Comedian Moshe Kasher has announced on Instagram that he has been diagnosed with tonsil cancer.
“3 months ago…I found a bump on my tonsils,” Cashier posted on Sunday. “It was cancer. Cancer didn’t take over that hard.”
Cashier, a stand-up comic who recently appeared on The Pit, was in Savannah, Georgia, working on the new Judd Apatow and Glen Powell movie Comeback King.
On Friday, Casher underwent surgery in Los Angeles and joked that “the Jewish surgical robots at Cedars-Sinai spent five hours pulling my jaw open, slitting my throat and dissecting my neck, leaving me with such a muscular scar that people will be afraid to fight me in the street.”
Cashier said her tongue was “squeezed and pulled out” from her mouth. “He’s swollen and bruised and looks like ‘I Am Sam,'” he said, referring to Sean Penn’s character.
Casher attached a photo of himself in the hospital and wrote, “This was the most terrifying and mind-numbing experience of my life. My life was filled with fear, meditation, tears, and medical planning (and 12 hours a day making set pitch jokes).”
He added, “It’s truly incredible that we were able to make it through the entire movie while dealing with this issue. But Judd couldn’t have been a more kind, supportive, nurturing friend while he was on the verge of a five-hour energy overdose due to his horrible habits.”
“I’m in pain,” Casher said, “but the good news is that the cure rate for my cancer is incredibly high (in the 95% range).” He’s waiting to hear if he’ll need radiation therapy, “but regardless, I’ll be fine and be back to being a cool guy as soon as possible,” Casher wrote.
Casher joked that the “good news” was that he had been diagnosed with “the type of cancer you get from sex,” but urged his followers to get tested and get their children vaccinated, writing that “HPV-positive tonsil cancer is prevalent in men under 55.”
Casher said he doesn’t know when he will return to live comedy, but he and his wife and fellow comedian Natasha Leggero recorded an episode of the Endless Honeymoon Podcast just before the surgery.
“Thank you Natasha and all my amazing friends for their support,” Kasher concluded. “I woke up on the operating table full of emotion and gratitude for the gift of my life and consciousness. I can’t wait to get back to work. But for now, I’m breathing. I’m walking. I’m eating. I’m alive. I’m alive.”
Casher, a comedian known for his observational black comedy and crowd work, wrote about his interesting upbringing as a Hasidic Jew to deaf parents and his struggles with drug addiction as a teenager in his memoirs Casher in the Rye and Subculture Vulture. As a tribute to his work as a sign language interpreter, he appeared as an ASL interpreter on season 2 of “The Pit.”
