Francesca Martinez of BritainFrom The Daily Record in Scotland where Martinez is playing The Strand in Edinburgh:
As a performer whose cerebral palsy means she has to lean on a chair during her set, Francesca Martinez is the first to point out the irony in her being a stand-up comedian.
"I'm like a wobbly rock star," she tells the audience after being helped on to the stage.
The former Grange Hill actor can't stop her body shaking because of her condition, but by the end of her set the audience couldn't stop convulsing because of her jokes about the condition.
Martinez has been in the news recently after she turned down the opportunity to represent the disabled community by carrying the Olympic Torch through London.
She did not mention the incident in her set but certainly shone a light on how the wider community treats disabled people.
Martinez did this most neatly by asking a lad in the audience what he was bad at and then treating his inability to play football as a disability. "Were you born like that?" she asked the hapless lad. "Couldn't your mum have had a test when she was pregnant?"
Then she rounded on the lad's girlfriend. "You are so brave. Well done," she said. "Does it mean he can't have sex?"
It was a clever routine that kicked the legs from under many of the patronising assumptions that are made about people with disabilities while provoking gales of laughter.
Her real skill was in hammering home her points without lecturing the audience.
It's not easy to tell brutal home truths in a light-hearted, humorous manner but Martinez has the knack of making discrimination look daft.
She also knows how to wickedly make the most of her cerebral palsy.
"Sometimes it is worse than others," she said. "It seems to get a lot worse when there is a long queue at the airport."
