When we tell stories about disability, who are we really telling them for?
That question was the reason I started developing my show.
There is a version of the disability story we all recognise. It appears on our “For You” page. A heartwarming tale. A tidy arc. If you’re lucky, a donation link. It is inspirational, heartbreaking, and ultimately reassuring… which, to give credit where it’s due, is hard to fit into a short reel. You feel moved. Perhaps grateful. Perhaps you even repost.
These stories are often called “inspiration.” Sometimes they are something closer to trauma porn.
Trauma porn is storytelling that packages real pain for consumption. It invites an audience to witness suffering at a safe distance, to feel something intense and then leave intact. It can create empathy. But it can also create a hierarchy: look at this difficult life, look at this family who copes, look at this extraordinary resilience. Don’t you feel lucky?
Who does that serve?
Sanitising real stories often protects the audience more than the people inside the story.
I grew up with a disabled sibling, Patrick. I love him. I am also shaped by the complexity of that love. There were beautiful moments. There were exhausting ones. There were moments of fierce pride and moments of shame I didn’t know what to do with. There were times where I was overwhelmed by my own interference in his care routine that I wanted to disappear.
But “complicated” is not a marketable genre.
When stories about disability are polished into palatable narratives, something gets lost. Mess gets lost. Anger gets lost. The strange and grotesque humour that families develop to survive gets lost. The disabled person themselves can get lost, reduced to symbol, moral compass or a box to tick for a funding application.
When I started making my show I vowed to always try to search for the truth. But my truth felt funny and messy but overwhelmingly dangerous. I kept asking: what are we allowed to laugh at?
In my show, I play grotesquely funny characters based on real-life encounters. The well-meaning stranger who says something unforgivably inappropriate. The professional who speaks about my brother as if he isn’t there. The person who tells me I’m “so strong” for being related to him. These characters are exaggerated. They are absurd. They are sometimes monstrous.
They are also real.
There is a particular anxiety around humour and disability. Laughter can feel dangerous. It can feel cruel. It can feel like punching down.
But what if the target of the joke isn’t the disabled person? What if the joke is aimed at the systems, the awkwardness, the patronising narratives, the structures that make life smaller? What if the joke is punching up?
Artist licence allows me to distort and heighten. It gives me space to turn discomfort into something theatrical. When I become a grotesque version of the able-bodied hero or the sanctimonious advocate, I’m not mocking vulnerability. I’m mocking power. I’m mocking the need to feel good about someone else’s pain.
I’m writing this from France, where I’m currently studying bouffon. Bouffon is an old, unruly form of comedy. Historically, bouffons were outcasts who would mock the powerful from the margins. They would exaggerate society’s hypocrisies until they became unbearable and hilarious. The humour comes from exposure. From saying: look at the bastard in our lives. Look at the absurdity of what we pretend is normal?!
Bouffon leans into ugliness. It doesn’t tidy things away. It invites the audience to laugh and then feel slightly implicated in that laughter.
That feels important when talking about disability.
Because if we can only tell stories that are polite, uplifting, and easily digestible, we are still centring comfort. We are still asking disabled lives to perform inspiration. We are still asking siblings and parents to be noble side characters in someone else’s moral education.
Sometimes the truth is not noble. Sometimes it’s horrid. Sometimes it’s funny in ways that make you feel guilty for laughing.
And maybe that’s where something more honest can begin.
When audiences laugh at the grotesque characters in my show, they are not laughing at my brother. They are laughing at the social scripts they recognise. They are laughing at the awkward charity video voiceover in their own head. They are laughing at the way they’ve been taught to respond to disability.
That laughter can be uncomfortable. Fantastic news!
Because discomfort is not the same as harm. Discomfort can be an invitation. Why does mess threaten you?
Who benefits when we smooth disability into something inspirational?
Often it is institutions. Funders. Media outlets. Even audiences who want to feel compassionate without interrogating the structures that make life difficult in the first place.
Who benefits when we allow this colossal mess into the room?
Maybe the people who live these stories.
Maybe laughter becomes a way of reclaiming narrative rather than packaging it.
I don’t want to abolish tenderness. I don’t want to reject joy. My big brother taught me both of those things from a young age, and I’d probably be better off taking a leaf out of his book. But I have grown very wary of stories that exist purely to make an audience feel better about themselves.
The question I keep returning to is this: are we telling the truth, or are we telling something that feels safe?
And if we are brave enough to sit in the unsafe version, what new stories might we allow ourselves to hear?
Big Little Sister will perform at Thurs 12th March at 7:15pm.
Click here to book
