From Paralympic ‘best loser’ to fearless comic: Ricky Balshaw skewers disability myths without the feel‑good spin

My conversation with British comedian Ricky Balshaw begins with me doing what many able-bodied people probably do around disability: wondering whether I’m using the right words.

Ricky, who has cerebral palsy after the umbilical cord became wrapped around his neck during birth, went on to win a Paralympic silver medal for Great Britain in para-equestrian dressage. He is remarkably unfazed by my linguistic fumbling.

When I wonder aloud whether “specially/differently-abled comedian” is the appropriate terminology, he laughs off my anxiety about getting it wrong.

“To be honest, there’s that many things that I don’t know what the right or wrong thing is myself, so don’t worry about it,” he says.

Disabled, non-abled? He isn’t particularly precious about it.

“I’m not sensitive. It’s all good.”

That opening exchange along with his joke that “Ricky isn’t short for rickets” tells me almost everything I need to know about Balshaw and his comedy. At one point, he even turns the tables on me, mischievously asking, “Did I get in your head, get your intro right?!"

His humour lives in those awkward spaces most of us are almost too careful to go near, for fear of saying the wrong thing, appearing less than woke or, worse, getting cancelled.

Balshaw, meanwhile, seems to have great fun going straight there. He knows what might make you squirm and chances are, he’ll joke about it before you do.

I discover that almost immediately when I describe him as a Paralympic champion. He swiftly corrects me: “I already got silver. I can’t call myself a champion.”

As an Indian mother who considers anything below first place an administrative error, I protest, only for Balshaw to deliver the kind of self-deprecating line that will become a recurring theme of our conversation: “I was the best loser. I was the best loser on the day.”

It is funny, brutal and refreshingly devoid of sentimentality. Balshaw has no interest in presenting himself as an inspirational figure simply because he is disabled, nor does he believe comedy needs to arrive carrying an uplifting message.

“I just don’t like that whole thing going on, trying to sell a message and having this underlying thing,” he says. “I think with a comedian, just go on, be funny, and that’s it.” If someone walks away inspired, he is perfectly happy with that too, but it isn’t the assignment.

“I just go on stage and just be myself.” And being himself means disability is very much on the table, and Balshaw is often the first person to make the joke. He cheerfully lists some of its practical advantages such as “Close parking is great. We get loads of discounts on places” and tells me that he has even been physically lifted onto stages before. In Dubai, this suddenly sounds less like an accessibility requirement and more like a diva rider.

“I want to be carried everywhere,” he jokes, before taking the gag somewhere darker: “I’m not really disabled. I’m able-bodied. It’s all an act. I’m a character act.” His fantasy is to one day make it onto Live at the Apollo, stand up at the end and simply walk off.

It would be easy to describe that humour as a coping mechanism, but that would also be imposing a neat inspirational narrative on a comedian who spends much of our conversation resisting exactly that.

Balshaw traces his humour partly to growing up working-class in Telford, where his mother worked in a chippy and as a cleaner, his father did fencing and worked as a bookie, and the family lived in council housing.

“I think a lot of humour comes from the working class,” he says. “People do what they can to survive and often taking a nick and joke with each other is what you do.”

School gave him another useful qualification for stand-up: a thick skin. “Honestly, I was at school in Telford. There’s nothing these guys can say to me that I haven’t heard and got five answers for,” he says.

Strangely enough, when he eventually became a professional comedian, the savage heckling he had anticipated never really materialised. He had prepared comebacks and expected audiences to attack his disability, but says they generally treat him no differently from other comedians. “They’re not nicer or more or less than an able-bodied person. They’re just the same.”

If somebody does venture into that territory, however, Balshaw knows he has an advantage. “Because I’ve got the disability, I can fight them a bit harder,” he says with obvious relish.

His route from Paralympic dressage to stand-up is almost comically illogical, which is probably why it suits him. After retiring from his sport, Balshaw did what sensible adults are supposed to do and got himself a regular job in sales, flogging garage products and cabinets. He hated it.

“I just thought, this isn’t for me. I can’t do the nine to five. I’m not built for this,” he says.

Comedy had always fascinated him, and around 15 years of after-dinner speaking meant that he wasn’t exactly starting cold when he entered the open-mic circuit. He progressed quickly and, two years later, quit the sales job. Stand-up is now his full-time profession and, perhaps more importantly for any sceptical parent, it pays the mortgage.

His father had initially questioned the wisdom of abandoning a regular salary for comedy, but Balshaw has managed to make the unlikely shift in lanes work.

