Getting onstage to perform comedy is both extremely easy in the literal sense (you just go up and start talking) and really tough in the artistic sense (like trying not to suck).
While most comics have dozens of thoughts and ideas and insecurities rattling around their heads while they’re performing, some have to contend with their own physical limitations as well.
“I did Acme a couple of years ago and I did really, really well,” says comedian Brandon St. Germaine. “They asked me to come back, but unfortunately I can’t get on that stage. I was able to do it that time because my mom was with me and she set up my ramps, but even that was pretty dangerous.”
And yet, St. Germaine has been performing for well over a decade, and he’s not the only disabled comedian in town regularly killing it on stage despite literal obstacles as well as audience expectations.
“Even when you get past the physical barrier, it’s tough to get the audience over the barrier of seeing a disabled person do comedy,” he says.
A Duluth native, St. Germaine regularly performs in his hometown and at various Twin Cities rooms while managing the challenges of diastrophic dysplasia, a condition that impacts cartilage and bone development, which causes him to have bulky joints.
“If I don’t address that I’m three feet tall and in a wheelchair when I get onstage, then I get pity laughs. Or I’ll get confused laughs,” says St. Germaine. “It’s like they’re sitting there thinking, ‘Does he know that we know?’ So it’s up to me to say, ‘Yes, I know I’m three feet tall and in a chair.’”
St. Germaine says his stage time has been limited due to less than ideal conditions at most of the local clubs.
“It’s difficult because I just can’t get around easily,” he explains. “It’s impossible for me to get on most stages, so I end up having to do it from the sidelines. That’s really disheartening.”
But St. Germaine’s material is killer. Once he addresses the obvious, onstage he’s able to engage with people on topics he ordinarily wouldn’t get to. Sometimes that means pushing back at the audience’s silly questions (“People ask me a lot of unsolicited questions, like, ‘How fast does your wheelchair go?’ That might not seem very personal to you, but imagine a complete stranger approaching you in public to ask how fast you can run.”) Other times he’s able to get darker (“I work at the suicide prevention lifeline. I don’t like to make a whole lot of jokes about it, but you can imagine how I got the job, right? The guy took one look at me and was like, ‘He gets it.’ Not that I want to commit suicide, it’s just easier for me to commit suicide. I can jump off this stage right now and be done with it.”)
There are also perks to being a comedian. “I get to yell at able-bodied people for being dipshits,” he says matter-of-factly. “I like that. But I also hope that seeing me exposes them to people with disabilities in a way they wouldn’t expect.”
Sure, he says, he hopes to create more opportunities for other disabled performers through his standup, but the reward he gets from comedy comes from just being onstage and creating laughter in a way where his disability doesn’t need to be a punchline.
“Comedy is the lowest barrier-to-entry job there is. Every other entertainer has to do something; we just have to get up and talk,” he says. “I think comedians have big egos and an overinflated sense of self-worth. They think of themselves as the philosophical moderators of our time, but typically they’re crappy people with poor personalities being rewarded for attention seeking behaviors from strangers. It attracts some of the worst people in society.”
He pauses.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m one of them, too.”
Sam Bondhus absolutely nailed his first time performing without saying a word.
“I went to deaf camp when I was 10 years old,” he says. “I signed some joke, and the entire cafeteria busted out laughing. That was the greatest feeling I had ever gotten from anything before.”
Bondhus was born deaf and attended Minnesota State Academy for the Deaf from grades 7-12. He learned sign language at a young age, which helped make him a stronger comedian.
“I think me being so physical onstage was derived from deaf school,” the Faribault native explains. “We had to sign and use expressions and act out everything we were saying.”
While Bondhus tried comedy during college, it wasn’t until around 2022 that he really started to pursue it seriously. That’s also when he started addressing his disability onstage.
“Once I started talking about being deaf, things started moving in a positive direction,” he says. “I used to think my deafness was something I should try and hide and not talk about. Now, as cheesy as it sounds, I realize it’s kind of like a superpower in terms of comedy. If I wasn’t deaf, I don’t think I’d be half the comic I am right now.”
From talking about what it’s like to play musical chairs with deaf people (“We just keep walking in the circle because we don’t know when the music stops”) or his college’s misplaced allyship (“The first day I was there, they built me a ramp”), Bondhus has the benefit of writing material that is personal and completely unique from what other comics on the local scene are doing. But what do you do when your own community pushes back on you for speaking your truth?
