Maysoon Zayid: I got 99 problems ... palsy is just one

Maysoon Zayid: I got 99 problems ... palsy is just one https://www.ted.com/talks/maysoon_zayid_i_got_99_problems_palsy_is_just_one#t-830655

I enjoy stand-up comedy a lot and I have chosen a video of a Muslim woman comedian who has cerebral palsy, which means that she shakes all the time. I admired the fact that she can joke about her disability and use it to make people laugh. Maysoon Zayid is also a writer, actor and co-founder of the New York Arab-American Comedy festival.

Her first joke: imagine you are at the mall, shopping for Christmas. There are no parking lots, but there are sixteen empty handicapped spaces. So one asks oneself: “Can’t I just be a little bit disabled?”

Since learning to walk was a difficult process for her, she said that one of her father’s tactics was dangling a “dollar bill in front of her and make her chase it”.

Her parents taught her that there was nothing she couldn’t do… so her dream to be an actress in a soap opera    … She went to the Arizona State University. Of course, she was very good at her studies, but she never got cast. At one moment the university decided to do a show about a girl with cerebral palsy. She thought she would get the part since she has CP, she was so happy that she was screaming “Free at last!”, but to her biggest surprise, the part was given to a non-palsy actress because Maysoon would not be able do the stunts  

Towards the end of the video she becomes serious as she starts talking about race and disability discrimination. She says that people with disabilities are “the most underrepresented in entertainment”. She calls for creating more positive images of disability in social media which should result in decreasing the hateful attitude towards disabled people.

She made a big impression on me. She chose a good tactic to convey her message: she did not start with complaining about the fact that disabled people are not represented enough in entertainment. Instead she made the public laugh, the public loved her and devoured every word she said.