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Podcast #68: Funny, not funny

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Damon Rose Damon Rose | 12:17 UK time, Thursday, 14 April 2011

What happens when you throw 3 disabled comedians together and get a fourth disabled comedian to chair the discussion? Find out the answer in our latest holiday podcast special.

Listen or subscribe to the show by following this link

Liz Carr is joined by an international panel to get to the bottom of when and why disability has its funny moments. Her guests are: Maysoon Zayid, Chris McCausland and Stella Young.

Maysoon Zayid

• used to describe herself as: "a Palestinian Muslim virgin with cerebral palsy from New Jersey" at least until she got married at the end of last year. Founder of the Arab-American Comedy Festival, she has also appeared in US TV soap As the World Turns and the Adam Sandler film You Don't Mess With The Zohan. Maysoon spends four months of every year working in the Middle East running a programme for children in Palestinian refugee camps; whilst there, she performs a sanitised version of her stand up routine in English and Arabic to local audiences. She joins us from our studio in San Francisco.

Chris McCausland

• believes he is the only full-time blind comedian in the UK. Winner of various comedy awards including best newcomer at Jongleurs in 204 and a runner-up in Channel 4's So You Think You're Funny. You may have seen Chris on the CBeebies show Me Too where he played the market trader Rudi; 150 episodes were made. You can see him at this year's Edinburgh Fringe in a new one man show. Chris joins us in our London studio.

Stella Young

• Stella Young is a comedian and former presenter of disability culture show No Limits on Australia's Channel 31. Much of her comedy material comes from her experiences as a less than average height wheelchair user. Most of Stella's time is currently focused on ABC's new disability website of which she is the startup editor. She talks to us on Skype from her home in Melbourne.

Some great lines of discussion in a roundtable special. Listen out for Stella's bizarre insect story and a great bit of banter between Chris and Maysoon about whether you should be proud of being disabled. Should you? Can you? Listen and make up your own mind. One thing's for sure, disabled people are uniquely positioned to see some pretty weird behaviour out there, it seems.

Read a transcript of the show


Mat Fraser returns in early May with guest host Kiruna Stamell for a couple of hsows. Liz Carr will be back again in June. Everyone's so busy it's hard to pin them all down in one studio at the moment. We're using this as an opportunity to play around with the format though, so do tell us what you think, email: ouch@bbc.co.uk and/or leave comments below.

Our next podcast will be published on May 8 with another two weeks later.

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