Kylie Vincent stepped up to the mic, stood before the crowd and thought, “I’m just going to say the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Vincent, 26, has been performing standup comedy since she was 18. After growing up in Ventura County, California, she left home as a teenager, graduated from high school and moved to New York. Convinced she’d perform on the stage, “I was always getting cast as like Sebastian instead of Ariel, so I was like, ‘OK, you find me hilarious and not the ingenue.’”
She started performing standup seven, sometimes eight times a night in New York. She got to be herself and bring herself, talking about past pains (her first solo show, “Bird,” touches on childhood abuse and sexual assault) while making people laugh.
“Standup is like so addictive, and it’s honestly probably good because the people that do get into standup otherwise would be maybe drug addicts,” she says.
She took her standup on the road starting in 2022 and performed in 30 states. On her way across the country, she begged clubs, bars and breweries to let her perform; on the way back, she was headlining.
She moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 2025, and her travels inspired a short film, filmed Jan. 17 and 18. That weekend, her left thumb started to go numb. The next week, she went to Sundance Film Festival for one of her side gigs.
The morning after she got home to Los Angeles, she took her dog, who’s paralyzed and uses a wheelchair, outside, and Vincent stopped being able to walk. An MRI revealed a 7-millimeter lesion on her brain, and a spinal tap test confirmed her diagnosis: multiple sclerosis.
The day after she was discharged from the hospital, she joked about it onstage.
Kylie Vincent says she found standup to be “really cathartic, that I could just kind of bring myself to what I was making, and how I was making people laugh.” Andrew Max Levy / Courtesy Kylie Vincent
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MS is a chronic neurological disease where the immune system breaks down myelin, the protective barrier covering nerve fibers, which can affect the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves.
In her standup performances and across her social media, Vincent calls it “mega-slut disease.” (Often followed by, “And yeah, it’s incurable.”)
Symptoms include vision loss, severe fatigue, balance issues, muscle spasms and numbness, like Vincent experienced. Looking back on when it started, she recalls a joke she kept repeating while making her short film.
“At the time, I didn’t have insurance. … I was like, ‘If anything happens to me on set, do not resuscitate,’” she says. “Oh my god, if we only knew what was going to happen next.”
She knew at the time the numb feeling was a problem, but she figured she could address it later. It spread from her thumb to her hand to her entire left side, but by then she was in Park City, Utah, for Sundance, so she thought it might just be the cold. When she got home, she thought, “I’m going to go to sleep, and hopefully when I wake up, this will be all over.”
When she couldn’t walk the next day, a comic friend drove her to the emergency room, an anecdote that could serve as its own standup set, even though it features a misdiagnosis, a weeklong admittance and life-changing news.
First, there was the matter of getting to the hospital.
“My friend, who is also a broke-a– comic, was like, ‘I’ll take you to the ER … and I heard this thing that if I take you to a hospital that has ‘saint’ in it, it’s a Christian hospital. They won’t ding your credit. So I’ll take you to a saint hospital,’” Vincent recalls. “I was like, yeah, whatever, sure.”
When they arrived at the hospital, it was about 1 p.m.
“I show up, they have no f—— wheelchairs left. I was like, ‘OK, awesome, you’re a hospital.’ Do you need me to go home and get my dog’s wheelchair? I can use that,” she says.
A nurse conducted an EKG on Vincent and complimented the young comedian’s tattoos.
“I was in the waiting room from 1 p.m. to 1 a.m., which is totally fine. I had Temple Run on my phone, and my right side was working,” Vincent says.
Finally, she saw a doctor. He was male, and in a recent standup set that’s growing more viral online, he’s memorialized as, “the he/him doctor.”
“He came in, just saw that I wasn’t able to walk, did not ask me any other questions, nothing else, and was like, ‘OK, I think I’m going to send you home with antibiotics and just call it a UTI.’ And that was crazy,” Vincent says.
Luckily, another doctor saw her case before she was discharged.
“I guess the neurologist of the hospital, thank god … was like, ‘Nah, she needs to get a brain scan because it’s giving stroke.’ That’s how they said it, they’re like, ‘It’s giving,’” she recalls.
Vincent, meanwhile, was thinking of actor Aubrey Plaza, who had a stroke at age 20 and was briefly paralyzed. (“She’s so talented and funny. So that’s amazing,” Vincent says.)
“Then they send me down for the MRI, and he comes back into the room after the scan, the neurologist, and he tells me that I have a 7-millimeter lesion on my brain, then asked me if I know about multiple sclerosis,” she adds. “And I was just like, literally don’t even know what millimeters is.”