Out on a limb

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This article was published 09/04/2018 (2932 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Winnipeg Comedy Festival’s presentation of The Debaters will be Courtney Gilmour’s first appearance on the CBC Radio comedy battle show, but the Toronto performer is on pretty sure footing with her topic: She’s pro-GoFundMe campaign.

The 33-year-old standup comedian has positive personal experience with crowdfunding. Her own campaign (www.gofundme.com/dreamleg) is almost a third of the way to its $100,000 goal — 100 grand being the going price for a state-of-the-art prosthetic leg these days.

Gilmour, who was born missing both hands and her right leg above the knee, has been using standard artificial legs, which cost between $8,000 and $20,000, require constant adjustments and repairs, and can cause pain without providing full mobility.

As she explains on the GoFundMe page sets up by friends and family, her “dream leg,” the Genium X3, is waterproof, has a microprocessor knee, senses motion, has activity modes such as running and walking, and has a stumble-recovery feature.

She also explains that although part of the cost of an artificial leg and associated therapies is covered by Ontario’s Assistive Devices Program (and in some cases insurance or the War Amps), the rest is left for the individual to pony up.

“The general consensus, overarchingly, has been that people had no idea even a regular leg was that exorbitant price, and then that the one that would really, really help me was off-the-charts expensive,” she says of the response to the online fundraiser. “It’s interesting to know about the lack of funding in Canada — I’ve done lots of research, so I learned a lot about it too.”

American comedian Sarah Silverman recently retweeted her campaign — “My phone was blowing up with donations” — but generally it’s been slow and steady since its launch in December 2017, “with spikes here and there, depending on media coverage,” Gilmour says, adding that she has been both thrilled and overwhelmed by the response from total strangers.

In addition to The Debaters show (Sunday, April 15 at Club Regent Event Centre, 2 p.m.; $30), Gilmour has three other appearances at the comedy festival, including the Rumor’s Comedy Club Series (Thursday at 7 p.m.; $15), the Just My Luck gala (Pantages Playhouse Theatre on Friday at 9:15; $35) and the Dis’Ability showcase (Club Regent Event Centre on Tuesday at 7 p.m.; $20). The showcase includes Winnipeg comedian Adam Schwartz, who has written a book and performed at the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival on living with Asperger’s syndrome; Victoria’s Curran Dobbs, Minneapolis standup Chloe Radcliffe, California’s Nic Novicki, comedian Darryl Lenox, who’s based in Surrey B.C. and Winnipeg’s Big Daddy Tazz.

The latter two shows are clearly designed as a showcase for Gilmour’s material about living without limbs. That’s no problem for the comedian, who usually begins her routine with jokes about her very visible disability — something she says is necessary to bring the audience onboard.

“I can’t just dive into a set about how cellphones are crazy or whatever,” she says, laughing.

“But I think a lot of people assume it’s a chore for me. I think people assume that I don’t like talking about it, that it gets boring or old. It can sometimes, but I hold myself a very high standard in joke-writing, where I only want to deliver and write jokes that I personally find really fresh and funny about my disability…

“Would I like to have a show where it’s just people who already know me and are coming to see me and I could open the show any way I want? Yes. But addressing the elephant in the room is something I don’t mind doing.”

Gilmour has the same attitude about themed showcases that, while intended to be inclusive, could also be interpreted as ghettoizing a subset of comedians.

She is pragmatic about the situation, noting that women, long marginalized within the comedy commmunity, have frequently resorted to all-female lineups or comedy collectives to redress the wrongs of years of exclusion.

“I think maybe the only thing that’s tiresome is that we feel pressured to represent our group, when we just want be considered a person and do material that explores other aspects of our lives,” she says of lineups that spotlight the differently abled.

“But I do feel like there’s a really cool togetherness, in the sense of community and bonding, between us when we sit together at shows like that, because we’re not only showing a large group of people that people with disabilties are funny, but here’s seven of us in a row.”

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @dedaumier