Sam Kissajukian spent 10 years on the Australian standup circuit but increasingly found himself pulled in two directions. By his own account, the more he delivered the kind of material audiences most responded to, the less true he was to himself. The act of bad faith drove him to quit.
It also precipitated a crisis in his mental health. A six-month manic episode was followed by six months of depression. With his bipolar disorder undiagnosed, Kissajukian became prolifically creative. The title of his show, 300 Paintings (★★★★☆), alludes to the surfeit of artwork he produced when he was not busy upsetting his sleep patterns or asking hedge-fund managers to invest in his self-sabotaging inventions.
