Disabled People are Funny

Posted by Lara Masters at 11:38 on 16 Dec 2008

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I went to see the well-established disabled stand-up comedy troupe “Abnormally Funny People”  performing their monthly gig at the Soho Theatre.  Comediens with a smorgasbord of disabilities - blindness, deafness, Crohn’s disease, short person, cerebral palsy and wannabe (that’s the token able-bodied one trying to fit in with the disabled posse but who was, rather embarrassingly, mentally and physically unchallenged) - took to the stage and let us laugh at them.

Disability and the general public’s reaction to disabled people is a rich, largely untapped vein of humour. I am very witty and hilarious and this is partly due to my terrible degenerative nerve-condition that is slowly taking away any small remnants of voluntary movement that I have - boom boom! OK, that’s not so funny but other things about disability definitely are.

One of my favourite jokes of the night was by the slight, diminutive wheelchair-using Liz Carr who recanted that when she went to New Zealand, home of extreme sports, she was asked by one of the natives if she had been bungee jumping.  When she replied she wasn’t really sure if her very extremely petite body was built to bungee jump, he said; “Come on! You can’t go to New Zealand and not go bungee jumping!” Liz responded that she had been to Switzerland and managed to survive the trip! (That’s a euthanasia joke if you’re not up with the hot disability topics du jour.)

I laughed at disabled people for an hour and a half. It’s good to laugh at disabled people.  I highly recommend it. I shall be making a point of laughing at disabled people regularly from now on. The next show is Wed Jan 21st book through www.sohotheatre.com I’ll be there; come join me in chuckling at those crazy crips! It’s what they’re there for.

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