‘The first time I did standup comedy was the best feeling in the world ’

Being disabled and Jewish gives Aaron Simmonds plenty of material for his awardwinning comedy routines, he tells Elisa Bray

IT’S A stonking line up. I’m surprised you’re interviewing me and not Jo Brand,” says Aaron Simmonds, ahead of his performance at Henley Festival. But Brand didn’t win the Jewish Comedian of the Year award (in 2017) and Simmonds’ star is very much in the ascendant; as well as Henley, he has a new show at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

Growing up in Pinner, Simmonds loved comedy from childhood. He watched the 1997 comedy film Liar Liar so frequently that he could quote chunks, and he never tired of videos of Eddie Izzard and Frank Skinner. A CD featuring short sets by comedians was played repeatedly on the hi-fi given to him for his barmitzvah.

A self-proclaimed extrovert, Simmonds distinctly remembers discovering his funny self at 13. “It was a very conscious decision of going, ‘people will like me if I’m the funny one’.” Indeed, during our chat not five minutes pass without a joke.

But he never fathomed that comedy would become his profession. “The idea of being a comedian was the same kind of aspiration of wanting to be a footballer,” he explains, an even more distant dream given that, having had cerebral palsy since birth, Simmonds is in a wheelchair. “It just was never going to happen.”

He was sporty, but always felt he was fighting an uphill battle because he couldn’t run as fast or for as long as his peers. Then, at 15, he discovered the level playing field that was wheelchair basketball and went on to play for Great Britain’s under-23 team.

He spent a year studying for a degree, took up powerlifting and became a personal trainer. And then at 24, bored with all the restrictions of life as a health-conscious powerlifter, and his relationship, he felt compelled to do something “silly, fun, and insane” and asked himself, “‘What’s the stupidest thing I could do?’ The answer was either do a bungee jump, or do standup comedy for five minutes.” He decided that standup would be scarier.

His first gig, at an open-mic night in Piccadilly Circus, where he had to pay £4 for the privilege of performing, was a firsttime-nerves-induced whirlwind through five minutes of material. It wasn’t until the end of his tube journey home, adrenaline coursing through his veins, that he could hold in his excitement no longer. “I got to Rayners Lane station and it’s on a massive hill, and I went full pelt screaming at the top of my head how I was a standup comedian and that I was going to do it forever. It was the best feeling in the world. As soon as I did it, I was like, ‘I need to do that again as soon as possible.’”

As a child, he was “independent, forceful, and driven”, and he credits his parents for ensuring that his disability didn’t limit him. “Looking back, it’s quite clear that there’s a line in the sand: it’s a disabled kid, he could either accept all the help that he’s being given or go, ‘no, I’m going to do anything I can possibly do that is not sitting on the couch being waited on,’ and my parents deserve a lot of credit for not allowing me to be that person. They are wonderful people. As much as it would be advantageous to my comedy career if they gave me a whole bunch of trauma… they didn’t.”

When he told them that he was going to do standup, they encouraged him. “That unconditional support means that you can walk across a very thin tightrope with no fear of failure, because you’ve got that safety net,” he says.

Given that he’s “an unconventional person, polyamorous [open to having multiple romantic relationships simultaneously], I don’t want kids and don’t want to get married and all this kind of stuff,” he’s grateful that his “nice Jewish parents” weren’t expecting the conventions from him.

Most people don’t want to have a fight with a guy in a wheelchair