It would be easy to describe that humour as a coping mechanism, but that would also be imposing a neat inspirational narrative on a comedian who spends much of our conversation resisting exactly that.
Balshaw traces his humour partly to growing up working-class in Telford, where his mother worked in a chippy and as a cleaner, his father did fencing and worked as a bookie, and the family lived in council housing.
“I think a lot of humour comes from the working class,” he says. “People do what they can to survive and often taking a nick and joke with each other is what you do.”
School gave him another useful qualification for stand-up: a thick skin. “Honestly, I was at school in Telford. There’s nothing these guys can say to me that I haven’t heard and got five answers for,” he says.
Strangely enough, when he eventually became a professional comedian, the savage heckling he had anticipated never really materialised. He had prepared comebacks and expected audiences to attack his disability, but says they generally treat him no differently from other comedians. “They’re not nicer or more or less than an able-bodied person. They’re just the same.”
If somebody does venture into that territory, however, Balshaw knows he has an advantage. “Because I’ve got the disability, I can fight them a bit harder,” he says with obvious relish.
His route from Paralympic dressage to stand-up is almost comically illogical, which is probably why it suits him. After retiring from his sport, Balshaw did what sensible adults are supposed to do and got himself a regular job in sales, flogging garage products and cabinets. He hated it.
“I just thought, this isn’t for me. I can’t do the nine to five. I’m not built for this,” he says.
Comedy had always fascinated him, and around 15 years of after-dinner speaking meant that he wasn’t exactly starting cold when he entered the open-mic circuit. He progressed quickly and, two years later, quit the sales job. Stand-up is now his full-time profession and, perhaps more importantly for any sceptical parent, it pays the mortgage.
His father had initially questioned the wisdom of abandoning a regular salary for comedy, but Balshaw has managed to make the unlikely shift in lanes work.
“I mean, I’m not loaded. You know, if people want to pay me more, that’s fine,” he says.
The material itself is rooted largely in observation and storytelling, particularly experiences he can claim as his own. That rule also helps him navigate an increasingly polarised comedy landscape. Balshaw doesn’t buy entirely into the fear of cancellation because he believes comedians now have more ways to find their own audiences outside traditional television gatekeepers.
“For everybody that doesn’t like these jokes, there’s someone that does,” he says.
He also knows where his own limits lie. Politics, for instance, isn’t an area he believes he understands well enough to turn into material.
“I only talk about stuff that I’ve lived,” he says. “Anything that I’ve got experience in and can talk first hand, I’m safe to do it because my opinion is true. Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s my opinion and my viewpoint.”
That doesn’t mean he believes comedians should simply shrug when a member of the crowd crosses a line. If someone makes a sexist or openly disrespectful heckle and the room hears it, Balshaw believes the performer has to address it.
“You can’t not address it,” he says, arguing that the comedian’s job is to shut it down while somehow still finding the funny in the situation and keeping the rest of the audience on side.
There is one modern development, though, that genuinely worries him: artificial intelligence creeping into comedy writing. Balshaw will use AI as a sounding board, perhaps feeding it a story and asking it to pose questions that force him to think about an angle he hadn’t considered, but there is a hard line around authorship.
“I refuse to get AI to write a joke for me,” he says.
“I’ll never, ever get AI to write me a joke. And I think it takes the soul out of comedy.”
For someone whose comedy is so deeply connected to lived experience, perhaps that resistance isn’t surprising. Cerebral palsy gives Balshaw material precisely because it has shaped the way people react to him, and one stereotype particularly irritates him: the assumption that disability equals helplessness.