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Josh Blue — Cripple Comedy |
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Written by Dan England
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Thursday, 14 February 2008 |
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 There’s a moment during Josh Blue’s run in NBC’s “Last Comic Standing,” after the audience gave him a wild standing ovation for his routine poking fun at his cerebral palsy, when guest judge Kathy Griffin asked him why he went into comedy.
“I don’t think I had a choice,” Blue said. “What was I going to be? A traffic cop?”
It was a funny moment, one of the many that eventually led to Blue, a Denver resident, winning Season Four’s competition and kick-starting a career that many now recognize as one of the top stand-up acts in the country.
Blue will perform that act Friday, Feb. 22, at the Union Colony Civic Center.
But just like Blue’s humor, that statement had some truth to it. Blue really didn’t have a choice.
Cerebral palsy, at least Blue’s condition, isn’t a debilitating disability that leaves him in a wheelchair. He’s a striker (the dude who scores the goals, at least that’s the idea) for the U.S. Paralympic Soccer team. But you’d know something was wrong right away when you met him. His right arm is a bit spastic — Blue likes to say it has its own job — and his speech is slurred, like he had three or four too many beers. One of Blue’s most famous bits is when he describes getting thrown in jail after the cops thought he was drunk and having to stay there for several days, with the cops asking him, “Duuude, what did you DRINK?”
If anything, that condition was worse when he was a kid, so just imagine what it’d be like to be on the playground with all that going on. But Blue had a weapon. He fought fire with fire with his sense of humor.
“Ultimately humor is the great disarmer,” Blue said in a phone interview. “It’s a great way to diffuse situations. And at a young age, I figured if I was going to have to live with it, I might as well be enjoying this, too.”
Blue has always lived with cerebral palsy. He can’t tell you when his parents discovered it.
“I like to say that when my Mom told me, ‘When we realized there was something with you, we realized there was nothing wrong with you,’” Blue said. “It was hard to tell with a baby at first. Babies are squirmy all the time.”
Blue, of course, hated his cerebral palsy but as he got older, he began to see an opportunity, not only to develop his act but to increase awareness about the condition.
“I wouldn’t change it for the world now,” he said. “I’d have to talk about being a generic white guy if I didn’t have it, and I think that’s been done before. I didn’t mind being on stage. I was stared at my whole life.”
Blue modeled his act on Richard Pryor and, later, Chris Rock. Pryor, he said, was a master at pointing out the differences in people and making them funny. He made it OK, for instance, to talk about being black, in the same way that another favorite, Ellen DeGeneres, made it OK to talk about being a lesbian.
“I think it was the way he sort of didn’t give a (crap) about everything,” Blue said. “He was very direct and made speaking your mind OK.”
Rock, he said, talks about things that shouldn’t be funny but really are.
“He put things in the way that you could grasp them and then ultimately grasp them even more,” Blue said.
That’s ultimately Blue’s goal with his act, besides the simple goal of making people laugh. Blue’s condition, in his words, is funny and edgy at the same time, even if it offends some people. On a Web site, he mimics the famous Geico commercial by traveling through the airport (the same music as the commercial, Royksopp’s “Remind Me,” plays in the background) and seeing a sign that says “Comedy — So Easy A Cripple Can Do It”).
“The people who don’t like my act really need to see it,” Blue said. “I mean they really need to see it.”
It does bother him when someone doesn’t like his act, he admits, because he wants to reach as many people as possible. He initially hesitated to get into comedy despite his natural feel for it (and spending years honing it on the playground).
“It’s such a brutal business,” Blue said. “When I have a good show, I feel good for maybe a little bit after the show, but when I have a bad show, I feel bad until I have a good show.”
But he’s learning that you can’t please everyone, and his favorite moments come when people say they wanted to laugh at his jokes out of pity but later enjoyed the show.
“I think it catches people off guard,” Blue said. “They have a preconceived idea about me, and the show isn’t what they expected. But then they know it’s the real thing, and they really laugh and have a good time. That’s what I want.”
Blue isn’t sure about expanding his act. He enjoys talking about his disability and isn’t even sure he would be funny talking about other subjects.
“Anything I do is from the point of someone with a disability,” he said. “So I can’t not do it. I can’t do it from a big black woman’s point of view.
“They tell you so many times to find your voice in his business, and then when you do, well, they say you use that voice too much.”
Blue’s condition is good material, but it won’t prevent him from living the rest of his life. He has a baby on the way with his fiancé, something he said he’s “super excited” about.
“I think it’s going to be a great experience,” he said. “I’m a little scared, but that’s just because it’s uncharted territory.”
Any prospective father would probably say the same thing. Blue, at least when it comes to that, is just one of the crowd. And sure, he’s a little different, but he’s grown to love that part of him, too.
“People have been having kids for at least 100 years now, and I’m sure they’ve been raised under much worse conditions,” Blue said. “The fine motor skills are a little scary, but I’ve held lots of babies, and with mine I’m a little more comfortable and confident. Because if I drop my kid, well, it’s on me.”
See the show:
Josh Blue
with John “Hippieman” Novosad
7:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 22,
Union Colony Civic Center, 701 10th Ave. in Greeley
Tickets are $28, $22 and $18. For more information, call the ticket office at 353.5000 or go to www.ucstars.com.
The show contains some light adult humor.
For more information
See more of Josh Blue at www.joshblue.com or www.disaboom.com.
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