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Comedian Ray Bradshaw is breaking boundaries with his sign-language shows-Ashley Davies-Entertainment – Metro
The odd sign mix-up adds to the entertainment.
Ray Bradshaw was the first comic to perform in spoken English and British Sign Language (Picture: Supplied)
Every comedian has a story about getting a hard time from an audience member, but Ray Bradshaw must be one of the few stand-ups who’s been heckled by an animal.
During a particularly crowded gig, a woman’s hearing dog had settled down on the stage and did a massive yawn just as he was hitting his punchline. It’s a good thing humans find him hilarious.
With his 2018 show, Deaf Comedy Fam, Ray became the first comedian to perform in both spoken English and British Sign Language (BSL). What had started out three years before as an attempt to make his comedy more accessible for his parents ended up being a first experience of live stand-up for more than 800 people.
Both of Ray’s parents are deaf but he and his two siblings can hear, so they grew up bilingual. He jokes that he must have been the only eight-year-old growing up in Glasgow who knew what an endowment policy was, but that’s the reality for lots of Coda (children of deaf adults); translating for their parents and the hearing people they have to deal with, such as at the bank, becomes second nature.
‘I don’t think I’d be doing this job if I hadn’t grown up the way I did,’ says Ray. ‘I love doing the job I do, and I love meeting people because I’ve always done that.
‘I’m very empathetic because when you grow up with parents with a disability you see people being treated the way you don’t want them to be treated, so you then never treat people that way.’
Ray is about to kick off a national tour of his new show, Deaf Com 1, which is all about his life right now, covering funny family stories (he has a three-year-old son) and a scary experience in Bahrain.
Performing it in both English and BSL is no easy feat.
For starters, he needs to hit the punchline at the same time in both languages, which is tricky when the structures of BSL and English aren’t identical. And if something happens in the room he has to pause to find out what’s going on and riff off it. ‘You also lose puns and wordplay, and jokes become a bit more visual. You end up acting out jokes a bit more, which works but it’s something I never would have done before. You also get really comfortable with silence,’ he laughs.
‘The biggest challenge is chatting in the audience. If you’re a hearing person you can whisper to the person beside you. If you’re deaf you have to sign, so I get immediate feedback, non-stop, throughout the show. Imagine you’re telling a joke and you see someone go; “Hmm, I might go to the toilet during this bit.” That’s a confidence blow!’
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Fortunately, the lulls in hilarity are rare. Ray did his first BSL shows so that his parents could come and see what he did at work. His mum lipreads, but his dad communicates entirely in sign language. He thought his first ever signed show might be a disaster, but within ten minutes he could tell it was working.
‘After one Edinburgh show a woman came to thank me because it had been the first time she’d been able to see a signed comedy show on any day of the week; usually there’s just one interpreted performance and if you can’t get to that you miss out,’ he recalls.
He had planned to do the bilingual shows for a couple of years, but wanted to get it right. ‘I didn’t want to rush into it,’ he says. ‘For me this was personal, so I wanted to make it good. It’s my culture and heritage, and it’s something I’m very proud of.’
Ray: ‘For me this was personal, so I wanted to make it good’ (Picture: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty)
One of the things he enjoys about touring is learning regional variations on sign language, and realising that some of the words he knows aren’t universal. At one recent show, he was joking about how, when he was six, he thought his dad was a spy.
To indicate this, he peeped through a circle he’d made with his thumb and forefinger, but noticed discomfort in the audience. It turned out that his family’s sign for ‘spy’ was really ‘pervert’.
‘I was like, “Yeah, that is a different joke.” If I hadn’t been able to see that, that would have ruined the show for them,’ he laughs.
Ray is touring Deaf Com 1 from February 9 to April 14, 2023
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