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on the street · down a ramp, not a flight of stairs · no cover, no two-drink minimum

A comedy club on the street

Laughingstock

Tonight: disabled comics, on their own terms

Comedy is a form of knowledge. When disabled comedians take the stage, they bring a perspective shaped by daily navigation of a world that was not designed for them — and they do it on their own terms, in their own voice, controlling the frame. They make audiences do their own thinking.

Disabled comedians are not inspiring for being on stage. They are comics who happen to be disabled. And these sets map the gap between how disability is publicly discussed and how disabled people actually live, laugh, and relate to their own bodies and communities.

From our Campfire Learn Together, Being Disabled Can Be Pretty Funny, where the community watched Josh Blue and Tina Friml together and talked about what their work reveals about disability, identity, and the world.

Who is on

In this room, the only thing that stands in the light is what the comics said. Everything else — our write-up, our notes, the house rules — is out here in the dark with the audience, which is where it belongs.

Josh Blue

Josh Blue has cerebral palsy and is a Paralympian in soccer. He won Last Comic Standing in 2006 and has been touring for over twenty years. His specials center disability without apologizing for it: life with a palsy arm that “has some stuff to do” after dark, a restaurant server who asks his friend “what will he have,” getting put on the disabled list after an injury at the Paralympics, and Botox, which in his telling was developed to help people with cerebral palsy before somebody noticed it would sell.

“shouldn’t that somehow make me better?”

Josh Blue
On being put on the disabled list after an injury at the Paralympics.

“I’m guessing: talk with your manager.”

Josh Blue
His friend’s answer, in his bit, when a server asked the friend what he would have.

“well, fuck cerebral palsy, we could really be helping people.”

Josh Blue
On Botox, and on who medical research turns out to be for.

Tina Friml

Tina Friml has cerebral palsy. She frames herself as “the bisexuality of ability” — not fully committed to either side — and names three perks of being a disabled comic: she can never be a hack (“nothing about this is relatable”), CP is the most interesting thing about her (otherwise she is just “a liberal white girl from Vermont”), and nothing she does can fail, because an audience will file all of it under inspiration. That last one is not a boast. It is a critique. She calls it being on “free play” — a baby who cheated death and has been in the bonus round ever since.

“I don’t suffer from cerebral palsy, I suffer from people”

Tina Friml
The social model of disability, compressed into a punchline.

“nothing about this is relatable”

Tina Friml
One of the three perks of being a disabled comic: she can never be a hack.

“the bisexuality of ability”

Tina Friml
Not fully committed to either side, which is where a great many of us live.

Every line in the light is quoted from our write-up, belongs to the comic who said it, and is 30 words or fewer. The write-up does not say which set each one comes from, and neither do we. The line under each is ours.

The whole night

The whole night, in the order we put it in, and it runs until you stop it. No runtime on this one: it is a list we keep adding to, and a total here would be wrong the next time it changed.

Disabled Comedy, on YouTube, from our own channel.

The bill

Or pick one. Every set says how long it runs before you press it, and nothing plays until you do.

Chalked up off the playlist on 2026-09-23, in the playlist’s own order. The playlist is ours and we keep adding to it, so the whole night may have more on it by now than the bill does.

What the laughs are doing

From the takeaways of the same write-up, lightly trimmed.

For the bar afterwards

The Campfire ended with questions rather than answers. Three of them, to take home with you:

The rest of them are in the write-up. Campfire Learn Together is where we watch things like this together, and it is open to the whole community.

House rules

Whose these are

Every set belongs to the comics who wrote and performed it, who are named on every one, and to the channels that published it. None of them is affiliated with Stimpunks and none of them endorses us. Nothing here is hosted by us: each set is on YouTube, and nothing reaches YouTube until you press play. The playlist is ours, on our own channel.

The writing at the top, the takeaways and the questions are ours, from our Campfire Learn Together write-up. The lines in the light are the comics’ own, as that write-up quotes them.

The name is an ordinary English word for the person everybody laughs at. In here it is the name of the one room where the comic decides what the joke is.

The neon is Yellowtail, by Astigmatic, under the Apache License 2.0, and it sets the club’s name, the comics’ names and nothing you have to read. Everything you do read is Bricolage Grotesque, by Mathieu Triay, under the SIL Open Font License — bricolage being making do with whatever is to hand. More in the liner notes.

HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?

Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so — and in here, MAX GLITTER is the water on the stool going sparkling.

Job marker — a set list taped to the floor of the stage

You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.

The job: Who ordered?

Before the code: A server asked Josh Blue’s friend what he would have. The friend guessed Josh would be talking with somebody. Who?

Hint 1

It is one of the lines standing in the light, under Josh Blue’s name.

Hint 2

It is the line his friend says, not the one he does.

Last hint

Whoever you ask for when the service has gone wrong.

Give me the answer

The answer is Your manager. “I’m guessing: talk with your manager.” The server had gone round the table taking everybody’s order and, when they got to Josh Blue, asked the person next to him. It is not a rare failure of manners. It is the routine assumption that a disabled person at the table is not the one to address.

Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.

Quest code: SETLIST

Hand it in at the Adventurer’s Guild →