Scouse in the house

He's officially the funniest blind man out of Liverpool; he's just won a prestigious Channel 4 talent trawl but, as he tells Sunil Peck, Chris McCausland is the same "mummy's boy" off-stage as on

Chris McCausland was on stage at the Edinburgh Festival when he was interrupted by some people in the audience chatting.

“I mentioned it and they went quiet. It happened again and I pulled them up on it and I made a joke about going into stealth mode like a submarine to hide from the blind guy. In the end it turned out that someone had received a text saying that his brother had been taken into hospital.” With the room feeling “awkward”, McCausland asked in surprise “what are you doing here? Go to the hospital!”

“But once they’d gone I said ‘come to think of it, that might have been the guy I hit in my car on the way to the gig’!”

According to his website, McCausland is probably the world’s only blind professional comedian. But he has worked hard to make a name for himself for being funny rather than for being blind.

McCausland used to have a lot of sight which he began to lose ten years ago because of the degenerative eye condition retinitis pigmentosa. He talks openly about his blindness and is clearly not in denial or “trying to avoid” his disability, but he doesn’t want it to define his comedy.

“If I do an hour, I don’t mind doing five or eight minutes of blind stuff, as long as it’s funny and it’s not clichéd.”

The “funny stuff” includes the time McCausland missed the barber’s and walked into the undertaker’s for a haircut, and watching the football with his mates in the pub when the radio commentary is eight seconds ahead of what’s happening on the screen.

But his act also has observations about a woman travelling several stops on the tube with her hair trapped in the doors, the advantages of sleeping at a decent temperature in the spare room after rowing with his girlfriend because she gives off so much body heat in bed, and the differences in drinking culture between comedy clubs in the UK and New York.

“I always think it’s got to be something that I wouldn’t mind my mum and dad hearing. I’m a mummy’s boy! I wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about experimenting with sex toys or paying for hookers.”

A self-confessed geek, McCausland studied maths and further maths at the Royal National College for the Blind in Hereford and graduated with a degree in computer science in 2000 from Kingston University.

As his sight worsened, it became impossible for him to design websites that looked good.

A fan of Eddie Izzard since the mid-90s, he fell into a career in stand-up in 2003 while off sick from a call centre job with shingles.

“I was bored shitless! I’d always been a fan of comedy and collected stand-up videos and I was sat at home looking on the internet for a DVD or new stand-up that I might not have seen.”

He came across an online advert which said “you can be a stand-up comic in one week!”

It seemed like a “cool job” but one that he could never do.

“Then I thought you know, I’m sure loads of people have a go and I’m sure there’s loads of really shit people who do [he laughs]. I wonder if I could write something funny.

“I can’t even remember any of the jokes. Put it this way: the jokes didn’t survive.”

His first shot as a stand-up happened three months later at an open-mic night for new acts.

“You don’t get paid, but they giggled and chuckled enough to make me want to have another go - even though I wasn’t relaxed and did it with no intonation whatsoever.”

As someone who “has no shame and is not shy”, he persisted and in his first year as a stand-up, McCausland finished in the top three of pretty much every national competition and won the title of Jongleurs Best Newcomer.

He’s honed his act now and his delivery is self-assured and conversational.

In fact, he says that the on-stage Chris is the same as the chatty Scouser I meet.

“Because of having to get shown up on stage, the start of my gigs has always had to be dealing with the eyesight. You can’t go from dealing with that into a fake persona or a character or a crazy guy. You’ve already engaged the room in dialogue and so you’re stuck as yourself, you don’t have as much freedom to deviate. That’s why I’ve never tried to do the surreal or manic thing [he says doing an impression of the comedian Lee Evans]”.

It was 2005 before McCausland could afford to pack in his job at the call centre and become a fulltime comedian. By then, the job had become “monkey work” but he has no regrets about doing the job in the first place because it got him off benefits and gave him more of a social life. He worked close to home which left him time in the evening to do gigs.

So how does he deal with the inability to spot someone in the crowd to pick on to get a laugh?

“It’s no different for me than for any other comedian. If I turn up to go on at the end of a gig, the guy compèring the show will say there’s a group on the right from such and such a firm, there’s some guys on the left from India on holiday having loads of fun and some Star Trek fans in the front.”

But he won’t pick on anyone “unless someone is being disruptive or too noisy”. Even then, it’s all done in “good spirits”.

“I had a pissed old Irish woman who was getting involved a little bit too much and it was getting disruptive. She was loud and she had this drunken Irish laugh. She was there because one of her kids was getting married and they were all on a night out for the engagement. I said ‘I can’t see you but I’m guessing you’re the drunk Irish woman. There can only be one person in the room with a laugh like that’! Everyone laughed and I said ‘I’m guessing the only reason your kid’s getting married is not because they’re in love, they just want to move out of the house!’.”

McCausland doesn’t like sitting down while performing and prefers to “move and gesticulate”.

But he uses a stool as an orientation aid.

“I used to find that half of my brain was trying to track where I’d moved to make sure I hadn’t drifted or turned. Obviously that takes away from your brain working on the gig. Two years in, I realised that using a stool would help so I have a bar stool up there which means I can move around and then go and perch on the stool. Even if it’s just for fifteen seconds, it looks relaxed and composed, but really what it does is that it allows me to know I’m back in the centre of the stage and that the mic stand is on my left.”

As someone who is “proud” to be blazing a trail as a blind stand-up, I wonder if McCausland can put his finger on the reason for the lack of blind comedians on the stand-up circuit.

“I’d imagine that anybody who has given it a go has really really milked the blind thing. It’s also very very hard work in terms of the amount of time you’ve got to put into it and the travelling is a nightmare. I had to do four or five gigs a week for two years before I was able to give up my day job.”

McCausland has just won a talent competition organised by Channel 4 and the Cultural Diversity Network and will perform to programme makers at an awards ceremony at the end of November to recognise the promotion of diversity issues in the TV industry.

Lenny Henry, who was one of the judges of the talent competition, praised McCausland as a comedian who is “hugely confident, talked about a disability incredibly charmingly but then quickly moved on to talk about race, relationships, gender and all manner of subjects with great spot-on writing.”

It’s a “great opportunity to showcase my comedy” but given his reluctance to be defined by his blindness, does he feel that winning a diversity competition will compromise him?

“Not really, no. The way I look at it is that there’s a difference between disability and ethnicity. Your ethnicity is your culture and you can be proud of your culture, your roots and where you’re from. Blindness is a hindrance and not something you’re proud of. You can be proud of achieving something despite being blind, but you’re not proud of being blind.”

Already well-known to parents and children as Rudi the market trader from the CBeebies programme Me Too, McCausland is optimistic that he could be in the running for more mainstream TV exposure on game shows like 8 Out of 10 Cats and Never Mind the Buzzcocks “in the near future”.

“I love doing the stand-up gigs and I’d love to have people buying tickets to see me doing comedy. One TV appearance will put more bums on seats than three years of gigging. So I see TV as a means to an end.”

He’s writing a radio comedy and has just pitched an idea to a TV company for a programme which combines his interests in comedy and science fiction.

“I’ve got to write another show for Edinburgh next year. I’d like to have forty five or fifty minutes of new stuff by February.”