"It’s a stonking line up. I’m surprised you’re interviewing me and not Jo Brand,” says Aaron Simmonds, ahead of his performance at Henley Festival. But Brand didn’t win the Jewish Comedian of the Year award (in 2017) and Simmonds’ star is very much in the ascendant; as well as Henley, he has a new show at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

Growing up in Pinner, Simmonds loved comedy from childhood. He watched the 1997 comedy film Liar Liar so frequently that he could quote chunks, and he never tired of videos of Eddie Izzard and Frank Skinner. A CD featuring short sets by comedians was played repeatedly on the hi-fi given to him for his barmitzvah.

A self-proclaimed extrovert, Simmonds distinctly remembers discovering his funny self at 13. “It was a very conscious decision of going, ‘people will like me if I’m the funny one’.” Indeed, during our chat not five minutes pass without a joke.

But he never fathomed that comedy would become his profession. “The idea of being a comedian was the same kind of aspiration of wanting to be a footballer,” he explains, an even more distant dream given that, having had cerebral palsy since birth, Simmonds is in a wheelchair. “It just was never going to happen.”

He was sporty, but always felt he was fighting an uphill battle because he couldn’t run as fast or for as long as his peers. Then, at 15, he discovered the level playing field that was wheelchair basketball and went on to play for Great Britain’s under-23 team.

He spent a year studying for a degree, took up powerlifting and became a personal trainer. And then at 24, bored with all the restrictions of life as a health-conscious powerlifter, and his relationship, he felt compelled to do something “silly, fun, and insane” and asked himself, “‘What’s the stupidest thing I could do?’ The answer was either do a bungee jump, or do standup comedy for five minutes.” He decided that standup would be scarier.

His first gig, at an open-mic night in Piccadilly Circus, where he had to pay £4 for the privilege of performing, was a first-time-nerves-induced whirlwind through five minutes of material. It wasn’t until the end of his tube journey home, adrenaline coursing through his veins, that he could hold in his excitement no longer. “I got to Rayners Lane station and it’s on a massive hill, and I went full pelt screaming at the top of my head how I was a standup comedian and that I was going to do it forever. It was the best feeling in the world. As soon as I did it, I was like, ‘I need to do that again as soon as possible.’”

As a child, he was “independent, forceful, and driven”, and he credits his parents for ensuring that his disability didn’t limit him. “Looking back, it’s quite clear that there’s a line in the sand: it’s a disabled kid, he could either accept all the help that he’s being given or go, ‘no, I’m going to do anything I can possibly do that is not sitting on the couch being waited on,’ and my parents deserve a lot of credit for not allowing me to be that person. They are wonderful people. As much as it would be advantageous to my comedy career if they gave me a whole bunch of trauma… they didn’t.”

When he told them that he was going to do standup, they encouraged him. “That unconditional support means that you can walk across a very thin tightrope with no fear of failure, because you’ve got that safety net,” he says.

Given that he’s “an unconventional person, polyamorous [open to having multiple romantic relationships simultaneously], I don’t want kids and don’t want to get married and all this kind of stuff,” he’s grateful that his “nice Jewish parents” weren’t expecting the conventions from him.

“It helps that my brother’s got all of those things. It takes the pressure off. When I told them that I was in a polyamorous relationship, they were like, ‘cool. It’s not conventional, but neither are you’.”

His father advised young Simmonds to never let the truth get in the way of a good story, and that he could get away with anything with a cheeky smile. This Simmonds lives by to this day, when he’s on stage and wants to get away with saying something that’s “a bit over the line”.

On that subject, we turn to Chris Rock’s joke at the Oscars that resulted in a punch from Will Smith. Simmonds didn’t think it was a particularly good joke, and he wasn’t impressed by the reaction from Smith and Jada either. But he adds that, being in a wheelchair, angry audience members are not a concern; he’s never felt endangered on stage. “Either you’re going to beat up a guy in a wheelchair, or you’re going to get beaten up by a guy in a wheelchair, and you’re going to look like a dick. So most people don’t want to have a fight with a guy in a wheelchair.”

When he first started gigging, he avoided his disability, telling stories about his dad instead, but could feel the audience asking, “does he not know he’s in a wheelchair?” His disability is now a focus of his gigs, but he is plotting a show for next year that doesn’t talk about it at all. “I like the idea,” he says. “But at the same time, it’s a huge part of who I am, and it affects me on a daily basis. It seems counterintuitive. To not talk about it would be almost like cutting off your own arm, and I’ve got enough troubles.”

He may see the copious stories that living with his disability provides as an advantage, but he wants to make it clear that it’s far from the only thing he talks about. “I think of myself as a comedian who is disabled, not a disabled comedian. And that is a very important distinction.”

His Jewishness, he says, is only likely to feature in sets for Jewish crowds simply because he’d otherwise need extra time to explain for it all to make sense. He tells the story of how a man offered to heal him — because he was Jesus. “That’s funny as a disabled person, but as a disabled Jewish person, that’s doubly funny,” he says.

Aaron Simmonds 5 - photocredit, Steve Ullathorne

Aaron Simmonds (photo: Steve Ullathorne)

It’s also a positive thing for the world to hear disability addressed by somebody who has a fabulous career. He has had plenty of messages from people saying they’d never seen someone with cerebral palsy making jokes about it, and he cites fellow comedians Rosie Jones, Francesca Martinez and Adam Hills as showing the way for future comics with disabilities. Although he never saw his disability as an obstacle to his dreams. “When I saw Michael McIntyre live at the Apollo I didn’t think ‘if I was able-bodied, I could do that.’ I thought, ‘if I was that funny, I could do that’… forgetting that he’d been doing that for 15 years.”

As well as the importance for disabled people and other minorities of having a voice, be ingrepresented and feeling heard, Simmonds points out that people outside those groups need to hear other experiences. And while in telling his own experience, he’s not a “spokesman for all disabled people” in the same way that he isn’t one for Jewish people, he wants to help people understand other viewpoints.

On dating profiles, he states that he is in a wheelchair, with the icebreaker that he’s “totally cool with it” and the offer to answer questions. “People are still really awkward about it”, he says. “My belief is the more chill I am about my disability, and the more open I am, the more comfortable I can make somebody else. If I can prove that talking about disability doesn’t have to be this awkward, difficult conversation, that’s going to help anyone, and that’s fantastic.”

Aaron Simmonds is at the comedy club, Henley Festival, at 10.15pm on Sunday July 10.
His show, Hot Wheels, is at the Edinburgh fringe festival August 3 to 29, pleasance.co.uk