He makes comedy from depression, poverty and words like ‘eschew’

Here’s a true thing that sounds like a joke: Comedian Gary Gulman got recognized by a fellow patient in the psychiatric hospital he checked himself into in 2017. He was two dozen years into a stand-up career that had brought him solo specials for Comedy Central and Netflix, and appearances on two generations of late-night talk shows: Leno, Letterman, Conan, Colbert, Ferguson, Kimmel. (It will bring him to the Warner Theatre in Washington on Saturday.) But by 2016, the chronic depression he’d struggled with for most of his life had...