Written by Max Thornton.
I suspect a lot of us are very, very sick of the constant attempts to defend bigotry in the guise of comedy. It just never stops. Every single week, it seems, some dude on Twitter or the stand-up circuit gets called out for a shocking instance of racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia (or, if we’re really lucky, all of them at once), and then he and his minions dig their heels in because it was just a joke!
How many more times do we have to say that nothing is apolitical? How many more times can we explain the “punch up” principle? Sure, there are times when it’s more complicated than that and more nuance is called for, but it’s a good guiding principle, and it is not a difficult one to grasp.
And so, for our sanity, we adore our openly feminist comedians, people like Wanda Sykes or Margaret Cho or the Citizen Radio folks, as a necessary counterweight to the reactionary garbage that comprises much of comedy. These comics are performing a kind of alchemy, transforming their political anger into acts that entertain while speaking truth to power. Comedy can be potent when it’s a transfiguration of rage at injustice, or of inner demons and self-loathing – but it can also just be nice.
Adam Hills is a nice comedian. His stand-up set Adam Hills Stands Up Live, which aired on Britain’s Channel 4 in late 2012, isn’t about mockery or ridicule or attack (whether justified or not). He’s not punching up or down: he’s not punching at all. At most, he’s nudging up.
I’m not, of course, claiming it’s somehow apolitical, but this particular set doesn’t feature jokes about, say, gender relations or the government. On his TV show The Last Leg, he is sometimes more overtly political, calling out body-shaming, condemning rape threats, or having a spat with the Westboro Baptist Church, but the politics with which his stand-up is shot through is that of disability consciousness.
Adam Hills has a prosthetic foot. He has covered the summer Paralympics for television in his native Australia or in Britain for the last two competitions. In some ways Adam Hills Stands Up Live is a very gentle primer in the nuances of disability consciousness.
Disability is a slippery category, one with fuzzy borders and a lot of contested terrain. Different disabilities have different, sometimes non-overlapping concerns. Conditions like mental illness, cognitive impairment, and Deafness are not necessarily included under the disability umbrella, whether through the preference of the people concerned or through their exclusion by others. The classic distinction between visible and invisible disabilities has been problematized by pointing out that many disabilities vary in visibility depending on the circumstances. Disability activists long ago distinguished disability as a social category from impairment as a bodily reality, analogous with the feminist distinction between gender and sex, but, like the sex/gender distinction, the disability/impairment distinction has recently come to be recognized as more complex than this simple dualism.
Hills points toward this slipperiness when he says, “I don’t consider myself disabled,” but elsewhere in the set refers to “other people with disabilities,” implying that he is part of the category. It’s a recognition that you don’t always have control over whether or not you are part of a social category. While he notes that “I am extremely lucky to have been born with a ‘disability’ that doesn’t dramatically affect my life,” Hills certainly doesn’t use that as a way to distance himself from other disabled people – on the contrary, he is very involved with disability and its slippery cousins.
Most strikingly, Hills frequently performs with a sign interpreter in order to welcome a Deaf audience to his shows. He incorporates the interpreter into his act, tells a number of jokes about the ins and outs of sign language, and interacts with the Deaf members of the audience.
[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfl7D4_joZU”]
Early in his career, Hills avoided mentioning his artificial foot in his act: “I wanted to prove myself as a comic before talking about this. I never wanted to lean on my leg.” Now, however, he is a public figure who talks and jokes about his disability without playing into ableist stereotypes of the inspirational supercrip or the bitter crip. His jokes about disability and sexuality draw attention to the odd ways in which people with disabilities are simultaneously desexed and hypersexualized, taking on the tipsy friends who wonder if he ever “uses it” in sexual situations as well as the woman who blurted out, “Can you still have sex?” (Answer: “Uh, yeah! What does your husband do? Does he take a run-up?”)
On top of all this, his James Brown bit is some of the purely nicest comedy I have ever seen. White male comedians, stop taking your inspiration from the Daniel Toshes of the world, and learn from Adam Hills instead.
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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax.