The doctors are in — and they’re funny.

Tucked near a Mobil gas station and a Harbor Freight Tools on Hollywood Boulevard, this is one of the highest-energy live comedy shows in town. Or maybe it’s the most comedic of therapy sessions in town. Or both.

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Welcome to “Comedy & ‘Therapy,’ ” a monthly event at the cafe Coffee Confessionals, in which comedians on stage dispense advice to audience members in the crowd. It’s far simpler than navigating your patient portal. After buying a $16 entry ticket — no deductible — audience members have the option of scribbling an anonymous confession or a personal dilemma onto a piece of paper before dropping it into a box.

Each show features six comedians — three who perform straight comedy sets and three who serve as “therapists” for the evening. The therapists each draw a submission from the box, then read it to the audience before scanning the crowd and inviting the participant up on stage to the therapy couch.

Hilarity then ensues — and it’s interactive. After the comedian riffs with the “patient,” the audience weighs in on the issue with green and red “thumbs up/thumbs down” paddles, often yelling out comments or directly querying the participant. The action is punctuated by booming sound effects — canned applause, the “wah-wah” of a sad trombone and a hyperactive electronic buzzer, among them — coming from a trigger-happy soundboard operator behind the coffee counter.

“Recently, a friend’s girlfriend told me she had a dream I got her pregnant,” comedian Chris Collins reads, after drawing from the box. “Well, if she’s not into me, she’s having second thoughts about marrying him. Do I tell him?” (Ooohs and aaahs from the audience.)

Audience member Matthew Robinson, 36, hides his face with his paddle before finally heading up to the stage.

“Well, if you’re thinking about telling him you kind of have to now because this is on camera,” comedian Collins tells him. “This is gonna be out there forever!” (No pressure.) Robinson chuckles as canned laughter from the soundboard fills the room.

Crowdmembers casts their votes during comedy set at Coffee Confessionals.

Comedian Chris Collins (@chrisco11ins)

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“Give a thumbs up if you think he should tell his friend,” Collins later urges the crowd.

“Yeeaaah,” most of them yell, waving their green paddles in the air.

“Nooo,” comes a shout from the back of the room, a solo red paddle wiggling.

“One toxic guy in the back says don’t tell him!” Collins quips, as the room erupts in real human laughter.

“It’s a fun event,” says Coffee Confessionals owner Jing Lin. “But there is a genuineness to it. We’re not calling people up on stage to make fun, it’s really to help them through their problems.”

Robinson said, later in the evening, that his “therapy session” was actually helpful.

“That was something that gave me anxiety recently and it feels good to have everyone say ‘No, you should tell him.’ It was kind of a relief.”

Lin says she opened Coffee Confessionals in 2024 because she wanted to create community around coffee, conversation and the sharing of vulnerabilities. (There’s a neon sign in the window that says “Spill Your Beans.”) Lin missed the coffee culture of New York, where she’d moved to L.A. from, and has long had an affinity for coffee shops — she studied filmmaking in college and coffee shops are where she feels most creative, often spending afternoons there sipping a drip coffee while writing.

Shop owner Jing Lin sits post-show at Coffee Confessionals.

After about a decade working in marketing at NBCUniversal, Lin left the job during COVID in 2020 and hatched plans to open “a different kind of coffee shop.”

“I thought a lot about how to bring people together: How do you make a new friend, a new acquaintance, without just talking about the weather?” she says. “It’s really when you connect on a deeper level, when you’re revealing something. Those stories are what bring people closer together because you find ‘oh my God, I can really relate to what this person is going through.’ So I wanted to build a shop to get to those deeper conversations.”

Lin leaves stacks of “conversation cards” featuring icebreaker questions on the tables at Coffee Confessionals, to help prompt connection between strangers or for those on first dates. “What makes a good lasting marriage?” reads one; “Where do you see yourself five years from now, 10 years from now?” reads another. There’s also a “spill your beans confessional board,” where visitors can anonymously respond to prompts.

