My evenings these days are almost always a matter of settling down after my dinner and watching either a film or documentary on TV before going to bed. Last night, however, before turning in, I was treated to something rather interesting: an episode of Live At The Apollo hosted by Tim Renkow, a comedian with Cerebral Palsy. While he could speak quite clearly, he was a powerchair user whose CP was fairly obvious. I had never seen him before, but as a comedian he put on quite a good set and made a laugh a few times.
One thing I raise a cultural commentator’s eyebrow at, though, is how the number of comics who have CP there are on the circuit seems to be growing fairly rapidly. I’m not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing of course, and it’s still very much the case that the more visibility we have as a minority, the better; but especialy since the appearance of Lost Voice Guy Lee Ridley, people seem to have assumed that just having Cerebral Palsy makes you amusing or entitles you to attention. I’m not saying that such vloggers are completely devoid of talent or that they don’t have the capacity to be funny, but, without wanting to name any names, they seem to assume they have a right to tell chavish, vulgar, unfunny jokes. And because of the way they speak, nobody is going to have the nerve to tell them how crap they are, or to shut up. They thus spew bollocks on their youtube channels, which I’m sad to say has began to irritate me more and more.
In and of itself I probably wouldn’t have too much of an issue with this, but the fact that they mix such misguided humour with fairly overt, right wing politics is what irks me. Say what you will about freedom of speech, but I find myself wanting to tell them to just shut the zark up. They come across as spoiled, unfunny wankers with vastly inflated senses of their own comic ability and political acumen. Again, I’m not going to name anyone in particular as that would just be crass, and in fact I’m thinking about more than one person; but the way that certain people seem to assume their CP automatically renders them as amusing as professional comics, when all they do is tell puerile, reactionary gags, is something I can’t ignore. Guys like Renkow and Ridley have started a wonderful trend in the rise in comics with CP, but unfortunately not everyone now trying to jump onto that bandwagon seems to share their talent.
