Sit-down comedy

The small stage at the Gaslamp Restaurant & Bar in Long Beach lights up, and on cue Joe Eurell rolls out in his wheelchair.

The small audience tenses up as his motor-chair gets stuck on the red curtain for a few seconds. He takes the microphone from the announcer, greets the crowd and beams out, “you know, I was thinking about something very important earlier,” Eurell said. “Do orphans feel sad when they hear your mama jokes?”

Eurell, 26, is a senior political science major at Cal State Long Beach who has cerebral palsy. According to the National Library of Medicine, cerebral palsy is a group of disorders that involve both the brain and the nervous system. It can impair body movements, learning, hearing, speech and thinking. But Joe Eurell proves that although he’s in a chair and speaks differently than others, he can still be as sharp as a whip, and a stand-up comic, or as he sometimes refers to himself, a “sit-down comic.”

Eurell first discovered stand-up comedy as a child in Anderson, N.C., while secretly watching trash talk show host Morton Downey Jr. and comedian Sam Kinison. When he was 12 years old, Eurell was adopted and left the south to live with his new family in Huntington Beach.

“My biological parents weren’t very effective at raising their kids,” he said. “I owe my adoptive parents a great debt for how much they’ve helped me.”
Eurell first took the stage of comedy early on in college, but had to take a break due to his grades.

“I told myself that I would do more comedy after I balanced my grades” said Eurell, who is now a straight A student.

His style of comedy ranges from witty, intellectual jokes about the relativity of time to a few political jokes about gun control. For the most part, however, Eurell stays away from touchy politics and gets most of his material from his own experiences, such as taking the Orange County Transit buses.

“Any city bus is a rolling trough of material that is just waiting to be picked up,” Eurell said. “The more obscure the line or route, the more fun stuff you’re going to find on the bus.”

The joke that got the most laughs during one of Eurell’s sets was about questions he gets asked on the bus.

“I get asked all the time how I got cerebral palsy, and these are strangers, so I give them stupid answers like ‘I sneezed too hard.’”

Having cerebral palsy has only affected Eurell’s ability to travel for shows since he relies on public transit, so he remains local in Long Beach and around Orange County.

Roommate and friend Rob Molina said that Eurell’s disability gives him an edge.

“He’s more memorable,” Molina said. “It doesn’t hold him back. He does all he can despite his disabilities, he even does more than a lot of people actually.”

Molina and Eurell have been rooming together for almost four years, and have been friends since high school. Although Eurell needs help doing some everyday tasks like getting dressed, the two spend most of their time enjoying each other’s company and occasionally rap together for fun.

For now, Eurell calls stand-up comedy a hobby that occasionally gets him money, but he’s not sure if he will make a career out of it. However, Molina disagrees.

“I think that he has a lot of potential. He keeps getting better every time,” Molina said. “He’s definitely the right kind of person to make it.”

Eurell’s next show is Thursday at the Group Therapy Pub in Placentia. His videos can also be found on YouTube.