In addition to “Comedy & ‘Therapy,’ ” the coffee shop also hosts open mic nights, art walks and networking panels, among other events. For the comedy show, Lin says she’s mindful about booking a diverse group of comedians, with a cross-section of ethnic and LGBTQ+ backgrounds, as well as a mix of emerging and established performers.

Janelle Marie (@iamjanellemarie) assumes the role of host for the evening’s “Comedy and ‘Therapy.’ ”

Coffee Confessionals is admittedly small but cozy, with hardwood floors, bountiful string lights and just a few cafe tables inside. But that’s part of why the “Coffee & ‘Therapy’ ” show works. With about 35 audience members the night I attended, the tiny coffee shop felt packed, with standing room only in the back. The vibe was festive, social and playfully raucous — more impromptu living room performance among friends than comedy club.

Comedian Janelle Marie, who served as the evening’s MC, says the configuration of the room is an asset to her as a performer.

“It’s a very intimate space,” she says. “As a comedian standing up there you’re able to look out and see everyone and do crowd work and really connect with people.”

Even the straight comedy sets, sans interactive therapy, were shot through with intimate admissions, albeit humorous ones.

Olivia Xing, who is “made in China,” as she says, riffed on why she married her husband.

“I married him because he’s Mexican and I just know if ICE comes to get me, they’d get him instead. So I feel safe.”

Comedian Jordan Conley (@loljordancon1ey) offers some therapy advice during his set with randomly-selected crowdmembers.

The golden box of crowd-submitted confessions that comedians scoured through to incorporate during their interactive sets.

Toward the end of the evening, there was an unexpected confessional.

“I farted in the supermarket,” comedian Jordan Conley read from a piece of paper he’d drawn from the box.

Suddenly, a tall, lithe woman in a long overcoat stood up and made her way to the stage. The increasingly hilarious exchange between Conley and 27-year-old Nicky Marijne covered the basics (Which aisle? Produce. Audible or not? No.) But despite the absurdness of the topic, the conversation was not without therapeutic insight.

Marijne had come to the show “just for fun” and submitted her confession as a joke, she told The Times later. But the on-stage interaction with Conley got her thinking, nonetheless.

“As a woman you’re not supposed to fart, but it happens. Whereas [with] guys, it’s ha-ha funny. But for us, it’s like ‘oh my God,’ and we feel shameful. So [this] had a little therapy to it.”

Comedians Chris Collins (@chrisco11ins), left, and Mina Quarterman (@minaquarterman) prep for their sets while fellow comic Olivia Xing (@oliviacrossing_) beams with support from the crowd at Coffee Confessionals.

After the show, one of the evening’s comedians, Mina Quarterman, turned to the crowd for advice, as attendees were zipping their coats and readying to leave.

“OK, so I had the crowd [at the Laugh Factory] turn on me because of something I said on stage [recently],” she said. “And I wanna know if you guys think I was wrong.”

The crowd leaned in around her as she relayed a story about using a term on stage that an audience member felt was offensive.

“It caused a ruckus,” Quarterman said.

Everyone at Coffee Confessionals, however, seemed in agreement that Quarterman hadn’t been in the wrong — and she appeared visibly relieved. “Thank you for [workshopping] this!” she said.

Ultimately, whether you come to Coffee Confessionals seeking real advice, community and connection or stand-up performances, laughter itself is therapeutic, the evening’s MC, Marie, says.

“Laughter is everything. When you laugh — like a real belly laugh — you’re letting out your inner self,” she says. “It’s true freedom.”

Post-show with Sammy Cantu (@boom_shenanigans), standing from left, Jordan Conley (@loljordancon1ey), Chris Collins (@chrisco11ins), and, seated from left, Jing Lin (shop owner) and Olivia Xing (@oliviacrossing_) at Coffee Confessionals.

