From Nicola Sturgeon using a sign language interpreter for her daily TV bulletins during Covid to the 2021 Oscar-winning film CODA to Rose Ayling-Ellis winning Strictly, we’ve never been more aware of deafness or hearing loss. If you take the more than 12 million people in the UK whose hearing is affected and add their friends, family and colleagues, you can see why comedian and broadcaster Ray Bradshaw is filling venues from Southampton to Ullapool to Belfast with his new Deaf Com 1 solo show, his biggest live tour to date.

Bradshaw is a CODA, child of deaf adults, and performs all his shows in both British Sign Language and English, proving that humour and hearing aren’t mutually exclusive. Starting standup at 19, while studying drama, he did a few dates with Ardal O’Hanlan, then his own shows and his first Edinburgh Fringe in 2015.

“Then it all just snowballed,” he says. “I don’t think at any point you think ‘wow, I’m funny’. You just think how am I still getting away with this?’

His 2018 show Deaf Comedy Fam attracted audiences of 800 deaf members, many watching comedy for the first time, and sold out at the Edinburgh Fringe. It went on to win the Innovation Award at the Adelaide Fringe and led to him touring with Frankie Boyle and John Bishop, hosting BBC Radio Scotland’s Off the Ball and Deaf Jam music show, and being the first comedian to win a Scottish Culture Award.

“I’m really excited,” says the 34-year-old at his home in Glasgow, just back from Perth, Western Australia where he’s been trailing Deaf Com 1, in which he signs and speaks simultaneously, which covers his recent fatherhood and teaching his young son sign language.

“It’s great because you get reassurance that it’s working. But some of the signs are different and the weirdest thing about the gigs to deaf audiences, which I’ve done now for six years, is you get immediate feedback. If you’re hearing then you whisper to the person next to you, but if you’re deaf you sign. So sometimes I’ll be on stage telling a joke and I can see someone sign ‘that joke was rubbish’ and that’s crushing,” he laughs, “but that kind of real honesty is always good.”

“It’s not just in Australia, where Auslan, the Australian sign language differs to BSL, that differences crop up.

“I did Bedford in England and had a joke about when I was younger. Because my dad’s born deaf, profoundly deaf, and communicates only through sign language while my mum lost her hearing when she was 14 months old through measles so lip reads and speaks, I was really suspicious about my dad. I thought he was a spy when I was growing up. When I told that joke in Bedford I lost every deaf audience member and could see them signing to each other ‘that’s horrible’. It turned out the sign I used for spy is the sign they use locally for pervert. Audience members being able to sign and tell you that kind of prompt is so good because otherwise you would just go into the dark.”

Ok, so what about something Scottish like tattie scone?

“In our house we would do potato triangle. And I’ve grown up with my mum and dad so we’re what you would call lazy signers, like if my dad’s driving he will sign one-handed and I can understand it and vice versa, and he would sometimes just mouth words.

“I just remember being maybe seven years old in the playground and signing someone and they didn’t sign me back and I thought they’re an idiot, how do they not know that, because the upbringing was so normal to me you don't realise.”

Just as sign language was naturally Bradshaw’s first language, it’s also the first language for his three year old son.

“My wee boy was signing before he could speak. He would sign food and bath and things like that so that’s great. I didn’t know how easy it would be for him because I’ve only ever seen adults learn. My wife Hayley went to sign language classes and when I did John Bishop’s tour he started learning and they both made it look really difficult,” he laughs.

“But my son’s picking it up so quickly. I was only in Australia for two weeks but when I came back he’d learned some new signs after spending time with granny and grandpa - traffic lights and stop! So I knew what had happened - my dad ran a red light and he’d watched granny and papa have an argument about it.” He laughs.

Bradshaw didn’t set out to champion deaf awareness or do a sign language show, he was just busy finding the funny in everyday life.

