You're having a laugh!

Laugh and the world laughs with you, they say. But if you’re disabled, it’s more likely to be laughing at you. So, what’s so funny about us? And who’s allowed to make or laugh at jokes? And, asks Ian Macrae, is there such a thing as disability comedy

How sharp is your funny bone? Let’s start with a little test.

Actor and comedian Mat Fraser was once asked by one of those annoying people who feel it’s their right to ask such things whether he’d always been “like that”.

He looked them dead in the eye and said: “Actually, no. I woke up this morning. Fuckin’ arms had dropped off!”

Did that make you laugh?

In the past few weeks, Jimmy Carr and “that joke” have once again brought the subject of disability humour kicking and screaming into the spotlight.

But let’s face it, the comedy stage is littered with the corpses of victims and stereotypes. Seaside landladies, Pakistani bus conductors, Scotsmen (mean and/or drunk), mothers-in-law (fat and overbearing), West Indians (relentlessly cheery), gay men (lispingly effeminate), spinsters (butch battle axes), the Welsh (stupid), the Irish (even stupider).

The difference between all of the above and disabled people is that, for the most part, they’ve fallen off the comedy radar – at least in terms of what’s regarded as acceptable – while we appear still to be fair game.

Earlier this year, for instance, when Professor Stephen Hawking was ill in hospital, the Metro carried a cartoon on its front page suggesting that someone should just switch him off and back on again. Those disabled people who dared to express the view that this was less than funny were told simply to see the joke and “get a life!”

Prime Minister Gordon Brown is often singled out for the sort of abuse which hardly qualifies as comedy at all for the pure and simple fact that he has a prosthetic eye. Imagine the justifiable outcry if someone (other maybe than an African American satirist) was similarly derogatory of President Obama on the grounds of his ethnicity.

But here we have to nail a central question. Is there any value, either in social or comic terms, in drawing those sorts of parallels between disability and other areas of what is often termed the social agenda? Disabled comedian and activist Laurence Clark believes it’s important to do so.

It’s incredibly useful because disability isn’t seen in the same way by a lot of comedians. It’s either seen as very risqué, close to the bone, an area for very dark humour. Or there’s still not an acknowledgement that disabled people form a substantial part of the audience.

Citing an earlier incident involving Jimmy Carr, where a disabled person left one of his gigs having been offended by a joke which referred to “vegetables”, Clark again stresses his point.

“This sort of thing will go on happening until comedians see us as part of the audience.”

Adam Hills is another disabled comedian who’s met and dealt with reactions from disabled members of his audience head on.

“I’ve had people heckle me on stage for things I’ve said about disability. They’ve told me ‘You know what, just because you’ve got one you can’t be offensive’, and I’ve had to take that home and think about it.”

For Hills, it seems to be about establishing your right to discuss and joke about such things but also be clear about that right and about why you feel able to go certain places.

“I’ve got a whole routine about sign language and how sign language can be vaguely racist – as a premise which I then take apart.

“This guy in the front at the Comedy Store kicked off and said ‘my sister’s deaf’. I said, ‘ok, but I’m not talking about being deaf I’m talking about sign language’. Basically he threatened to come on stage and punch me. He told me to back off and I said I wasn’t going to back off, ‘but you listen to the rest of my act and tell me whether you’re offended’.

“What he’d missed was the fact that I’d said I worked a lot with sign interpreters so that deaf people can come to my gigs. So it came from a place of understanding.”

There’s a world of difference between comics like Adam Hills, Laurence Clark, maybe even Jimmy Carr, and others like Jim Davidson or Bernard Manning.

Davidson infamously once refused to take the stage because a row of wheelchair-users had been placed between him and the first row of the general audience. But he’s also caused offence, apparently reckless of consequences to his reputation by, among other things, his use of language. He once described rival stand-up Ben Elton as “about as funny as woodworm in a cripple’s crutch”, a statement which seemed calculated to have maximum impact on all sorts of levels.

“Jim Davidson is interesting”, says Damon Rose who commissions and produces comedy for the BBC’s disability website Ouch!

“It’s not about his material, it’s about him having a problem with disability”.

Both Rose and Adam Hills (who writes for Ouch!), on the other hand, defend Jimmy Carr’s latest foray into disability related material. They point out in his defence that he has both visited and raised funds for service personnel wounded in Afghanistan.

The other defence often put up for him and comedians like him is that being offensive is just part of their shtick. But this is a line which cuts no ice with Laurence Clark.

“That argument would work if there was a level playing field. When disabled comics get as much exposure and media attention, then you can have the free-for-all, because people will be in a position to respond and give as good as they take. But we don’t have that at all.”

It’s becoming clear that humour is both diverse and individual at the same time. So in what is clearly a minefield, comedians and commissioners alike have a difficult path to find. So how does someone like Damon Rose, a disabled person commissioning and publishing comedy, decide what’s funny?

“It’s what feels right”, he says. “As someone with my experiences and as a disabled person I have this feeling as to whether something’s right or not.”

Meanwhile comedian Adam Hills has a mantra to guide him.

“Someone once said to me, ‘if it’s funny it won’t be offensive and if it’s offensive it won’t be funny’.”

One thing all three of them agree on is what’s not funny.

There’s an old visual gag which involves the teller sitting down and extending the right arm out parallel with the right thigh, then moving the two limbs in sync, maintaining the distance between them. The question is asked, what’s this? The answer, a spastic playing with a magnet.

“It’s not funny because it’s objectifying and it’s very much an outsider telling a joke about a group of people and very much objectifying that group”, says Laurence Clark. On the other side of the coin, Damon Rose says: “Humour’s funny if it’s based on experience and knowledge.”

He goes on: “And disabled people have our own humour. I was talking to a short person. She was sitting on a barstool and someone asked her how she got to be the way she was. She said it was through smoking. A few years ago she’d been six feet tall. The person took her seriously and said, ‘Oh my god, I’d better tell my wife. She smokes’.”

As to why there’s all this soul searching, with people scratching their heads about whether or not to laugh, Rose says it’s down to lack of visibility of and familiarity with disabled people.

“The confusion happens because the disabled experience isn’t in media enough, isn’t in drama enough, so it isn’t in comedy enough.”

And as for what works and what doesn’t, again Adam Hills thinks it’s really quite similar.

“Maybe the word is empathy. You’ve got to have empathy with the person. You can’t just make jokes about them. You’ve got to see it from their point of view.”