Diabetes stigma–the rejection, prejudice, and blame associated with diabetes–is deeply embedded in the current cultural narrative. It’s why jokes like “diabetes on a plate” have become so normalized. Most people don’t see it, but over 80% of adults living with diabetes report experiencing this form of stigma, and the impacts are real. People with diabetes often experience social exclusion, isolation, depression, and anxiety. Stigma is even associated with disengagement from care and worse health outcomes.
Stigma is everywhere, but changing stubborn cultural narratives is no easy task. So how do you raise awareness around a pervasive but invisible problem? We decided to laugh at it!
The diaTribe Foundation set out to create a social-first awareness campaign to elevate the voices and stories of people living with diabetes and shine a light on the good, the bad, and the sometimes ridiculous parts of living with an often invisible health condition. Diabetes IS serious, but comedy is the perfect vehicle to break down barriers and create safe spaces to challenge our own biases. We believed tapping into the power of humor and human connection would make the campaign so funny and relatable that viewers would have no choice but to click share, propelling our reach beyond the diabetes community to create unlikely allies out of an unsuspecting social media audience.
No one in the diabetes-stigma space had built a major campaign on comedy. The risk was real: get the joke wrong, and you either reinforce the very stereotypes you're fighting, or alienate the people who unknowingly perpetuate them. Diabetes stigma isn't a laughing matter, but we bet that laughing at it, carefully, was the only way to make people actually listen and take the brave step of challenging their own biases.
Our solution was to lead with lived experience. Spoonful of Laughter is created by people with diabetes, for people with diabetes. It aims to tell real stories of life with diabetes to normalize the condition, shine a light on the harms of stigma, and invite people to challenge their own biases without feeling attacked. The humor has to be authentic to resonate within and beyond the diabetes community.
A 2024 pilot proved the concept: six videos made with a small team of comedians with diabetes. In 2025, we scaled it into a global, creator-led movement. We worked with comedians and artists with diabetes from around the world and let them steer the ship. Their voices, their stories, their content, but one common goal: to lead the world laughing into a kinder and more joyful future for all people with diabetes.
We also took a bold approach to ensuring our social-first campaign reached the most impactful audience: by starting over from scratch. diaTribe’s audience is primarily adults seeking serious diabetes news and management tips. Rather than hoping our existing audience would hop on board with this out-of-the-box left turn, we forced ourselves to earn trust with an audience that had never heard of us. We launched Spoonful of Laughter on brand-new social media handles on Instagram and TikTok.
To build our new audience, we let the content speak for itself: no lecture, no ask, just a story funny enough to click share. But every piece of content ended on a real human perspective, not the statistic, seeding curiosity and empathy that would follow the laugh and invite people to join the movement.
Most stigma campaigns talk about the issue and plead with people to make a change. Spoonful of Laughter talks about life and shows people a brighter, more joyful story that we can all be a part of. In an industry that treats humor about chronic illness as too risky to touch, we made it our entire strategy and let human connection prove it could work.
We launched Spoonful of Laughter in late 2024 to zero online following. In our 2025 campaign, Spoonful of Laughter exploded across platforms to reach millions of new viewers around the world while growing our following to almost 20,000. Every follow represents to us a new ally who laughed, learned, and took an active step toward staying connected with the movement to end diabetes stigma.
Our @ASpoonfulofLaughter audience only has a 3.1% follower overlap with our @diatribenews audience, demonstrating that we successfully expanded our reach into uncharted territory and welcomed millions of people into the conversation about diabetes stigma where before we were only reaching thousands.
We garnered 9,900,000 views in 2025, but it’s the 718,000 engagements that tell the real story. The 588,000 likes demonstrate that people resonated with something in the stories we told, whether it was excitement about seeing a successful comedian with diabetes or agreement that navigating airport security has ridiculous challenges for people with chronic health conditions. 92,000 shares demonstrate that authentic and hilarious stories drive human connection. 5,000 comments, many from people learning about diabetes for the first time and openly challenging their own biases, show that the message is landing.
Since the beginning of 2025, we have also seen an increase in other nonprofits and even heavily regulated pharmaceutical and technology companies using humor in their campaigns while taking a more vocal approach to advocating about diabetes stigma, showcasing a true shift in narratives.
