Interview: Lara Ricote on finding confidence as a hard of hearing comedian and storyteller (BSL)

Ahead of performing at a charity fundraiser for Nerve Tumours UK at London’s Union Chapel next month, comedian Lara Ricote talks to Liam O’Dell about control in comedy, confidence, and the relationship with her sister which helped her embrace her hard of hearing identity.

“I think I went for the joke very quickly before I like even processed what does it mean to me,” Lara Ricote tells me over Zoom. She’s at home in Amsterdam, and our conversation comes before she jets off to Australia for a month of performances. “How do I actually feel about this thing that people call a disability? There’s a lot of feelings and emotions attached to it. A lot of resistance, a lot of wanting to be normal and a lot of trying to adjust to society that goes on kind of behind the scenes when I’m making jokes about how my hearing aids make noise during sex.”

At 26, the Mexican American comedian – who picked up the Best Newcomer award at the Edinburgh Fringe in August for her debut solo show GRL/LATNX/DEF – says she is only just hitting the surface of what it means to be hard of hearing, and believes it’ll add something new to her comedy work.

“I think I’ve always thought of it as like an adjective,” reveals Ricote. “I haven’t thought so much about the way in which my personality and the person I am bounces literally off of this thing that I’m hard of hearing. I came with a personality myself, or whoever I was going to be, and the fact that I’m hard of hearing, it became a new thing, and now this is my personality.

“I’m so glad for it because I’m not fighting it at all. I don’t wish things were different. I’m happy with the way things are, but I haven’t really gone through the process of figuring out [things].”

Another part of her personality is being a light person, which she credits to her family. “My mother is very silly,” she explains. “Everything goes through the filter of comedy, and it’s definitely been gifted to me. I think it made everything easier, there would never be the reaction if I didn’t hear something, it would never be, ‘oh’, it would always be ‘ha, ha, ha’. That’s a pattern that I just followed.”

Though as Ricote talks openly about her experiences now – at some points even asking me about my own journey – there was a time where the entertainer wasn’t as confident about being hard of hearing. Removing her hearing aids for three years in her early teens, her hearing loss – which is degenerative – got worse.

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It changed at high school. “I was like, I’m just going to wear them and if people say something, I’ll figure it out’,” Ricote explains. “I just wore them, no one said anything and I was like, ‘oh my God, I can’t believe no one said anything’. Then I told my friends and I was like, ‘this is a thing about me’. Everybody was cool with it.

“They got me like birthday cards that alluded to the fact that I’m hard of hearing, it was a nice jokey thing that felt like I was in control of who would make it a joke, and comfortable.”

Control over her hard of hearing identity and its connection to her comedy was strengthened further earlier this year, when Ricote received new hearing aids through a sponsor and realised how many things she was missing in the crowd.

“When like a glass drops,” the comedian gives as one example. “Comics are great at glass drops. Add a little comment, and now I’m back in control. I take the tension that was created in the room, and I make it mine, and then I break it in the way that I wanted to, and that gives people confidence in your comedy. Not being able to do that, it’s always been a big loss for me.

“Same with hecklers,” she continues. “Everybody knows what they said. I don’t know what they said. It’s awkward. I’m like, ‘hey, can you repeat that?’ They’re not going to repeat that. I just always have to be like, ‘I’m hard of hearing and this is a hate crime’, and then it’s fine for a moment. Everybody can laugh at that.

“It’s never about the thing that’s going on in the room, because I’m out of control in that situation, really. There’s a joy in that, also, I found now. It used to piss me off and be upsetting, but also the fact that I don’t have to engage is kind of a gift, because sometimes I don’t want to.”

Ricote presents another example to illustrate her point. When someone is too drunk and making a mess, having something in her pocket which she can grab to use in response, she says, feels like “putting a bag over it”.

“It’s like, ‘look’, and then it’s like, they’re not going to keep going, because I’m hard of hearing! It’s literally wrong to keep going, and people want to hear comedy, and if not, then other people get upset, you know,” says Ricote. “That’s nice.”

It’s something she has only just started liking recently, and started becoming more comfortable with.

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“Luckily, I’m in this position, and I think whenever I take something with comedy, it feels like, ‘oh, okay, yeah, this is unfortunate, but I’ll tell a story about this and I’ll probably make some people laugh and I’ll be able to make myself laugh about it too’,” she says. “It all of a sudden isn’t an unfortunate thing anymore. I’m so much in that space, that it’s true that I don’t think about what are the implications of how did that really make me feel that situation?

“I’d like swapped out ‘how did that really make me feel’ for ‘ha, this is going to be funny later’. But I will go through it, and I think when I do go through it, I’ll have the tool because I’ve gotten to talk to other people.”

One of those people is her older sister, who is also hard of hearing, and a trip together when the pair were 19 brought them close.

“It was the first time that we were only just us two, without anybody else,” recalls Ricote. “She was carrying my hearing aid batteries for me, and I was carrying hearing aid batteries for her and we were very helpful to each other. We sat down and talked about how it makes us feel. We’re talking about it now because we’re writing a series about two sisters who are Latina and hard of hearing.

“It’s a comedy series, so we’re designing ourselves as comedy characters and we’re like, ‘what makes us who we are’ and that’s when the conversation started to come up and talk about like, ‘huh, yeah, why is it that you being hard of hearing the same way that I’m hard of hearing, but this is your personality, and this is my personality’.

“It is a very loving, supportive relationship now, and I’m so happy to have it, I think if I wouldn’t have had it, I wouldn’t be nearly as comfortable.”

Ricote will be performing at the Stand Up for Nerve Tumours UK comedy fundraiser at Union Chapel, London on 17 May.

Doors open at 7pm, tickets are £22.50 (including booking fee) and the event will come with British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation.

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Photo: Gala Ricote.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is an award-winning Deaf freelance journalist and campaigner from Bedfordshire. He can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.