“I mean, I’m not loaded. You know, if people want to pay me more, that’s fine,” he says.

The material itself is rooted largely in observation and storytelling, particularly experiences he can claim as his own. That rule also helps him navigate an increasingly polarised comedy landscape. Balshaw doesn’t buy entirely into the fear of cancellation because he believes comedians now have more ways to find their own audiences outside traditional television gatekeepers.

“For everybody that doesn’t like these jokes, there’s someone that does,” he says.

He also knows where his own limits lie. Politics, for instance, isn’t an area he believes he understands well enough to turn into material.

“I only talk about stuff that I’ve lived,” he says. “Anything that I’ve got experience in and can talk first hand, I’m safe to do it because my opinion is true. Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s my opinion and my viewpoint.”

That doesn’t mean he believes comedians should simply shrug when a member of the crowd crosses a line. If someone makes a sexist or openly disrespectful heckle and the room hears it, Balshaw believes the performer has to address it.

“You can’t not address it,” he says, arguing that the comedian’s job is to shut it down while somehow still finding the funny in the situation and keeping the rest of the audience on side.

There is one modern development, though, that genuinely worries him: artificial intelligence creeping into comedy writing. Balshaw will use AI as a sounding board, perhaps feeding it a story and asking it to pose questions that force him to think about an angle he hadn’t considered, but there is a hard line around authorship.

“I refuse to get AI to write a joke for me,” he says.

“I’ll never, ever get AI to write me a joke. And I think it takes the soul out of comedy.”

For someone whose comedy is so deeply connected to lived experience, perhaps that resistance isn’t surprising. Cerebral palsy gives Balshaw material precisely because it has shaped the way people react to him, and one stereotype particularly irritates him: the assumption that disability equals helplessness.

“The biggest stereotype is that just we can’t do anything,” he says. With cerebral palsy, he believes there can also be an assumption that a physical disability automatically means an intellectual one.

“There’s a lot of stigma with my disability in particular that we’re sort of mentally disabled as well, and we’re not.”

Ironically, the disabled community isn’t where he tends to encounter outrage over his material. Balshaw says he hasn’t had “a single disabled person” come up to him angrily after a show. Instead, parents of disabled children often tell him that they relate to the jokes because, while he goes hard at his own experiences, he doesn’t use other disabilities casually as targets. “I don’t aim to please them, but I do accidentally,” he says.

Dubai, however, presents a different kind of boundary. Balshaw is here for his first Middle East comedy stint with The Laughter Factory, and despite his earlier argument that comedians shouldn’t obsess about cancellation, he readily admits that he has calibrated his material for the UAE. Asked how sanitised the version we will see here is compared with what goes through his head, he doesn’t hesitate. “Compared to what goes on up here, 10,” he says. “Honestly, the things that go on up here, I’d be locked up.”

He believes comedians understand the difference between genuinely held beliefs and the dark material tossed around while comics test boundaries among themselves. Audiences, understandably, may not always have that context, so some jokes never leave the green room. It is perhaps the clearest indication that beneath Balshaw’s anything-goes persona sits a comedian who thinks carefully about where, when and with whom a joke lands.

Dubai itself has already overturned one of his preconceptions. Before arriving, Balshaw admits he had expected a far more male-dominated society with fewer women in the workforce.

“It’s been so good just to see how wrong that is,” he says. His experience of the city has otherwise been almost embarrassingly enthusiastic: better weather than Britain, impressive facilities, enormous buildings and people who, he says, “can’t do enough for you.”

Naturally, this immediately makes him wonder how far he can push Dubai’s hospitality. “I’m going to try and push that while I’m here and see where that limit is,” he says.

It seems a fitting ambition for Balshaw, because much of his comedy is built around testing limits how we speak about disability, what we are frightened to laugh at, when a joke becomes offensive and how much discomfort an audience can take before it relaxes and laughs along.

Just don’t call him inspirational while he’s doing it. And definitely don’t call him a Paralympic champion.

He worked very hard for the title he gave himself.

The “best loser” will do nicely.

Don't Miss It!

Ricky Balshaw will be joined by American comedian Tevin Everett, UAE's beloved talent Miqdaad Dohadwala, and Dubai's favourite Andrea Brooks. Catch them in action at Bla Bla by McGettigans (8pm, August 13), Radisson Damac Hills (8.30pm, Radisson Damac Hills), and Dukes The Palm (8.30pm, August 15). Call 050 8786728