“I think for everyone you don’t realise how weird your family are until you go out into a bigger situation and start speaking about them and you go ‘oh your family doesn’t do that?’. It could be something as simple as having Yorkshire puddings at Christmas to my mum and dad’s asking me to phone the bank when I was eight. For me it was normal to be chatting about endowment policies and I can’t imagine a childhood without it. It just becomes a part of your identity.”

While he talked about his family, for the first six years of his standup career Bradshaw didn’t put special emphasis on his mum and dad’s hearing loss.

“I didn’t want it to become a gimmick then it all came from a show I did where you could dare me to do whatever you wanted at the Edinburgh Festival in 2015 so I got interpreters on stage. I looked to see what else deaf people could go to and there were only six sign language interpreted comedy shows out of thousands so I started doing it, thinking it was going to be disastrous, but it wasn’t.

“I realised - I’m trying to make it not sound too pretentious - but how powerful and important it was to people. I remember a deaf woman came up to me and said this is the first time I’ve ever been able to go to a show any day of the week. Usually the sign language shows are a Thursday, one Thursday out of the 30. I’d never thought of that.”

Once Bradshaw started signing shows he never looked back and it’s added an extra level of comedy to his act.

“It lends itself to humour,” he says. “You know how crammed Edinburgh Festival venues are so one time someone came in with a hearing dog and I was like ‘just give me the dog, we’ll put it on stage’. About ten minutes in as I hit a punch line the dog did the loudest yawn I’ve ever heard from any dog. So I got heckled by a hearing dog, who I put off the stage, and the audience laughed. Situations like that would never have happened otherwise.”

“It’s funny when I’m on stage and say a swearword, anything like that, and you lose everyone for half a second while they check what that sign is and go ‘right, I’ll use that later’. He laughs. “I like that because people are learning which I didn’t expect but it’s a nice by-product.”

Bradshaw has found that deaf members of the audience can also have a different take on a joke.

“I talk about how proud I was that over 800 deaf people come to a show on my first sign language tour then I found out that deaf people pay concession prices and I’d lost a lot of money and you see all the hearing people laugh then you see all the deaf people celebrating. And for deaf audiences any story that involves my dad getting one over on me or on the hearing public they are big fans of. And that happens a lot. My dad uses his deafness, which some people might view as a weakness, to his advantage ALL the time. So those stories resonate.”

Like the one where a teenage Bradshaw goes to parents’ evening with his dad and the school hasn’t organised a sign language interpreter so he does it, upgrading his teachers’ comments to make him appear a dream pupil, only for his dad to let him know on the way out that he can in fact lipread.

“Also hearing people are shocked when I drop in facts, like sign language didn’t become an official language till 2003, or that there’s no universal sign language. You can hear gasps and I like that because I would never get them in a gig where you’re just doing 25 minutes to make people laugh. With this you can bring people into a world you grew up in that is the most normal thing to you but everyone else finds absolutely mental.”

“If there’s an interval I put my instagram and Twitter handle up and people can message in questions, hearing people, deaf people, because one of the things with disabilities is people are scared to ask questions because they don’t want to offend. I don’t know a lot of the answers but every audience has deaf people, hearing people, Coda’s who have deaf parents, sign language interpreters, so we can have a laugh. It makes people relax and takes away any awkwardness.

“In Australia last week someone asked, when you were growing up did your mum and dad ever give you the silent treatment? And I was like yeah, every day to be honest.”

What does that mean, where they just don’t sign to you at all?

“Yeah. And someone asked me a question that was so good and I had never thought of: what’s it like watching deaf people argue? So my dad’s dead childish and if my mum and dad are signing an argument if my dad feels he’s losing he just shuts his eyes so he can’t see her signing. It’s the deaf equivalent of just going la-la-la, while my mum’s stamping on the floor to get his attention.”

Given that his mum and dad feature in his comedy, do they come to his shows?

