An article from Brian Logan in The Guardian in the UK about John Smith, who is billed as Britain's only British sign language comedian. There's also a video of him performing on the Guardian's Web site.Here's a joke for you. A man falls in love with a fairy. He is so smitten, this man, that he cups the little fairy in the palm of his hand, looks into her eyes, and says: "I love you. I want to marry you." Are you laughing yet? Probably not - maybe because the joke has lost a little in translation from its original language. In British Sign Language (BSL), the word "fairy" involves standing the index and middle finger of one hand on the upturned palm of the other, as if to represent the fairy's legs. But the word "marry" requires flipping the second hand over - which removes the ground from beneath the fairy's feet and sends her plummeting unromantically to the floor.
I am in Dublin to see John Smith, Britain's only BSL comedian. Smith, who is from Nottingham, has been hired to perform by the Irish Deaf Society as part of the Dublin comedy festival. I am here to see how comedy works in sign-language, how Smith's act compares with the spoken comedy I am used to seeing as the Guardian's stand-up critic.
Much of Smith's act is about the gulf between the hearing and deaf worlds; about the ways, from subtle to screamingly obvious, in which society excludes deaf people.But I have already had an inverse sense of that, in the difficulty I have encountered in organising my visit to his show. It proved far trickier than expected to find an interpreter to sit with me at the gig. Clearly, there are not many to go around - a problem compounded by the fact that Smith uses BSL, whereas the local interpreters use the similar, but not identical, Irish Sign Language.
Eventually, I find Susan Foley-Cave, who has worked with Dublin's deaf community for more than a decade and, by a happy coincidence, undertook academic research on deaf humour. (The fairy joke comes from her.) But my problems do not end here. Foley-Cave and I need to sit together, so she can translate Smith's act directly into my shell-like lug-hole. But we have been issued non-adjacent seats. When I try to explain this to the (deaf) ushers, I hear myself addressing them slowly, loudly and probably obnoxiously, like a British tourist on the Costa del Sol.
Most of the rest of the audience (if that word applies) are deaf. Foley-Cave knows almost all of them: Dublin's deaf community is out in force, which suggests that shows dedicated to this constituency are infrequent events. I feel incongruous- as, perhaps, do deaf people at conventional gigs. But Foley-Cave tells me not to worry. Yes, I might be made fun of: deaf comedy usually pokes fun at hearing people. But it is worse for her, because the most common butt of deaf jokes, the BSL-speakers' bete noir, is the interpreter. One gag features congregants at a funeral paying tribute to the deceased, a kingpin of the disabled community. One man is moved to cast his wheelchair into the grave, another his hearing aid, a third his walking stick. The BSL-speaker, eager to follow suit, duly slings his interpreter into the hole.
I will not be cracking any jokes about Foley-Cave; she is my lifeline tonight. To a hearing punter like me, the event already feels unusual, askew in some way, before it even begins. Maybe it is the silence in the bar beforehand, where conversations are taking place with hands, not tongues. Or the fact that the houselights in the auditorium (another word that no longer applies) do not dim when Smith steps onstage. When his act begins, it seems scarcely more familiar. If I expected his comedy to be broadly decipherable - that even without an interpreter I might get the gist - I was wide of the mark.
Chatting to Smith before the show with the help of another interpreter, he told me that he uses "a lot of facial expressions, body language and very big movements". His favourite comedian, he said (using the distinctive "jus' like that" gesture we might all deploy to describe him) was Tommy Cooper. Onstage, Smith elicits a cheer by referencing Rowan Atkinson as Mr Bean. There is an overlap between hearing and deaf comedy, and it is in this field of slapstick, clowning and knockabout. Deaf audiences might appreciate Laurel and Hardy, Men in Coats and, to some extent, Lee Evans, on the same level as their hearing counterparts.
But Smith is doing something a little different. Yes, his facial expressions are totally legible to a hearing viewer, and they often register the dismay or indignation you see on most stand-ups' faces. And yes, there are mime sequences I can interpret. One is about deaf people dancing. The dance ends with Smith cradling a woman in his arms - but when he wants to whisper a sweet nothing to her, he must use his hands to do so, and (like the fairy) she duly tumbles to the ground.
But in most cases, Smith's signing is integral to his meaning, and I need Foley-Cave to follow even his most cartoonish jokes. Many are enacted using roleplay, which is BSL's key device for reporting second-person speech or action. Onstage, Smith enacts a deaf person working in air traffic control; a deaf man having sex while wearing a miner's headlamp (so he can turn out the bedside light and still be able to "speak"); and various knives and forks flying across the room to adhere to a deaf man's cochlear implants (which contain magnets). Smith does not like cochlear implants, and at one point smashes a hearing aid on the floor with a mallet, which divides his audience. Implants are a powder-keg issue in deaf circles, because some see them as a "cure" for a condition that should not be deemed an affliction in the first place.
There is a political edge to Smith's act, unsurprisingly for a man who sued the factory in which he once worked for disability discrimination, and who later served at the Rotherham Deaf Advice Centre. There are embittered jokes about his memories of school, where deafness was treated like a deficiency and BSL ignored. (Smith is estranged from many of his family, who will not acknowledge BSL and insist on speaking to him.) There is a joke about sign-interpreted TV being scheduled in the wee hours of the night, which sees Smith speeding up sex with his partner in order not to miss the only telly shows he will be able fully to understand.
It is fascinating to see Smith's caricature of the hearing person, a sort of waffling drone burbling out of his mouth, far less expressive than the vivacious gestural symphony that is BSL. But what marks his act out from much deaf humour, says Foley-Cave, is that he is lampooning deaf people too: their tight-fistedness, their burping, slurping disregard for propriety; their garrulous solidarity. She compares him to Chris Rock, who mocks black people in his stand-up as well as whites. But Smith's fun-poking is more affectionate than Rock's, and his satire is not exactly impartial: at one point, he appears in a superhero's cape, punching the air and shouting, "Deaf power!"
The audience seem delighted by this; several punters gleefully parrot the phrase in the foyer later. "Deaf people can understand and empathise with my work," Smith said earlier. To represent deaf stories and deaf concerns in comedy, he believes, is liberating. It releases the tensions inherent in these people's lives ("Deaf people are treated like they're stupid," he says. "You're constantly having to fight and challenge with hearing people,") and both allows them to laugh and to know that they, too, are funny. "I can be a role model to these people," says Smith, "definitely."
But, even though his act is about, and for, deaf people, and even though watching it was for me a sometimes alienating experience, I left feeling that Smith's BSL humour was not so different from comedy everywhere. The more Smith jokes about deaf behaviour - about how deaf people are greedy, money-conscious, rude and lovable - the more they resemble, well, everyone else. As I once wrote about the venerable US stand-up Jackie Mason, "He uses the word 'Jew' where others might use 'person'." The same goes for Smith and deaf people. At the start of this night of sign-language stand-up, the difference between myself and the rest of the audience felt vast. By the end - and this is what's great about comedy - I couldn't help noticing how much we had in common.
