About This Tape
The Joy of Stress is a 1992 PBS comedy/self-help special hosted by Loretta LaRoche. She was an adjunct faculty member at Harvard Medical School’s Behavioral Institute of Medicine and a stress management expert who built a career around using humor to reframe anxiety. The full title on this tape is How to Prevent Hardening of the Attitude.
The tape runs 58 minutes and was produced by WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston. LaRoche went on to do several more PBS specials after this one, so this is the early version of a format she refined over the next decade.
The approach is part stand-up, part lecture. She’s performing for a live audience and the comedy lands more often than you’d expect from a stress management tape that got a grant from a health plan.
This tape later got a DVD re-release in 2002, also through WGBH.
Streamed March 1, 2026 on Twitch.
