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Freak Out interview
The Guardian, June 2000

Q. What’s the world’s smallest pub?
A. The Thalidomide Arms.

AN old joke, but is it funny? Yes or no? If yes, is it still funny if it is told to someone who suffers Thalidomide impairment by someone who doesn’t? If no, does it become funny if told by a Thalidomide victim? Laughter, like sneezing, is something we cannot help. All of us laugh, and frequently, at things which really should not (and probably, really, do not) amuse us in the slightest. Whether or not we should feel guilty about this, and from where that guilt springs, are hugely vexed questions, which a new Channel 4 series, “Freak Out”, will shortly vex further. “Freak Out”, a creation of “Eurotrash” producers Rapido, is a genuine innovation: a programme about disability, presented by people with disabilities, which is intended not as wholesome prosyletising, but as light entertainment.
  “It’s a very fine line,” agrees Mat Fraser, one of the show’s presenters. Fraser, whose arms are shortened and contorted by Thalidomide impairment, has heard the above joke, more than once, and appreciates the contradiction. “I laughed when I was told it by another Thalidomide victim, but when [Evening Standard television critic] Victor Lewis-Smith used it in one of his columns, I wanted to kick his head in.”
  Ash Atalla, the other regular presenter of “Freak Out”, hasn’t, incredibly, heard the joke before, and chuckles quite delightedly when told it. However, lest anyone suspect that he is less sensitive because the joke doesn’t pertain directly to his disability, he stresses that he would be perfectly happy to hear a good wheelchair gag, even if it were an able-bodied comedian telling it; he agrees, for example, that the well-loved Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch about the one-legged man auditioning to play Tarzan, is funny by any reasonable measure.
  “Doesn’t bother me at all,” he says. “The more precious people get about things like that, the more they isolate themselves, and come across as over-protective and whingey. Every time you see disabled people on television, it’s always worthy, always serious, and always fucking dull. One of the main problems of being in a wheelchair is that I can’t get up stairs, right? And how much can I say on that subject? Stairs. Are. Difficult. That’s it, goodnight. But years and years of disabled programming have given the impression that this is all we ever talk about.”

THIS difference in views between Fraser and Atalla – Fraser places himself on “the extreme edge” of the disability rights lobby, while Atalla claims that “I don’t follow disabled politics at all” – illustrates the difficulty of finding a balance between the telling satirical point, and the gratuitously discomfiting barb. In “Freak Out”, both presenters unapologetically utilise their disabilities as source material.
  In one episode, Atalla delivers a sketch examining what he calls “Sorry Syndrome” – the tendency of able-bodied people to apologise to the wheelchair-bound even when they are not at fault. Atalla casts himself as a malevolent, vengeful character, deliberately bashing into the ankles of pedestrians, then demanding outrageous compensations (“Mind if I take your wife home for a shag?”) – to which, naturally, they assent. Fraser, in the course of a terrific reportage piece on a San Diego-based stunt school for amputees (people with missing limbs are sought by directors wanting to make their battlefield scenes as authentic as possible), makes a joke about learning “unarmed combat”.
  While these are fine gags in and of themselves, they are also likely to have the same unnerving effect on audiences as, say, the (black) American comedian Chris Rock does when he launches into his celebrated and inspired rant about why he hates “niggers”. If the overt plan of “Freak Out” is the obvious, but nonetheless worthwhile, point that disabled people have a sense of humour too, it is the programme’s more subtle current as an exploration of the boundaries of comedy taste that is the more interesting.
  It seems to be almost obligatory for any new comedy series to claim that it is in some way challenging what is acceptable to the mainstream. Sometimes the boast has some truth to it – Chris Morris’s recent “Jam”, while often self-indulgent to the point of opacity, had its share of moments that were as funny as they were horrifying (the rosy-cheeked little girl delivering plaintive instructions on the dismemberment and disposal of a murder victim must have haunted a few nightmares since). More often, as in the case of “The Word”, “The 11 O’Clock Show” or Rapido’s own “Eurotrash”, it is merely a cover for puerile witlessness (it might also be observed that Antoine Des Caunes’ succession of silicon-enhanced sidekicks on “Eurotrash” added up to a far more grotesque spectacle than anything offered by “Freak Out”).
  “People are frightened of making jokes about disabilities,” acknowledges “Freak Out” Commissioning Editor Richard McKerrow, “because people find disabled people frightening. They get nervous about saying the right or wrong thing.”
  McKerrow suggests, as a benchmark for the humour of “Freak Out”, the cartoons of the American artist John Callahan, who features in a later episode. Callahan, paralysed by a car accident at 21, called his autobiography “Will The Real John Callahan Please Stand Up?”. His cartoons, though hilarious, are shot through with a vicious misanthropy, and the scope of his derision is pretty well limitless, encompassing not just the disabled but the old, the ill and, infamously, the Korean (one of his cartoons depicted an Asian-looking couple at home with the family hound, suggesting “Let’s wok the dog”). Which begs the further question of whether a visible disability, and the sympathy it might attract, allows a comic to get away with more.
  “I do underestimate the shock value of my arms,” says Fraser, “if only because I’ve always lived with them. But it is really not my intention, at least not on ‘Freak Out’, to make people squirm. All I’m trying to do is debunk a few myths and have some fun doing so.”
  “I don’t get a kick out of upsetting people at all,” says Atalla, briefly agreeing with his colleague. “If people are squirming, they’re not enjoying what they’re watching, and my sole ambition, as I really don’t have a message to get across, is that they enjoy it.”

IRONICALLY, the one aspect of “Freak Out” which may cause the most upset is the appearance, as a regular guest, of Bernard Manning. The tedious old twit surfaces as an interpreter on a segment called “The Deaf & Dumb Comedy Moment”, translating the joke being signed by deaf comedian Ilan Dwek. Both Fraser and Atalla seem less than enthused about his inclusion.
  “Rapido wanted to do it,” explains McKerrow, “and though I had reservations of my own, I said fine. I thought it was a good twist, inserting Manning in that box down the bottom of the screen. I think, really, he’s the butt of the joke.”
  Though there is an undeniable appeal to the idea of inserting Bernard Manning in a box, particularly one about to be shipped by tramp steamer to Gabon, his participation in “Freak Out” may be appropriate after all – as a reminder that, when the dust settles, the only truly offensive thing any comedian can be is not funny.

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