“Yes. The first time they came they thought it might be like a roast, and it is at points, it’s me slagging them off, but a lot of the time they win. They bring their friends, and my dad’s an identical twin so that side of the family is coming to shows down south.”

Since he’s given permission to ask stupid questions, is his dad’s identical twin also deaf?

“Yes, he is. So is that side of my family whereas my mum’s isn’t because she could hear until she got measles as a child. My mum actually got chatted up by my dad’s identical twin, but he went to the toilet so my dad just swooped in and she didn’t realise. She didn’t know he was a twin for about a month, which is just weird. I’ve never talked about that on stage because it’s not believable, but it’s what happened.”

With Bradshaw going from strength to strength touring in the UK and Australia before Covid, the pandemic saw him having to rethink as comedy venues were closed for 15 months. However, alongside the comedy, at his mother’s insistence Bradshaw did a back up with a degree in career guidance which paid off and he worked for Stirling Council.

“I was still doing that when I did the John Bishop tour. After doing the Glasgow Hydro on the Saturday I went to work at the council on the Tuesday so it was mental. Because we’ve got a little boy, I was doing as much work as I could and did so many Zoom gigs, drive in comedy gigs, and radio - I do lots of football stuff - then I did warm ups with Frankie Boyle and met John Bishop and that ended up being another four months, 70 dates, the O2 then Wembley.”

Does he ever use anything he picked up from his career adviser life in his comedy?

“Nah. Well, the main thing I’ve learned that was good for radio is to ask open questions which was good because I’ve ended up presenting a few different things. I’ve never had any training - I just like people - but I’ve managed to carve out this sideline of radio, talking about football, which I’d be doing in the pub anyway to be honest, because I’m a football geek.”

As well as managing a Saturday team - West Glasgow - and playing on Sundays, the comedian and Partick Thistle fan loves hosting Off the Ball when Stuart Cosgrove and Tam Cowan are off.

“It’s mad because I’ve grown up listening to that. I used to go to away games to see Thistle when I was a teenager and that would always playing on the supporters’ bus. I got asked to present it a couple of times and then just kind of fell into it. It’s so much fun just chatting football.

Hosting the show also allowed Bradshaw to realise his dream of playing for Partick Thistle.

“I got to play in the Kris Doolan testimonial. He’s a club legend. I thought I was going to play five minutes but I played 35 minutes against Celtic and I’ve never been more out of my depth in my life. I was running down the wing and someone shouted ‘show some passion Bradshaw’ so I turned round and it was my wife, heckling me from the stand.”

Following the Deaf Com 1 tour Bradshaw heads for a month-long tour of New Zealand and after some family time will be back in Edinburgh in the summer.

“The last two years I’ve gone away from the big venues and just done a room above a pub, charged a fiver and worked on new material. Then I’ll go back on tour next year maybe, just see how it all goes.

“Something I learned early on is don’t set targets because you can have a year of stagnation. I just want to keep progressing. I’d love to do more radio because it means a bit more time at home but also I love being out on stage. And every now and then I’ll get asked to go on Sky Sports and slag off England for getting relegated the night before, which I would be doing anyway. There’s nothing that I do in my career that I don’t enjoy.

“I just want to keep going. But my son’s very funny and he’s been teaching his friends at nursery sign language so hopefully he doesn’t go into my line of work because he’ll be younger and more attractive and steal the work from me. So I’ll tell him to keep in at school and become a physicist or something like that.”

You can take the comedian out of careers advice…

Ray Bradshaw Live Tour DEAF COM 1, Scottish shows: 8-10 March Perth Theatre, 9 March Heart of Hawick, 10 March Glasgow Pavilion Theatre, 12 March Inverness Eden Court, 31 March Greenock, l April Ullapool. Tickets from www.mcintyre-ents.com/live_shows/ray-bradshaw-deaf-com-one/.

How Scottish comedian Ray Bradshaw's new show, Deaf Com 1, with sign language, reaches a whole new audience