# Smoking Hot Comedy
### Comedy veteran writes her own advice book
By Michael Witthaus | The Hippo | Aug. 13, 2026
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As a standup comic, Jody Sloane is adept at reading a room — it's a means to survival. Recently she wrote a book that places that and other life skills in the context of mental well-being. It's called *Hold the Field — A Practice for Staying Present Without Disappearing.*
The book grew out of her own lifelong habit of feeling responsible for defusing tense situations, even if her help was never requested, a form of social diplomacy that quickly becomes conscription. It's a reflex, she believes, that most people recognize in themselves if they're honest.
"Everybody who does it thinks they're coming from a helpful place, and often they are," she said in a recent Zoom meeting. The trap, as she describes it, is that they end up fully responsible for the problem, absorbing a job that was never theirs to begin with, often at the cost of their own presence. It's its own kind of vanishing act.
To deal with it, Sloane created the APART™ framework: Awareness, Permission, Attunement, Restraint, and Trust. In a classic self-help format, she describes the toxic behavior and ways to address it. Real life examples, many that are deeply personal, illustrate corrective work.
It all begins with a bad tattoo.
Sloane stresses that she isn't writing as a professional or offering a therapy substitute. Rather, she's someone who's "read all the books," but didn't find one that spoke to her. She's there for people who "need a way to notice tension without absorbing it," and avoid vanishing into a fog of good intentions.
She spent years in therapy herself to deal with PTSD, every modality from IFS to cognitive behavioral and EMDR. All valuable, she said, but not definitive.
"What it did was tell me why I am the way I am, and not necessarily how to be in the world with these things I was dealing with," she said. "I didn't really find a book like that."
So Sloane wrote it herself, believing she wasn't alone in knowing that compulsively trying to lower everyone's emotional temperature was fruitless. "The most important takeaway is, you do it at the expense of yourself," she said. "You're not helping yourself … and that's the opposite of what you were hoping for."
What, then, is this … Field?
It's not the room, but rather what happens inside it, specifically its collective energy and tension. In comedy, it gives Sloane cues for things like dealing with a heckler, owning a joke when it triggers one audience member but makes everyone else laugh — or introducing a slate of comics.
That's something she'll do when she returns to the Hampton Beach Comedy Festival to host its final night on Aug. 23. It's a job she describes, only half-joking, as one she doesn't even like.
"I hate hosting, too," she said, echoing fellow comic Jimmy Dunn, who said the same thing in an interview to preview the festival he launched in 2010.
Her job as host is to gauge the temperature of the room and follow its flow, comedian by comedian. If a high-energy act is coming up, she'll ramp up the crowd's energy up to meet them. If it shifts down — for example, with a Stephen Wright type following Bobcat Goldthwait — her task then is to ride it, so the next comic lands on their own terms.
A few days prior to HBCF, Sloane will be at Beans & Greens Farm in Gilford, this time not as the person running the whole show but as part of Frank Santorelli & Friends. There she'll perform an extended set, longer than the 20 minutes she'll lead with at McGuirk's Ocean View before yielding to six more comics, including closer Dunn.
Sloane's 29-year-old daughter is woven into the act these days, a way to examine the friction between Gen X and Gen Z sensibilities. It's a reluctant choice.
"I normally hadn't brought her in," she said. "I was worried she'd be sensitive about what I'd say about her, but what I say is fun and sweet. And it's true."
Now that *Hold The Field* is out — it's on sale at Sloane's shows, by the way — she's exhaling, happily.
"The experience of doing it, and fulfilling it, has been huge," she said. "There are a lot of people who are willing to support me in this endeavor, and that's been the most heartening thing, I think — that people are like, 'go, go, go!' It's been awesome."