“I got hired to perform for a deaf conference,” he says. “I sent my script ahead of time so the interpreters could read it and would know how to sign it. The people who hired me approved it. They didn’t see any problem. But a few days before the event I got an email telling me that they didn’t want me at the conference because my material might be too offensive for some people. That was a moment when I was like, ‘If I can’t do jokes about our disability in front of other deaf people, why am I even doing this?’ I kind of felt oppressed by my own community. But like any comedian, you have to brush those moments off and keep going.”
This past year that material, deaf-based and otherwise, earned him a spot in the finals of House of Comedy’s Funniest Person Contest and helped him to win the inaugural Funniest Person in St. Paul contest.
But like the Bart Simpson “I didn’t do it” syndrome, Bondhus admits he’d like to move away from just doing deaf stuff for his own sake.
“I’m at a point where I have a lot of deaf jokes,” he says, sighing. “I feel like I’ve kind of put myself in a hole. I’m trying to write different material and not be the deaf guy.”
Bondhus’s immediate goals are to grow his comedy career and get more stage time. The only difference between him and other of his comedy peers is he needs to make sure he’s charged his hearing aids.
“One time I had my hearing aids die right in the middle of a set,” he recalls. “It was going really well, and then they died and the whole set plummeted. I mean, I think it did. I couldn’t tell if I was bombing because I couldn’t hear anything.”
While St. Germaine and Bondhus pursued comedy for the artistic and creative fulfillment they get from being on stage, Matt “Eagle Eye” Higgins started because he needed a way to fill his time.
“I moved to the Twin Cities to go to ‘adjustment to blindness’ training and was just like, ‘I want to do something,’” he explains. “I can’t be an engineer anymore. If I’m going to be broke, I’m going to have fun doing it.”
For Higgins, his story begins when he lost the majority of his sight at age 30.
“I lived in Delaware most of my life and worked for Dow Chemical for 10 years,” he says. “My career was feeling a little stuck, so I started going back to school. That’s when my peepers went bad.”
Higgins saw a black spot one night but didn’t think much of it. Eventually, he realized that the spot wasn’t going away. A trip to the eye doctor confirmed his worst fears.
“The eye doc looked at me and said, ‘Matt, you’re fucked.’ Three weeks later I couldn’t make out faces anymore.”
Without many career prospects, Higgins took on bartending at Northeast Palace, despite not having any prior experience and just enough sight to make it work ("It was frustrating to memorize everything but I just make a game out of it and have the customers play along."). The month after he started, the folks running the Minneapolis bar asked him to put together a comedy show.
“They were like, ‘You’re funny. You do it,’” he says. “So I got my friends who were comedians and made table toppers and stuff to promote it, and we ended up getting a pretty good crowd.”
After that, Higgins started doing the weekly open mic at the nearby Terminal Bar, where he had no trouble mining his past for material.
“For like the first six weeks, I had a new seven minutes every time I got onstage,” he says. “I have a weird life. A lot has happened since I’ve been blind.”
Though most audiences found him to be just as charming onstage as he is when he’s slinging drinks, there are still some moments where people don’t quite grasp his sense of humor.
“I got onstage one time and said, ‘I only perform to black rooms.’ It’s a literal fucking statement, because every room is black to me,” he says. “But I had people who weren’t paying attention who heard that line and started yelling, ‘You’re racist!’ So I said, ‘I’m literally up here holding a cane and telling you I went blind 10 years ago.’ And then they switched to, ‘You can’t talk about disabilities!’ People only hear what they want to.”
While he enjoys the creative outlet comedy has provided, Higgins admits that part of his motivation is trying to find a way to support himself financially.
“Eighty-four percent of blind people are unemployed. And that’s not because they want to be,” he says. “I’ve got a resume working in semiconductor technologies, and I’m still very limited in my employment options. [Doing comedy] gives me an option. I like being busy. I want to be productive. And if I can’t get a standard job like most folks, then I have to be creative.”
But much like he has his other challenges in life, Higgins is able to find the light in the figurative—or sometimes literal—darkness.
“At least I don’t have to see ugly people anymore.”
