s a trampoline and a clotheshorse laden with washing. There is also a small statue of Buddha and a plug-in ice bath set to 2.9C.
“I just did one this morning!” he says. Early chemotherapy side effects included neuropathy, an extreme reaction to hot and cold that meant he had to wear gloves just to take something out of the fridge. Ice baths help some people, he says, but they’re also good for his mental health.
A day in the life of Dai?
“There’s too much weight put on these ‘morning routines’,” he says. “I try, but if it doesn’t happen, I don’t beat myself up. This morning I did a bit of qigong, sort of a tai chi, to get the blood going. I did 20 minutes of meditation. I try as hard as I can not to look at my phone, because if I can delay that into the day as far as possible, I’m way better connected with the kids in the morning.
“They’ll get up and I’ll potter around and do lunches, and then I like to go for a walk to school with my daughter and take the dogs. Then an ice bath, like an absolute psycho. And then I just try to read bits and bobs of stuff that make me think positively.”
One of the things he explains in his new book is the concept of “reframing” a situation.
Jaquie Brown explains: “If I’m struggling with something, or I’m stressed, I think, ‘What would Dai do?’ Just give it a reframe! Take a breath, have a look at a tree. Talking to Dai, and learning his approach to life has helped me do the same ... you don’t need a diagnosis to live your life in this more present way.”
Henwood’s house voice is noticeably more quiet than his performance voice. His shoes are off and his orange-socked feet are tucked up underneath himself on the big squashy couch. Outside of the cancer, he says he’s never been healthier. His hair has thinned slightly, but (another life lesson he explores in the book) don’t judge anyone by their outward appearance because you absolutely never know what someone is going through. Like that time during lockdown when the country tuned in to laugh at Dai’s House Party, and nobody knew the host had just been told he had cancer.
“I just finished my last round of the current block of chemo about five weeks ago,” he says. “Every morning, my nose is full of blood. The inside of my nose is all scabbed up from this drug I take alongside the chemo.”
That’s the thing people don’t always understand, he says. Everything has a lingering effect.
“And then there’s the hardest thing, of course, which is the mental game. This is why I say it’s a diagnosis for your whole whānau. They get the mental game which, in a way, is the hardest. Something I read that struck me is that, in war, when someone sees someone say, get a leg blown off, it affects them more than if they lost their own leg. Seeing a close friend suffer something insane seems to do more to the mind than when you are dealing with your own stuff.”
That sense of helplessness? Brown relates. Ahead of the 2023 television interview, the pair sat in the garden to discuss just how much Henwood wanted to reveal. Hardest question?
“That’s easy,” says Brown. “The ‘have you made peace with death’ question and chapter. Because it’s so deep and so very real. But I felt that if we were able to put it in the book in a ‘Dai’ way, that it could reach people in a comforting way.”
Henwood: “I was always scared of death, as I’m sure a lot of people are. I think since my diagnosis, where I’ve fully reconnected with, I suppose, my roots of zen buddhism, I’ve discovered that everybody should think about death every day. Not in a nihilistic way, but ... like, I’m aware of the clock more. But everyone’s got a clock. You just realise it is something that happens that we can’t escape. It crystallises what matters for you.”
Henwood read the first draft of his book on holiday in Sydney with his family where they attended the NRL grand final. He’s recorded an audiobook version and hopes to make his story as accessible as he possibly can (the publishers, he says, wouldn’t let him give the book away for free).
He claims to be “allergic” to organised religion, describing instead a “personal spirituality” that guides a daily prayer.
“I don’t actually know who I’m praying to. Maybe I should have worked that out?! But, just generally, I pray for my complete healing so I can help others heal and bring peace, love and laughter to those who I come across.”
A dawning revelation: “Comedy is more about the people I’m doing comedy for, rather than myself. And I enjoy it more that way. I want to be able to help people, because selfishly, it really helps myself. I think I’ve just got a lot more to give. I’ve got this fire in me so, no... I’m not ready to go yet.”
The Life of Dai by Dai Henwood, (HarperCollins Aotearoa New Zealand, $39.99) will be available in stores nationwide from June 7.
Kim Knight is an award-winning lifestyle journalist who has worked at the NZ Herald since 2016.
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