Some 20 years ago, a cobweb descended over my right eye. What I thought was a migraine, turned out to be a semi-detached retina. Even saying those words now makes me flinch.

After surgery, I lay still for days on my side, eye patch in place. Back then, my husband and daughter went to our local library to find books on tape for me. Since I’d reviewed Allegra Goodman’s novel Intuition just before this scary event happened, they brought home cassettes of two of Goodman’s earlier novels: Kaaterskill Falls and The Family Markowitz.

I was lucky and my sight recovered, so I now think of that interlude of being marooned on the couch listening to Goodman’s novels unspool as one of the most idyllic reading experiences of my life. Which is why, even though I’ve kept up with Goodman’s work, I was hesitant to read her new novel, This Is Not About Us.

Most of her books have explored intense and enclosed worlds: from the labs of cancer researchers in Intuition, to rare book zealots in The Cookbook Collector, to the island prison of a 16th-century castaway in last year’s Isola. This Is Not About Us, however, is different: It’s a throwback, in form and subject to The Family Markowitz, which came out 30 years ago.

Both novels are domestic tales about three generations of a Jewish family and both are structured as a series of linked stories in which various family members take center stage. I worried that returning to a familiar formula might mean that Goodman was running out of energy as a writer. Then, I started reading and stopped worrying.

When I finished This Is Not About Us — I kid you not — I read it a second time, just to savor all the interconnections, all the shifts in family members’ opinions of each other.

This Is Not About Us opens at the prolonged deathbed of Jeanne who, at 74, is the youngest of the three Rubenstein sisters. Jeanne’s house is packed with flowers:

[T]he sunflowers from her daughter-in law, Melanie, the roses from the Auerbachs next door. …

The flowers depressed her, especially those already wilting. When she looked at the mums, she felt she wasn’t dying fast enough.

Sardonic Jeanne does inevitably depart and that’s when the mood here darkens — not because of her death, but because of an apple cake that middle sister Sylvia serves at Jeanne’s shiva. The apple cake recipe originally came from the eldest Rubinstein sister, Helen, but Helen is not a gifted baker like Sylvia.

When Sylvia entices the entire extended family to gather around a Bundt cake that emits the warm sweet fragrance of apples, Helen storms out of the shiva. And she refuses to forgive Sylvia for … well, Goodman postpones the emotionally overwhelming ending to this preposterous and painful family rift till the very last pages of her novel.

The 17 chapters of This Is Not About Us can stand as independent stories, but they accrue power from the subtle ways in which they alter our initial impressions of family members. “Deal Breaker,” for example, focuses on Helen’s older daughter Pam who’s in her early 50s and single. In an earlier story, another character describes Pam as: “a black hole”; someone who “[a]t the best of times, … looked askance.”

But in “Deal Breaker,” we see Pam cut to the quick when she realizes the man she loves will always put his ex-wife and teenaged daughter first. That’s when her mother Helen’s superhuman ability to hold a grudge (remember the apple cake?) becomes a quality that fortifies Pam.

Talking with her parents about the reason for the break-up, Pam struggles to characterize her ex-boyfriend’s steadfast loyalty to his ex-wife and daughter. She asks her mother for the word that describes those trees that hold onto their leaves all winter:

“‘Marcescent,’ says Helen, because she knows the word for everything. She is such a puzzler.

“That’s how he is,” Pam tells [her parents].

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“Good for him,” says Helen, and Pam knows she means good riddance. …

Pam can’t help but admire her mother’s clarity.

Helen is difficult. She’s daunting, but she’s crisp.

She never clings.

Goodman herself is pretty “marcescent” as a writer. She holds fast to the gifts that have marked her since her earliest books: psychological acuity, humor and an abiding curiosity about the volatile chemistry of people bound together by affinity, profession or blood.

Bianca Censori
On Wednesdays I Wear Pink

Published
February 25, 2026
6:09 PM PST