The 37-year-old male who cut off his own penis and flushed it down the toilet is not the worst thing that Morgan Jones Phillips has seen on the job. Nor was it the "zombie girl" who lunged at him, spewing blood from her mouth, nor the first time he responded to a suicide-by-hanging call — though they are all among the funnier things that he's been through as a paramedic.

But let's be clear. We're talking about the kind of funny that isn't so much "black" as it's red — red like arterial blood, pink like a collapsed lung, and whatever color best represents intestines that have sprung loose from some poor sap's stomach. Drawing on his five years as an EMT, Phillips cheerfully handles some grim and squishy material to tell the true stories that make up his one-man show, Emergency Monologues.

"I'm a strong believer that comedy equals tragedy plus time," he says, on the phone after coming off a mostly bloodless shift marked by a lot of "MIDs."

That's "muffins in distress" — paramedic code for folks who panic over minor stuff like headaches and papercuts. He says he had hoped to have a fresh, funny story to tell for our interview, but no such luck. "I don't know what was in the air today. Out of 11 calls, 11 people, only one went to the hospital," says Phillips. He sounds simultaneously disappointed, relieved and annoyed.

Emergency Monologues debuted last year at Summerworks, taking the audience choice award, and since then has made irregular but well-attended appearances around town. Phillips, a bespectacled guy in his late 30s, comes out in his blue uniform with his only prop, the somewhat lopsided Wheel of Misfortune, and gives it a spin. Whichever stories the wheel stops on — maybe the fan favorite "Penis Guy" or the sublime "I Can Retire Now" — are the ones he tells.

The choices change, however, depending on which version of the show he's doing. The bar version is played strictly for laughs, held together by Phillips' easy and unaffected knack for telling funny as hell stories about crime scenes and head-on collisions, even if his delivery is at times a bit ragged. The more serious, stage-y version includes two distinctly sad stories.

He notes dryly that when people go to the Cameron to see a band they "don't need to hear a story about a dead baby" from the opening act.

This week and into next month, Phillips is doing the funny version for a serious reason, helping to raise funds for a friend and fellow EMT who recently suffered a spinal injury and is now a quadriplegic.

It's tempting to suppose that Phillips does this for more than the obvious fun and applause — that there's a therapeutic pay-off in his monologues that helps him deal with the heartache that comes with the job. Not so, he says.

"As much as I'd like to say there's a cathartic process, the truth is I don't put the most serious things in the show." He prefers to focus on the moments he enjoyed. The heartache stays offstage.
 
"A lot of people ask paramedics 'What's the worst thing you've ever seen?' I've heard that a million times. We all have and we all hate that question," he notes.  "The truth is that the worst thing I've ever seen, believe me, you don't want to know and I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to live through it again."