When comedian Josh Blue takes the stage, he unabashedly draws attention to how people often mistake him for a homeless person. From there, his self-deprecating style of humor allows him to tackle the main subject of his stand-up: his physical disability.
Blue, who was voted the Last Comic Standing on the NBC reality show of the same name in 2006, has cerebral palsy. While this condition varies from person to person, its primary symptoms include stiff and weak muscles, poor coordination and tremors. Instead of dwelling on these limitations, Blue brings them to the forefront of his stand-up as a means of defying stereotypes about him and others with disabilities.
Blue did the opening act for renowned comedian Ron White at the Durham Performing Arts Center two weeks ago. There, he joked about how it takes him 45 minutes to type out a three-word Tweet, as well as how he and his friends from the Paralympic soccer team developed a game to see who could hold up their dysfunctional hands in the air for the longest time. He then closed by saying that the money for purchasing his DVDs and T-shirts after the show “would go to a disabled person.” Yet the one-liner that competed for most laughs while he was on stage was when he told the audience “when one door closes, another locks behind you.”
In his hour-long special “Sticky Change,” which is currently streaming on Netflix, Blue also incorporates his interracial marriage to an Asian-American woman and the fact that he’s a white African-American (he was born in Africa but grew up in Minnesota) into his comedy. Yet rather than allow his humor to be solely about his circumstances, the majority of it stems from his interactions with people. Though his condition is strictly physical, Blue says in this album that countless individuals automatically assume that he is also mentally disabled — a mistake he says allows him to have all kinds of fun with these people.
Having acquired a substantial fan base and critical acclaim through “Last Comic Standing,” Blue isn’t the only person out there applying this approach and subject matter toward comedy. In 2014, blogger Shane Burcaw published his autobiography “Laughing at my Nightmare,” in which he uses the same kind of self-deprecating humor to describe his life as a 21 year-old with Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), a rare motor neuron disorder which confines him to a wheelchair. A review of the book on Bookliststates that “instead of soberly presenting the ups and downs of a potentially bleak existence, he [Burcaw] pens an uplifting, laugh-out-loud memoir that calls out the absurdity of his circumstances, and the joy he finds in the everyday.”
In many ways, the lives of Blue and Burcaw play out like the final scene of Monty Python’s “Life of Brian,” in which a chorus of people on the verge of death jovially sing the satirical tune, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” Particularly, in an age where more minorities are being represented in pop-culture, comedy may provide the best outlet for disabled communities to counteract stereotypes.
