How comedy can change your life

Disabilities, the barren no-man’s-land of stand-up comedy, is an area which comedians will normally choose to bypass. The risk involved in testing its waters is just too great- one uncanny family connection in the audience and the performer risks swimming with sharks. An indiscriminate racial rampage may have earlier brought the audience to a round of cheerful uproar, yet one stab at MS and it has gone too far. The comedian has transgressed the upper limits of the prerogative as an entertainer. Nature is unforgiving, no less to the brazen git who has just mocked it.

Yet Francesca Martinez defiantly braves this largely uncharted territory, unconcerned with the perils that await her. For Martinez, a sufferer of cerebral palsy, shameless comic rants about her condition help to lift the social awkwardness that clouds the issue. Seeing the funning side of her handicap and sharing it with others has enabled her to come to terms with it. In high spirits she affirms that her comedic career has changed her life. Chatting to her over the phone about this turning point, we soon drifted into conversation about the comic potential of social prejudice.

The comedian’s first attempt at writing and performing comedy was on a now infamous day in February 1999 when newspapers reported Glenn Hoddle’s shocking implication that disabled people were being punished for sins committed in previous lives. Martinez ran with this, composing a routine along the lines of “Oh my God, what must I have done in my past life? I bet I was an axe-murderer or killed old grannies in their beds.”

“It really made people laugh,” says Martinez, reminiscing about the moment, “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is the first time I’ve actually mentioned my disability in public.’ And it’s amazing- instead of creating tension, it actually just gets rid of it.”

Martinez’s initiation into comedy occurred almost by accident, whilst at a comedy workshop, researching a role that she was to play in a film written by her father, screenwriter Alex Martinez. "I was absolutely terrified; for the first six weeks I couldn't get up or say a word. It was so scary just standing up and being myself." But a chance conversation with another man from the course changed everything. "I remember saying to him one day, ‘you know I'm different,’ and he said, 'What do you mean you're different? Everyone's different. Brain-damaged is a label, you are you, and that's all you are.'” From this point onwards, Martinez began to consider her disability in a different way.

In her new show, In Deep, Martinez forces the audience to recognise their own prejudices regarding disabilities. She quotes a statistic that the majority of parents, given the choice, would not have a child if it was determined early in pregnancy that the child would be disabled. Then she says breezily, “so, you know, it’s good to be here.” It’s a succinct way of raising a knotty subject. According to Martinez, “the whole routine is meant to make people question: is a disability the worst thing your child could have? Because, you know, what if they’re a complete bastard?!”

It's hard to disagree with such a passionate argument, but I put it to her that no matter how much a child is loved, is it not true that raising a disabled child is necessarily going to be harder than raising an able bodied one? "Well yes,” she replies, “and there are loads of degrees of it aren't there, I mean my disability - okay, I'm a bit wobbly, I can't do a lot of housework, I can't run - but on the whole, I can do everything I want and have a very fulfilling life. And I can't comment on other disabilities; all I know is that they exist and they're part of humanity and I think we need to learn to embrace them, rather than concentrating on eliminating them at birth."

This revelation has allowed Martinez to stop thinking of herself as a "faulty model" and to embrace her "flaws and so-called weaknesses that [she'd] been hating.” In her new show, the emphasis that she places on self-confidence is evident.

"I'm a big fan of anyone who I feel is totally being themselves" she says. Does stand-up offer a unique opportunity to do that, then? "I think there's a huge yearning for listening to individuals speaking from their hearts. Because it's really the last place you can do that and see that in society. I think it's just something about the raw nature of it, you're in a room watching someone talk." The effect of stand-up for Martinez personally has been not just cathartic, but life-changing. "When I first started comedy, a comedian said to me 'Stand-up comedy's funny, you spend years and years peeling away the layers, to be yourself.' And that's ironic, because I think that's what all stand-ups are aiming for. And that just gives us an idea of how difficult it is to peel away the layers of insecurity, fear, lacking in confidence, just to actually go out and say 'hey, guys, this is me.’"