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But seriously, folks...

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Soon after Jan Donahue’s husband deployed to Iraq for nearly two years with the Minnesota National Guard, one of her neighbors tied a yellow ribbon around a tree in the Donahues’ yard.

“That’s great — thank you,” Donahue said during a comedy routine in front of a military crowd at a Holiday Inn here. “Now, how about tying one of those yellow ribbons on my dog and walking him around the friggin’ block?”

The 49-year-old Minnesota mother is trying to find humor in the fears and frustrations of being a soldier’s wife.

With help from a Los Angeles comedy coach, she has developed a stand-up act and has been performing it in front of military audiences around the country. And while her husband is now back from Iraq, she hopes to make a career out of telling jokes.

Among other things, Donahue riffs on the hardships at home: “When your husband’s deployed, you’ve got to pick up the slack and do different things. Everybody’s got to take their part. My kitchen floor’s dirty — the dog’s not doing his job.”

And she cracks wise about those who have returned home: “What do they teach those soldiers in Iraq? How to snore louder? How to steal the covers? How to talk in your sleep?”

Her new line of work grew out of her misery — a husband absent for much of the last five years, two belligerent teenage boys (one of whom is now an Army private stationed at Fort Lee, Va.), a mountain of debt and her own health problems, including depression.

“Bad for life, good for comedy,” said Judy Carter, the coach who helped Donahue with her act. “When people come to me, they think they’re going to be talking about the good things in their life — no. Tell us about your humiliations, the painful things, the bad day.”

There have been plenty of painful days, Donahue told Military Times on Nov. 13 as she tooled around the streets of Windom, Minn., a city of 4,500 located “at the crossroads of opportunity” in the state’s southwestern corner, about 135 miles from Minneapolis. The area is known more for its meat-packing plants than its crop of nationally recognized comedians.

“We laugh about what we can,” Donahue said. “It lightens the load a little bit.”

A year ago, Donahue didn’t much see the humor in her situation. Her husband, Sgt. Kevin Donahue, was first called up in 2002, when the couple’s sons were 13 and 15. He was stationed at RAF Mildenhall, England, in a support role for the war in Afghanistan.

Kevin, 47, is a cook in the Minnesota Guard. He returned from England about a year later but was soon called up again for training and then deployment to Iraq with the 134th Brigade Support Battalion.

All told, he would be gone almost two years.

And he wasn’t always safe inside a base chow hall while he was there, Donahue told Military Times. With contractors handling much of the food-service work in Iraq, Kevin spent much of his time there manning convoys outside the wire.

Not long after her husband left, Donahue developed kidney stones and lost her job with the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Her sons were getting in trouble with the law.

“I didn’t want to leave the house. I didn’t want to do anything,” she said. “I almost didn’t want to live anymore, except I had to for my boys and my husband. But I didn’t know what I was going to do, because everything that could possibly go wrong was going wrong.”

In early 2007, the Minnesota Guard learned that many of its soldiers in Iraq would see their tours extended. The Guard made counselors available to family members, and Donahue — by now at her wit’s end — went to see one.

“She said, ‘What do you want to do in life?’” Donahue recalled. “I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to be a comic, but I’ll never do that.’ But a week later she had me at a family readiness group doing some comedy.”

Donahue, who has performed in front of 10,000-person audiences, is making a name for herself. She’s done interviews with national media in major U.S. cities and said her base fee has now climbed to $3,500. When she spoke to Military Times, she’d just gotten her nails done ahead of a gig at Travis Air Force Base, Calif.

Donahue’s humor seemed to connect with some of those in the audience in Rochester.

“When you think about your loved one, you do get sad, mostly,” said Laura Strickland, whose 22-year-old son, Kyle, is due home soon after a year in Iraq. “It’s nice to get a reminder that it’s OK to remember the funny things, the silly things.”